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!

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.

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!

RIBMosaic : Now part of Aqsis

HUH!?!?!

I am sure some of you are thinking this. Yes, it is true. RIBMosaic is now a part of the Aqsis project and the current official "home" of the new add on.

The back story goes like this. Eric Back emailed a certain select few last month (around the time of the last post here) and told us that he would no longer be developing the recoded Blender plugin. He was "orphaning" the code as it was on Sourceforge and anyone could come and pick it up. Knowing that RIBMosaic was important for Aqsis it was decided that the developers would adopt the code as it last was and continue development with the intention to bring Aqsis closer to Blender.

From the developer mailing list :

Eric has given his agreement that this should be the 'home' of RIB Mosaic now, and understands that we will focus on the integration of Aqsis specifically into Blender, while endeavouring to ensure that nothing we do will intentionally preclude support for other compliant renderers. We as a team will probably not be able to focus any effort on supporting other compliant renderers, beyond possibly testing regularly to ensure that existing functionality still works. Of course, we will assist and encourage anyone who wants to work on support for other renderers should they wish to do so within its new project space.

Cheers

Paul

In a way this would be a "RIBMosaic for Aqsis", while other developers could make a RIBMosaic for say 3Delight, or AIR or even PRMan.

So now RIBMosaic is now a part of Aqsis and will be packaged with the renderer from now on. A lot still has to be completed and there has to be some serious testing done in order to accomplish this in a timely manner. In order for Project Widow to continue, the tools need to be upgraded as well, it was bound to happen and now is the time.

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ribmosaic

Thank you Eric for bringing this idea to full steam, without your efforts and help it's hard to imagine being this far by now.