Sunday, May 03, 2009

Blender to Renderman Artist Tools v 0.5 Released! (UPDATE!!!!)




(EDIT: UPDATE! See below original post for more info!!!)

Finally this LONG awaited release has come! Sorry for such a long delay everyone, it has been a hectic year for me. Over the past 2 months I have been working hard on testing Blender 2.48 and the recent versions of Aqsis and Pixie to make sure that it can be considered "production stable", I have been on and off with making this ISO over the past year (to many people's dismay - sorry again) but so far with latest developments this looks good. Most of the tests I have done have been successful and I decided to finally put together this ISO for everyone to use, previous versions were not so bug free. I am listing it as version 0.5 because this is the fifth time I have undertaken such a task, the first time was just for my own use and each time since marked another "version" of this toolkit.

Anywho...... on to the goods!!!!

In this release are:

Compiled and sources of Blender 2.48, Aqsis 1.4.2, Pixie 2.2.5
Mosaic 0.2 Beta
Python 2.5.4 (installation for Windows - Linux already has it)
CGKit 2.0
Shaderman 0.7 and ShadermanNEXT
SLer
Shader sources (hundreds of them!!)
Shaderman shader projects
OpenEXR 1.4.0 (Windows install, Windows and Linux source)
OpenEXR 1.4.0 sample images
Dr. Queue (compiled and source)
Cutter
GIMP
Cinepaint (Linux only!! There is no recent Windows build)
Documentation from Pixars Online Research library as well as SIGGRAPH papers
Crimson Editor (Windows code editor)
Dev C++ and MinGW (Windows only, Linux has gcc which is the basis for all Linux builds)
Python scripts for Blender (various usefull ones not released with Blender)
Voodoo (for visual effects camera matchmoving)
Blender files (examples and test files)
Some usefull textures


This ISO is available HERE and we are also working on having it hosted elsewhere on a more permanent basis. This ISO is available free of charge, nobody is making money off of this at all, we have included all the required licenses (such as GPL and BSD). You are free to host this ISO and redistribute it as we have done so, we only require you to credit Blendertorenderman.org as original source since it has taken quite a number of man hours to test the software and put together the ISO. Please note that Pixar and ILM do have copyright information that MUST be included with the package, we do NOT want to upset these guys and it is only respectful that we do this since they pretty much influenced the industry and provided us with the means to do all of this.

Please note that while this is a "production stable" release, that there may be unforeseen bugs. Due to the nature of programming on different operating systems there is always the chance that something might be wrong. While this has been tested on Linux and Windows by myself personally, I have experienced some bugs here and there. That is the nature of the game, sometimes things get broken in the mix and there is a lot of code between all of the software. For the most part, and I mean %95 of the time, this release is stable enough for production, be it small studio or individual.

Also I am posting my updated Blender to Renderman Pipeline document originally posted in 2006. This has been revised to reflect current developments but is still being worked on and should be complete by late May, at most.

All the Development software for Windows like MinGW and DevC++ are to be considered AS IS! Like I said I am not a programmer but have included these into the ISO anyway, it is up to the end user to collect the necessary libraries and tools. I have not included any Linux libraries because it is easier to download them as needed from a repository, thus ensuring proper compiling of code. Any Linux programmer will be well versed in the trials of finding the right source if not found in repositories.

Lastly I want to thank the following people for their work and contributions towards this (of course not listed in any order).

Temujin
Eric Beck
Ildar Ahmetgaleev
Ton Roosendaal
Paul Gregory and the entire Aqsis development team
Okan Arikan
Alexei Puzikov (ShaderMan!)
Bobby Parker
Malcolm Kesson
Syoyo Fujita
Andrew Silke (for the original Generi Rig!!)
Larry Gritz
Saty Raghavachary
Tal L. Lancaster
Florian Kainz (for developing OpenEXR)
Robin Rowe

And everyone else who has joined our project, offered advice, testing and support!! Without everyone's encouragement none of this would be possible.

Oh yeah and thank you
Google for developing superb software to host our site!!

UPDATE

Due to some oversight an update was required. Sorry for that and promise to not make the same mistake!

Changes :

Code:Blocks added to replace Dev C++
GIMP source added
Python source added
CGKit 2.0 source added
Blend files removed (plan to add it next update with BRAT stable models, some required too much initial setup and didn't render right)

Hosting update

For now a torrent file has been created for this update but we are still hosting the original ISO as well since not everyone uses torrent programs.

BRAT 0.5rc1 (original host)

BRAT Release Update 0.5rc2



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