Saturday, August 16, 2008

Blender Renderman Artist Tools Downloadable ISO soon





This is a new approach to the spread of this project to the rest of the world. Tenzin and I have discussed the compilation of a downloadable ISO of the tools we use and are developing and call it BRAT - short for Blender Renderman Artist Tools. This was about 4 months ago, and after a brief moment of real life issues can continue to work on this. Soon there will be an ISO for Blender and Renderman.

The first will be an early release with tools, shaders, resources and such to test it's functionality and to test how easy to implement into an existing CG pipeline. All you need to do is just install the software and shaders and you are ready to go. So far it is almost ready for final release, just need to tie things up and give it a test run on fresh install of Windows before unleashed to the world and tested on Linux. There should not be any issues with Linux, the first pipeline using the current versions was being built on 64 Studio, a 64 bit Linux distro, and it worked just fine.

The next part of my project will create an installer of some sort that will setup the required programs, libraries and plugins to run pretty much out of the box without having to install and configure each and every one by hand. A pipeline setup tool for lack of a better term. That will be a bigger project that might not be seen until the end of the year.

More details will be outlined later, but expect this to be available for download early to mid September of this year (next month).