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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."
Since it's the BSD license, how good does this look for closed source graphics? Just curious. I'm not familiar with what was available from other sources before this.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
This is great, a similar thing happened with Open EXR which is an image file format for high end film production. ILM open sourced it and it was quickly picked up by other studios, which lead to the software companies implementing it.
It seems like it's a good route for the VFX companies to take. Open source tools that are useful, then they get implemented in the main software packages which reduces your costs of maintaining plugins and a lot of custom code.
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Drink Coffee - Do Stupid Things Faster And With More Energy!
Remember that Pixar bought Disney for minus a jillion dollars a while ago.
That's probably the most accurate (and honest) way of looking at the Disney/Pixar deal.
Yeah... this might be some sort of miscommunication. Mickey Mouse's lawyers might not have really understood the implications of a BSD license. I wouldn't be surprised if the Ptex site disappears, nothing further ever arrives along the lines of open-source code, and Disney's lawyers attempt to find loopholes to get mirrors of the Ptex source taken down.
Disney has always held tight controls over their IP, and while the BSD license gives them a lot of control over what *they* do with Ptex, it gives the community a lot of control over what the *community* does with Ptex, provided any forking coders properly acknowledge the original authors and abide by the set (albeit minimal) of constraints provided by the BSD license.
[Obligatory IANAL, so any groklaw aficianados, feel free to correct, clarify, or serve me with a court-order comprising one Clue Stick (TM).]
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
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. It's good to see projects like this, that studios have put huge amounts of effort into, released into the open source community.
Of course, I have to put my money where my mouth is now :)
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxNlAlOuQQQ
That's a really nice system, I hope it can be adopted into other packages as a plugin or something as it stays under the BSD license.
Wasn't that how it was supposed to work? Maybe Bruce Perens can back me up on this, but I thought Open Source was supposed to be good for profits and business.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.