An industry insider has reported to certain people that ILM is putting a GPU based re-lighting tool into the open source world, a tool that has been used on many films by ILM technical directors and has been kept a secret for the better half of the decade. However ILM has already built a new engine that is based on REYES and GPU re-lighting code that had been part open source and part science research, so this leads to wonder if they are borrowing existing open source code and heavily modifying it.
This old engine is based off of technology that existed around the turn of the century and while it still functions very well in modern pipelines, the code is old and ported from old SGI libraries. The new tools currently in development are built from modern libraries for Linux, thus removing the chains of legacy obsolete code. ILM is presenting this code to the world mainly for the hell of it, they no longer feel that there are any secrets worth keeping. While the code may be functional, the fact remains is that it is obsolete and much of the pipeline is lightyears ahead of what had been created even a decade ago.
More information as to the location of this tool will be revealed soon.
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