Merry Christmas! A gift from us... to you.

Well it is that time of the year and this year I decided to release the Widow Pipeline as a present to the Blender and Renderman communities. Yes it is true you can get these all on the sites themselves, however some tools are not so well known. So now everyone can use the same tools we are using for the short film "The 10:15" (aka Project Widow).

Widow Pipeline I for Linux tar archive

(of course this was not without it's own technical problems.... torrents did not work, now just a single tar archive.... sigh)

This release is built for Linux, since much of the team uses that operating system, also some of the tools are built for Linux and would require some work to get them to build on Windows or Mac OS. Shrimp for instance is modified specifically for this short, WidowShade was a heavily modified version of ShaderLink, something that took close to several months to complete before Shrimp was brought into the pipeline.

This release is similar in fashion to the BRAT release in 2009, however the difference in the release is that where BRAT was meant for a more general installation on multiple operating systems, with a wide variety of tools and example files, this release is more specific and designed to fulfill a specific role : to be the basis of an open source production pipeline. This release is also using older tools rather than bleeding edge, simply because of stability and the fact that at the time of this writing there is still much to develop to get a stable pipeline using Blender 2.5x and RIBMosaic.This is the result of over a year of work developing a stable pipeline so that “Project Widow” could be completed and the hope is that people will be able to use this as a starting point for their own projects, or using this to learn Renderman with Blender.

Artist Tools

Aqsis
Blender 2.49b (both 32 and 64 bit)
RIBMosaic
DJV
Ramen
Cinepaint
Shrimp (Widow build)
WidowShade

Blender Scripts and files

Conspot
RIB_Lib Database (blend file with entire RSL LIB for linking)

Shaders

Entire shader collection used for “Project Widow” (as of Sep 2010)
Surface, Displacement, Imager, Volume, Light and Diagnostic shaders

Pipeline Tools

Shotgun API 3
WVTU (Widow Version Thumbnail Uploader)
WidVerTU 0.3 (dev version of GUI WVTU)
Postmosaic
BlenderAid
DrQueue

Libraries

RSL Lib 0.1
OpenColorIO 0.6.1 (Sony Imageworks color management library)



There is also something to find in this torrent. It's your present. It is a pretty complete collection of pre-production images, as well as R+D renders and test beauty shots. There are also some screw up images, some test blend files, as well as older images from the past to show just how much has changed in the past 5 years.

There is also the BlenderCon 2010 technical paper that I wrote, considering that this very pipeline is the one described in the paper.

Now to get back to the StarWars marathon on SpikeTV.

Merry Christmas!