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Pixar Demos Newly Open-Sourced OpenSubdiv Graphics Tech

Posted by timothy on from the world-improving dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Last week at SIGGRAPH, Pixar Animation Studios announced OpenSubdiv, an open source implementation of the Renderman subdivision surface technology, thus releasing the patents to the long standing Pixar 'secret sauce.' In addition to the offline subdivision scheme, it also includes a GPU implementation. This video demonstrates a realtime deforming subdivision surface running at 50 FPS in Maya (though it is freely available to use anywhere). The source code is available on Pixar's GitHub account." Says the project's site: "OpenSubdiv is covered by the Microsoft Public License, and is free to use for commercial or non-commercial use. This is the same code that Pixar uses internally for animated film production."

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  1. Re:As good a time as any by poly_pusher · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Being a 3D artist this does interest me. I use Modo, Maya, Zbrush, and Mudbox frequently and subd standard is very useful. Does your intended implementation share subdivision order Pixar's spec? Does UV smoothing result in identical UV borders? Currently this is a pretty big problem with multi-app workflows. For instance, a multiresolution mesh that has been smoothed in Zbrush results in different smoothing than a mesh that is smoothed with Pixar Psub subdivision surfaces in Modo. Even more confusing is that this difference also appears when comparing Mudbox to Modo. They both use the Catmull Clark subdivision standard however do not share identical UV smoothing. This can be overcome with linear UV's but that in itself causes problems for 2d texture painting. They do however seem to share point order from tests that I've done. Open-source subdivision technology originating from Pixar sounds like a wonderful thing that could alleviate some of the problems I mentioned. After all it's coming from the source of subdivision technology. Catmull Clark subdivision was created by Ed Catmull of Pixar and Jim Clark, co-founder of Silicon Graphics. Many of the custom implementations of subdivison surfaces I have seen cause a lot of problems on exchange. Modo's custom implementation of subd's prior to incorporation of Pixar Psub was pretty slick actually. It was fast, allowed for N-gons and supported some very dirty edge creasing. So it had big drawbacks when exchanging with other apps like Maya before they added Psub's. I guess my point in mentioning all this is that I hope what you are working on is capable of accommodating these kinds of needs, otherwise I and many other artists may not be able to use it due to workflow additions. Although it's very cool and I'd love to hear more about what you are doing.