Disney Releases 3D Texture Mapper Source Code

dsavi writes "Ptex, Walt Disney Animation Studio's cutting-edge 3D texture mapping library which was first used on nearly every surface in the 2008 animated feature Bolt, was released under the BSD license on Friday. Quoting the announcement on monophyl.com: 'We expect to follow Ptex with other open source projects that we hope the community will find beneficial. We will soon be launching a new Walt Disney Animation Studios Technology page under disneyanimation.com. It will include links to our open source projects as will as a library of recent publications.' This looks good for open source 3D graphics."

Comments

Re:Thank new CTO at Disney, Greg Brandeau

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Greg Brandeau, the new CTO at Disney, is a powerful advocate of open source. He worked very hard (within the bounds of antitrust law) to help various visual effects and animation studios with Linux, addressing common issues to everybody's benefit.

I think that's the real point here. Does anyone seriously believe having access to Disney's software will have them churning out Disney-quality movies in a few weeks? The investment required to produce one of the Pixar movies we all like is incredible. Having good software makes a digital film studio more efficient, but it's not really differentiating. That is, every digital film studio is going to rely on software of some kind, and it's all going to be designed to do more or less the same thing. So why shouldn't Disney's IT department be working with other studios to improve the tools? That's exactly the kind of thing that should be open source, and that competing companies can collaborate on. A studio's real business advantage is going to be tied to the quality of the people operating the software, the quality of the creative folks developing the films, and the effectiveness of the studio's marketing. Meanwhile, the same indy filmmakers who start using Disney's software today might be people Brandeau will want to hire tomorrow.