Sunday, February 27, 2011

RIBMosaic Updates


As mentioned in November last year, RIBMosaic has been placed into the Aqsis repository after Eric stopped his development on the addon. The intent was to allow anyone else to join the project and continue working on it. Several hands went up into the air on this one, including myself until I actually tried to dissect the code and realized that my programming skills do not match up. To complicate things the Blender API has been changing quite often which caused RIBMosaic to break and cease functioning after a certain revision, which of course has not been a recent one. At the same time the work done on Project Widow reverted back to Blender 2.49b until a time when it is possible to use the new software, we really wanted to stress test the newer code, however the stability of RIBMosaic prevented this from happening.

Recently there has been some work done to RIBMosaic, not by the Aqsis development team but by someone who has been a user of RIBMosaic since the early days, he simply wanted to see it live on. NFZ (Jeff Doyle) has provided some patches to the Aqsis git repository that will make RIBMosaic function in recent Blender 2.5x revisions.


http://community.aqsis.org/2011/02/ribmosaic-developement-blender-25.html

"So does the patched RibMosic work with the latest official Beta release of Blender 2.56a?  No.  A recent Build with svn rev 35000 or greater is needed.  Blender svn trunk revision number is around 35100 as of 22 Feb 2011.  The Blender python API is still going through a lot of changes so its easier to keep up with the changes rather than focus on a previous release.  Not good for users since they would have to get an up to date build of Blender every few days but until the API stabilizes that is the way its going to be :). http://www.graphicall.org/builds/  has daily builds for most OS so for those that want to play that is a good route."

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=3191328&group_id=25264&atid=383972

The link to the patch itself.


This certainly is good news to hear!

Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Matt Ebb improves Blender to 3Delight

http://mke3.net/3delightblender/



Matt Ebb has continued to work on his 3Delight export script, which had been mentioned before last year as one of the newest Renderman addons that has popped into the Blender community.

Since RIBMosaic is in the process of being developed under a new team and is intended to be used for Aqsis, Matt's addon is geared more for 3Delight, a commercial Renderman compliant renderer that has been used in several big budget films and one of the most popular RiSpec renderers next to Pixar's commercial products.



From his site :

Supported Features

  • 3D motion blur with sub-frame samples
  • 3D depth of field blur
  • Integrated render result (appears in Blender compositor)
  • Polygon/subd mesh geometry, linked group instances, parametric primitives, particles as points or hair strand curves
  • Adjust shader parameters in Blender UI
  • Write and compile shaders in Blender text editor
  • Automatically converts texture maps to 3delight’s optimised tiled TIFF format
  • Simple global illumination light shaders built in
  • Automatically generated shadow maps, raytraced shadows
Download v0.5
Requires a Blender svn build > r34664

Installation

Unpack and move the render_3delight folder into your blender addons folder. You can then enable the addon in the Addons tab of blender user preferences.
08 Feb: Due to a change in recent versions of 3Delight installation, this only works if you start Blender from the command line. I’m investigating a fix now.

License

This software is free software and licensed under the MIT license – basically you can do what you want with it, though credit would be nice. If you’d like to show appreciation, please consider donating to a secular charity of your choice.
This exporter is not endorsed by or affiliated with DNA Research.