Why the domain name is gone

As some of you may have noticed, www.blendertorenderman.org is no longer mine, as of today I noticed it is now some spam site and honestly I do not care. Which is weird. I had this passion for Blender and Renderman for YEARS and then with the death of Project Widow so did that passion. On one hand I want to continue to support the idea, on the other hand I want to give up. So why the reversal in this passion?

1. Blender to Renderman does not seem to be interesting for most Blender users.

This is true and it has been proven time and time again. While there are a few dedicated supporters of this, which I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart, the vast majority of Blender users do not care. They want simplicity, in such that they want to add shaders and lights, hit render and VOILA.... done. Renderman is not like this at all. It is a specialist field and even I have trouble writing code from scratch. So why would the average Blender user? Well the IDEA was to get more visual effects and animation studios to look at Blender in a new light, that the tools can be used in their pipelines with Pixar's Renderman. These studios have pretty much ignored it entirely. There was only one studio that I worked with trying to get this pipeline to work effectively, which for some time they did only to switch to "industry" tools because of some client that requested it. Since then I have lost touch with the studio, sad.

2. Open Shading Language killed off the idea in a quick blow.

With OSL in Blender now it is possible to use RSL code (with some editing) to make shader nodes in Blender. This is cool, however it also killed BtoR because of the argument of "Why use RSL when you can just convert it to OSL and have native support in Blender"? I have tested out OSL in Blender and like it myself, OSL is a huge thing for Blender and fully support it. Even though it pretty much buried BtoR.

3. Time and energy is lacking.

I have devoted literally YEARS to this project and have had my fair share of both praise and blows, I have had people in the industry give me thumbs up and have had plenty of people just turn their noses to this project. I started this project back in 2005 when I was volunteering my time to a film that never got off the ground due to the vast amount of VFX needed, Blender was the choice of tools to use and back then the internal renderer was nothing like it is now. I thought "Why not use Renderman?", thus the quest of finding that key tool to export Blender data to Renderman code begun. RIBMosaic was introduced a couple years later and at that time was considered the best option for this task. Hence Project Widow. Now RIBMosaic is dead (though there still is effort with Matt Ebb's plugin), very little interest from the Blender community and zero interest from the professional industry, my own time and energy devoted to this has waned and quite simply I am tired of fighting. I want to make a living off of 3D work, not be an unpaid wanna be artist that has a itty bitty tiny niche community that nobody cares about anymore. Thankfully I was hired by a company to do freelance 3D work and while it is not much pay at the moment (very few projects), it is a start for me after wishing for SOMETHING for almost 20 years. 20 years of wishing to be a professional artist is a long time and I nearly gave up last year. Hell I STILL think that maybe this industry is not right for me with all the problems right now. I've had one interview to be a pipeline TD, obviously I did not get the position. I know several people in the industry, it is a hard one to get in to they say. Maybe this is not the right thing for me, I do not know but what I do know is that despite all the hurdles and problems I have encountered in trying to be a professional artist I have not given up actually doing it in my own time. I don't know where else to go from here at this time, all I know is that currently the few projects I do have going on I am doing with a level of professionalism and attitude that make my family proud, finally.

4. I have a family now.

When I started this idea, I was single and living with family members. I was employed with a non profit corporation (which makes a HUGE amount of profit actually) but anyways I was living a far different life back then. Now I have a nearly 4 year old little girl that demands my attention and a fiance', working for next to nothing in a major fast food chain, a freelance artist as well and still have to find time to do 3D but I still have far less time to devote to Blender to Renderman than I used to. It is hard to come up with "news" or reports from the community and industry, especially when as mentioned above, nobody cares anymore. OSL has taken over, the industry is a shambled mess of messes, I live in an area that really has no VFX or 3D work available and I have a family to take care of. I can't just pack up and leave to go to LA. Why on earth would I move to one of the most expensive locations in the nation on the hope that MAYBE I get employed by a major effects house or studio? STUPID. With the visual effects industry in disarray there is even less motivation to really work at it like I used to, even though I know I will regardless. Right now is not the time though, for personal reasons in my family I have chosen to put those dreams on hold until further notice. Besides there is other fields where 3D work is required other than visual effects and animation. At this moment I am pretty much doing arch viz for a client this summer, the next one might be a logo, the next might be a website (ick), I don't know but either way I have a family to keep off the street, a daughter to raise and a woman who loves me regardless of how much or little money I make.

5. Jaded.

Really that means that I have grown tired of the fight, I really have and it has been a fight. I can't tell you how many times I have argued with people over the reasons WHY Blender to Renderman is relevant. On one hand Ton Rossendal himself had praised my efforts, on the other hand the Blender community seemed to only dismiss it as useless effort. Right now there is a huge movement to get Freestyle into the Blender, my only question is why is there not the same effort to do the same for Renderman? Freestyle is a non photo realistic renderer and while it is quite interesting to see this unfold I can't fathom the reason as to why there is such a huge interest in something that can be done by Renderman too. I understand why OSL was chosen by the Blender Foundation, it is an open format and created by the very same person who made the first free Renderman compliant renderer BMRT, that person is Larry Gritz. This is one of the reasons why OSL and RSL are so similar, Larry Gritz not only changed the playing field for artists with little money but inspired developers across the globe to create programs such as Aqsis and Pixie, to name a few. On a slightly related note I believe that my BlenderCon 2010 paper inspired Ton to make Tears of Steel , I had mentioned in the paper that Blender's short films went the reversal of Hollywood ie;  that visual effects with CG started BEFORE the feature length CG animated films. That is not proven though and unless Ton himself wants to verify I still believe that my little paper had planted the seed of Tears of Steel, at least the idea of doing a visual effects based short rather than a CG short as they had done in the past.

So lets cut to the chase. Enough of the ranting.

In short I have had little time, little energy and with the birth of OSL in Blender this only spelled the death of BtoR. It was only a matter of time. All things come to an end.

Unless someone wants to help rise this up again like a phoenix I think this will be the last post on this blog. So please, anyone, who wants to help? Maybe with the visual effects industry in shambles this would be a good chance to spark it up again? Otherwise R.I.P. BtoR, it was a fun ride.

Cheers,
Ted

Pixar releases OpenSubdiv

In a surprise move recently, Pixar has released open source code called Open Subdiv.

Directly from the website :

OpenSubdiv is a set of open source libraries that implement high performance subdivision surface (subdiv) evaluation on massively parallel CPU and GPU architectures. This codepath is optimized for drawing deforming subdivs with static topology at interactive framerates. The resulting limit surface matches Pixar’s Renderman to numerical precision.

OpenSubdiv is covered by the Microsoft Public License, and is free to use for commercial or non-commercial use. This is the same code that Pixar uses internally for animated film production. Our intent is to encourage high performance accurate subdiv drawing by giving away the “good stuff”.

The source code for OpenSubdiv is located on github and is entering open beta for SIGGRAPH 2012. Feel free to use it and let us know what you think through the github site.

https://github.com/PixarAnimationStudios/OpenSubdiv

Platforms supported: Windows, Linux, limited OSX.

While it is highly unlikely that this will end up in Blender at all it is a very interesting project, coming from a highly unlikely place to ever release anything to the public. Though Pixar has released papers and some shader source code to the public, nothing was expected to ever come in the form of a software library, so this is a welcome surprise to say the least.

Pixar announces Renderman Studio 4.0

From the Pixar website....

EMERYVILLE, CA – (June 14th, 2012) Pixar Animation Studios today announced that effective immediately, RenderMan for Maya is to be combined with RenderMan Studio as a single premium software solution at the new price of $1,300 including a fully functional embedded renderer. This major product consolidation sets the stage for the impending release of RenderMan Studio 4.0, which will provide Maya artists and Technical Directors with the latest tools to setup scene data, lighting, and shader assets for film-quality final rendering.

RenderMan Studio 4.0 also introduces the latest rendering technology developed for the forthcoming RenderMan Pro Server 17.0, and showcases significant advancements in ray tracing for multi-bounce global illumination and ray-traced subsurface scattering, including a system of physically plausible shaders directly integrated into Maya and the Slim shader editor. With these new features, artists can maximize today's high performance multi-core architectures to create photorealistic images with minimal setup within the user interface of Maya. The process of shading and lighting setup has also been dramatically accelerated with new lighting tools, including the robust re-rendering technology used in "Cars 2" and "Brave" as well as progressive ray-traced re-rendering for rapid look development. With additional new capabilities such as Dynamic Shader Binding, expanded RIB archiving, and a new library of RenderMan materials for Maya, RenderMan Studio 4.0 is the result of the feedback from numerous VFX productions allowing Maya artists to easily create photorealistic images at the highest levels of cinematic quality in a comprehensive solution that can be configured to accommodate any VFX pipeline.

Upgrade Availability

RenderMan Studio 4.0 is compatible with Maya 2013 and earlier versions on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Upgrade pricing from RenderMan Studio 3.0 is available and existing RenderMan for Maya customers can upgrade to RenderMan Studio 4.0 for the same price as previous RenderMan for Maya upgrades. Student pricing is also available. Further details can be found on the new RenderMan website at https://renderman.pixar.com/. For direct assistance concerning sales, maintenance, operating system compatibility, evaluation licenses, or any other questions about Pixar’s RenderMan, please contact rendermansales@pixar.com.

About Pixar Animation Studios

Pixar Animation Studios, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is an Academy Award®-winning film studio with world-renowned technical, creative and production capabilities in the art of computer animation. Creator of some of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time, including "Toy Story," "Monsters, Inc.," "Finding Nemo," "The Incredibles," "Ratatouille," "WALL•E," "Up" and "Toy Story 3" the Northern California studio has won 29 Academy Awards and its 12 films have grossed more than $7.2 billion at the worldwide box office to date. Pixar's next adventure, "Brave" takes aim at theaters on June 22, 2012.

Aqsis 1.8 released

Aqsis 1.8 has been released as of Feb 29, 2012, a long awaited release build which brings some of the most exciting new features in this renderer in some time. Of these new features, the Point Based Global Illumination functions are the most obvious and anticipated. This release was not without it's problems however as the Windows and MacOS binaries were broken due to the move from FLTK to QT4, work is underway to fix this so expect a 1.8.1 patch release soon. The QT4 switch changed the GUI appearance only slightly, though in some tests Piqsl seems to respond much slower than it's FLTK predecessor, however the point cloud viewer program makes up for that. The PartIO library is a great addition as well, which will allow particle data to be used from various software such as Maya and Houdini. Despite the binary problems, this is one of the most exciting releases from the Aqsis team in years.

LONDON, UK - February 29, 2012 - Aqsis Team, the developers of professional open source rendering software, announced today the immediate release of Aqsis Renderer 1.8.0; its leading cross-platform 3D rendering solution adhering to the RenderMan standard.
This is the accumulative effort of many developers and community members around the world, resulting in an even more competitive solution.

Global illumination and software integration have been the primary focus for this release, with improvements including:

• Point-based global illumination, providing bake3d(), indirectdiffuse(), occlusion() and texture3d() shadeop support.
• Partio library integration, providing Houdini, Maya and PRMan compatible pointcloud support.
• New pointcloud viewer application (ptview).
• Qt library integration, providing native 64-bit support on all recommended platforms.
• BSD licensing for all new code.

In addition, key feature enhancements have been made with improvements including:

• Memory optimisations.
• PNG read/write support.
• Updated SLO interface, matching other renderer APIs.
• Improved RIB parser, including precise syntax error reporting.
• Reinstate command line support for frame selection using -frames and -framelist.
• MinGW support.

Further information regarding the changes in this release can be found within the release notes distributed with the software.
Aqsis Renderer 1.8.0 is freely available to download from the Aqsis website, with installers for Windows, Linux and OS X:
www.aqsis.org

Pixar and Greenbutton reveal RenderMan On Demand

In 2010 Pixar had demonstrated RenderMan running on MicroSoft's Azure platform, as reported here http://www.blendertorenderman.org/2010/11/pixar-and-microsoft-cloud-rendering.html, however back then it was only a demo. As of Jan 19, this has become a real working service thanks to GreenButton, Pixar's RenderMan On Demand is now live and ready for all your rendering glory, for a price of course. To be fair .70 cents a core hour is really cheap, of course this is based off of third party information, mileage may vary.

So it looks like cloud services are becoming more and more common for the 3D industry, while there has been renderfarms that existed before in the sense of a traditional farm, the difference is that GreenButton is a cloud based service. The advantage of using cloud service rather than an in house farm is that there is no initial huge investment in hardware, you only pay for the use of other's hardware. The obvious reason for an in house renderfarm is that it is tailored to the studio, you have complete priority over jobs and it looks pretty impressive to the outside world. Smaller studios lack huge pockets though, so cloud rendering is far more valuable and attractive than investing that same amount of money on a few servers.

There is another method for us to render out frames without tying up our computers for hours or days on end; distributed computing. Distributed computing is also a way for Blender artists to make use of a renderfarm without having to spend a serious amount of money, in fact with Renderfarm.fi this is possible for free. Much of the well known distributed computing projects like SETI@Home are based off the BOINC platform, this is a distributed server-client system that has connected millions of computers worldwide all for the name of science. Why not take advantage of the same system for rendering and that is exactly what Renderfarm.fi does, it enables Blender users access to a large number of rendering nodes for free while also providing your computer as a rendering node for someone else's project.

This is a service that is based off of BURP, the technological framework for using BOINC as a distributed renderfarm, written by Janus Bager Kristensen. BURP started several years ago and works closely with Renderfarm.fi yet the two are completely different entities.

The question I have is, why not start something like this for Aqsis, or Pixie? Renderfarm.fi has done a very good job of marketing themselves and in all reality they do not even handle the actual rendering, that is taken care of by us BOINC users. In theory this kind of service could be started for Aqsis as well. Can Aqsis and Pixie be added to Renderfarm.fi, or even have a new website devoted to this? Can open source Renderman be turned into a cloud rendering technology? I believe it can, however I am not the most talented programmer in the world, so personally I would be a horrible choice for a developer. I have been looking at the code, not to mention that there has been some talk over forums with the BURP and Renderfarm.fi guys about supporting other external rendering software, it looks very possible to get Aqsis at the very least. The wall is of course the development of supporting this, as Blender changes these guys have to make changes in their own software, keep up BURP and Renderfarm.fi support and then fix things when it breaks, so this does cut into time and energy into other render engines. Not to mention the server itself needs to be pretty beefy, funding for the static IP and cost of hosting this, unless someone out there is willing to donate this. Would there even be enough interest to work on such a project? This obviously needs to be a project outside of BURP and Renderfarm.fi but in communication with so that if this works and tests well, then maybe it can be added to the Renderfarm.fi service.

The reason for this post is primarily because I used to be one of the biggest nay sayers against community based distributed rendering, claiming that too many technical factors outweigh the benefits but in the past year I have come to realize that maybe 5 or 10 years ago this was true, now it appears that this no longer is the case. When I first heard of BURP many years ago I thought that it was a neat project but would probably not work out in the end and look at how wrong I was about that, not only has this evolved into one of the only community based distributed render farms on the planet but has allowed every single Blender artist access to it, for free. That is an amazing feat and probably one of the greatest additions to the Blender community period, hence the reason this website has their logo graphic on the sidebar, these guys are awesome!

Cinepaint Developments

One of the most overlooked software packages in the Blender to Renderman arsenal has been given a new breath of air by the developers, Cinepaint 1.0 was released during the end of November (sorry guys). What makes Cinepaint so powerful and unique compared to it's parent GIMP is that it was designed for film work from the start, it is meant to handle 32-bit HDR images that are impossible to open in GIMP, which is why studios continue to use Photoshop among other things. After what seemed to be a very long stagnant period of lack of updates and uncertain future, Cinepaint has exploded into the scene again, even getting 3D World attention with an article, not bad for an open source software that was a fork of GIMP. At this time there is only a Linux source of Cinepaint and it has it's bugs, in fact version 1.1 is being delayed due to a nasty memory leak.

Aside from the issues here are some of the things that Cinepaint users might expect to see in the future as described by Robin Rowe

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CinePaint Multi-bit Image Engine

CinePaint will continue to have a multi-bit engine. Some programs support deep paint by setting bittishness at compile time. You can have an 8-bit or a 16-bit core in ImageMagick, for example, but not both. It depends upon how ImageMagick was compiled. CinePaint has a true multi-bit engine where bittishness is chosen at runtime depending on the needs of an image. When you open a JPEG, CinePaint will allocate 8-bit channels for it because that’s what the image holds. When you open a 16-bit TIFF, it will allocate 16-bit channels.

At present, CinePaint supports unsigned 8-bit, binary fixed point 16-bit, half float 16-bit and float 32-bit. That’s a lot of flexibility in channel allocation, but not quite as much as we’d like. OpenEXR files may contain unsigned 32-bit channels and TIFF may have unsigned 64-bit channels. It would be nice to be able to open those in CinePaint without a loss of fidelity.

Comic Book, Anime and Fashion Illustration, Heads at Any Angle

Adding to ideas expressed in an earlier story, it would be nice to have an interface that supports pulling images from a library of art created by the artist, such as having a character’s head drawn at many different angles. This would enable an artist to quickly drag in previously drawn elements to quickly build an illustration. It would be nice to be able to mirror clone when half of a face is drawn in order to quickly draw the other half.

Architecture

There’s a lot that could be done to make architectural drawing easier. One would be a cross-hatch brush that would draw parrallel lines at a fixed separation locked to the background position so that drawing later with the same brush will line up perfectly. The angle of the cross-hatch would be a setting on the brush. Another important brush for architecture would be a perspective brush that draws straight lines according to the horizon specified by the artist for the picture. At zero degrees it would become a railings brush and have no crossing lines. There could also be brushes that draw boxes with proper geometry per the background horizon. There could be a clone brush that copies with perspective, whether it’s drawing bricks or a window that needs to be repeated across a building.

Roto and Tracking

Adobe After Effects has an excellent auto-roto feature that will separate foreground objects from their background. Surprisingly, Photoshop does not. It would be nice if CinePaint had auto-roto. It’s not surprising that Photoshop doesn’t have tracking and image stabilization like After Effects. It would be nice if CinePaint did.

Colorization

There’s a plug-in for painting colors from a similar photo onto a B&W image. Would be nice to have that type of thing as a standard clone brush feature.

Slides and Sequences

CinePaint’s flipbook can be used as a PowerPoint-style slide presenter. That could be further developed. While you can load a sequence of numbered images in CinePaint, there’s no way to save that sequence as a sequence. It would be nice if it would.

Brushes

In addition to the architecture brushes already described, it would be nice to have brushes that draw borders and to paint Apple-style liquid buttons. It would be nice to have a bucket brush that bucket fills but will not seek out through gaps smaller than the size of the brush. It would be nice to have a “sloppy” setting on the brush the can exaggerate or reduce the jitter with which a line is hand drawn, something like in Smart Sketch. There could be brushes that draw flowers or any randomly repeating “image tube” as in PaintShop Pro. As the brush paints it lays down the next image (or flower) in the tube. Another nice brush would be a human pores brush that adds pores to portraits that have been magnified.

Magnifier

It would be nice to have a magnifying glass like Apple Aperture.

Meta-data

It would be nice to support such things as keeping accounting data for the time spent working on an image.

Vector Graphics and Type

Artists seem to agree that moving between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop is inconvenient, that we’d rather do to one app to paint. However, mixing vector graphics and rasters gets messy. A solution is to put vector objects, including type, in a separate layer.

Adjustment Layers and Nodes

It would be nice to have adjustment layers, that is, layers that dynamically enhance the image below instead of changing the layer with a filter. Layers and nodes can be thought of like waves and particles in physics. They’re two ways of looking at the same thing and yet seem quite different. It would be nice if CinePaint displayed nodes.

Scripting

CinePaint has supported many scripting languages, but it hasn’t been a satisfactory user experience. Preferably, CinePaint would record macros/scripts implicitly and at all times like Apple Shake. That would be a better solution than the Adobe Photoshop macro recorder that requires the user to decide when to record a macro first. Taking scripts a step further, it would be nice to have a text-based way to create image files. For example, to be able to quickly snap together a color bars image from a text description of the sizes and colors of the bars.

Sound

CinePaint has a flipbook movie player, but no sound. It would be nice to have JACK support so external JACK-compatible sound tools like Traverso would play in sync.

High Fidelity Color

CinePaint has a RGBA color space by default. Work’s been done to support advanced color management and other color spaces such as CMYK in CinePaint. It requires a domain expert in the printing industry to really get this right. Enhancements provided by a German open source developer have been difficult for CinePaint users to comprehend. To advance in this area we first need a color expert who speaks English, someone who can explain to me what we really need in the color interface and who can test that we got it implemented right.

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Sorry for the lack of updates in recent months, my personal life has been quite filled with obligations.

Farewell Mr. Jobs

Today I learned of the passing of Steve Jobs. While I have not recently been a fan of Apple, the patent lawsuits between Apple and other companies has irritated me to no end, I do not think less of the man that helped bring about the PC industry, as well as bringing Pixar to the world.

When I was 16 I bought my first computer, a PowerMac, one of the first generation series even. At a blazing speed of 66 MHz, loaded with 8 MB of RAM and a huge 360 GB hard drive, I began to learn the art of 3D using the LogoMotion app by Specular Int. At the time I had no concept of real world 3D practices, however I managed to exceed the tool makers expectations of the software by creating character animation using this logo animation tool. I eventually ended up beta testing the next version, which I got for free upon release plus a tshirt!

Later on I learned about the obscure RenderMan software, developed by Pixar, in 2002. Prior to this I had no clue what was used to render out all of Pixar's films, quickly I learned that Pixar was instrumental in bringing about the visual effects industry via ILM in the early 90's. This is when I found that Steve Jobs bought Pixar from George Lucas in the mid 80's for a paltry $10 Million, Lucas was broke and needed money, something Jobs could afford and saw early on that this small division of LucasFilm could become great. I think Pixar as a company exceeded even Job's expectations, growing from a small software development company into a massive animation powerhouse that redefined feature film animation.

Steve Jobs brought the world many new technologies and new ways of thinking. He was a pioneer and a rebel.

He will be missed.

Point Cloud Indirect Lighting in 3Delight from Blender

Matt Ebb uploaded a video last month which shows off point based indirect lighting using Blender, his own RenderMan exporter and 3Delight. We all know 3Delight is a commercial renderer, we also all know that at everyone can get a single free license for non commercial work, which allows us to use a production grade renderer with Blender and take advantage of it's power. As such, this is why Matt Ebb has focused on creating the addon for 3Delight specifically, rather than a general RenderMan script.

In this post Ebb writes :

"After fixing some cross-platform issues that people were having with the last few versions, here’s a new release of 3Delight/Blender. As well as the fixes, I’ve included some new stuff that’s been on the backburner for a while – a new point cloud global illumination method. When enabled, the addon will automatically generate a point cloud, and then use it in the render for indirect lighting and environment lighting.

It’s just doing one bounce of indirect lighting, in the future it should be reasonably easy to add more bounces via photon mapping in the point cloud generation stage. Eventually I’d like to make this a bit more advanced, with a more modern design for the lighting/shading pipeline and more control over baking pre-passes, but for now (especially since I’m quite short on time ) I’d rather get it out and working in a simple, automatic way so people can use it.

I’ve tested this on my mac, and in both Linux and Windows XP VMs, but as always, if you have any problems on your system please let me know."

Download the new addon here: render_3delight_0.7.0.zip

Aqsis 1.8 Sneak Peek

The Aqsis developers have been quite busy trying to get all the features and changes ready for the 1.8 release, some of which has helped secure the future of the open source renderer. Since it's inception, Aqsis has always been a "old-fashioned" REYES rendering application, that is it had the functionality that complied with the requirements of the RiSpec, as well as additional features however it lacked the more modern rendering methods such as point based rendering. That is soon changing as reported earlier this summer and it was uncertain if these changes would appear in the next release, or in the 2.0 release, so it has been confirmed that the new point render branch will be merged with the main branch for the next release.

On July 31 the Aqsis team officially announced "Phase 1" for the next release, during which time will be focused on completing the new features.

Other additions include support for OpenImageIO, which was written by Larry Gritz, as well as Partio by Walt Disney Animation.

The main feature changes for 1.8 are as follows.

1. Point Based Global Illumination

• bake3d()
• occlusion()
• indirectdiffuse()
• texture3d()

2. Rewritten RIB parser

• Inline archives are supported, using ArchiveBegin/ArchiveEnd
• Frame dropping is reimplemented to allow a single frame to be selected.
• Archive interpolation in miqser executes ReadArchive calls in place.
• RiContext() / RiGetContext() now supported for the core renderer.
• RiBegin("something.rib") can be used to produces RIB via the core renderer lib.
• Validation of array lengths and parameter ranges for all RI procedures, used in both the core and in miqser.

3. Port all GUI tools to Qt.

4. Begin relicensing under BSD style license.

As some of you might know, Aqsis does have a couple of GUI based tools, Piqsl and Eqsl, both of which allow users to use Aqsis without having to resort to a command line to render a file or view an image. Piqsl is more commonly used as it is the primary framebuffer tool to watch the renderer at work, as well as use the tool to view multiple images, or to help with development of a render or shader as you can flip through the images. Eqsl allows users to render a RIB file, convert textures to a MIP map, or compile a shader. Both tools were an addition several years ago and have been evolving since and now they both have been ported over to QT, the GUI framework from Nokia, previously they relied on FLTK. While FLTK did provide an easy way to build a GUI app, QT has been chosen to replace it as the framework is proving to be more popular and many 3D tools and applications are using it as well, both commercial and open source.

The most exciting features of course is the Point Based Global Illumination stuff and many people all over the world are happy to see that Aqsis is evolving. This is the one of the most important things done to Aqsis since the renderer debuted on SourceForge in 2001, simply because the addition of the new GI code has changed it. Now it can work with GI much the same way as 3Delight and Pixar's RenderMan can, aside from the fact that ray tracing is still not possible yet. That is something to come about later on. Below is a very recent render with the latest Git source, which as of this week includes the point render branch added to the trunk.

Point Based Global Illumination with Aqsis

Aqsis 1.8 has a few more months of work before it officially is released.

This also comes shortly after a CGSociety article about the very subject, which ultimately led to another debate as to whether or not Renderman was dead, given the success of proprietary renderer's such as Arnold and CGStudio++. Regardless of who is sided with whatever software, Renderman still holds the title of being the one that brought CG to an affordable means of visual effects in film, has been for over 20 years now and not many other rendering software can match up to that record. That said the article in question relates to Point Based Global Illumination in Pixar's RenderMan, which is interesting to note that the Aqsis team was busy getting this very method of GI stable for release at the same time.

Another reason for the sudden shift in the Aqsis team to get more modern rendering methods into this now 10 year old project (missed that little bit of info until just now, Aqsis was registered on March 14, 2001), the decline of development with Pixie, the one time champion of open source Renderman with ray tracing and GI, which in some ways still is, however the development seems to have slowed to a halt with no new updates in years. So while the last working version of Pixie still works for this kind of thing, the Aqsis guys are taking a more pro-active approach and taking on the role as the open source Renderman of choice. Others are taking their ties to the team to help implement Aqsis into professional studios, others are developing plugins to work with Aqsis and providing technical support.

During SIGGRAPH the Blender team had a lot of interest by studios interested in placing Blender into their pipelines, something we have been dreaming about for years so now that the link between Blender and Renderman is getting tighter it is only a matter of time before these tools will be added as well. In certain places this has already happened. Once Aqsis is released fully in 1.8, this gives it a step up into the realm of professional use and give the renderer a massive step up in the world of open source visual effects.

Aqsis Website

SIGGRAPH 2011 opens up new avenues for Blender

This year's SIGGRAPH seems to be a solid turning point for Blender and it's developers. According to Ton, there was quite a bit of interest in Blender from the professional industry, which is amazing news to the entire Blender community since for years it has been bashed as a "hobby" app. Over the years Blender has been evolving and in such a fast rate that it is almost hard to keep up, however one of the most impressive changes is of course the interface, which on the surface level is pleasing to the eye and thus people are more inclined to explore more of Blender, from there they understand just how powerful this open source app really is. Shame it took them this long to figure this out, however Blender was a different beast even 5 years ago when the Blender to Renderman community was just a tiny speck compared to what it is now. Just in two years Blender evolved again into a very formidable piece of software. In turn other software that are commonly used in conjunction with Blender is evolving too, thus opening even more possibilities to the community at large. Then there is the community, of which had it not been for the large number of users that devote vast amount of time working with, or on, Blender, none of this would have happened in the first place. Blender truly is now making some serious headway into becoming a widely adopted tool for content creation and it all started as an internal tool for a game company. Amazing how events unfold over time.

From the Blender. org website.

Tradeshow booth

• During three days, 9-11 August, Blender Foundation presented Blender + art showreel at 6x3m booth at the tradeshow floor. 
• Link to showreel download & youtube coming soon! 
• HP provided us 4 fast workstations and 30" displays. 
• 100 Blender shirts and 1500 Blender DVDs were handed out (also thanks to sponsors Lumikuu &Renderfarm.fi) 
• Demo DVD made for FMX by Francesco Siddi & Sebastian Koenig & Thomas Dinges, thanks! ISO download is free to spread and use. 
• Booth attracted visitors from all over the world, all over the industry... including artists from Pixar getting personal demos. 
• Our OpenCL (Cycles render, compositing) projects attracted visitors from all main Graphic cards vendors (Intel, NVidia, AMD/ATI). They are seriously committed to help out with Blender testing and advising us on best usage of of OpenGL and OpenCL features. 
• Early demos of motion tracking did people's head turn too. It appears we're providing the first cross platform free/open tracking tool for film makers here. 
• Met with author of MeshFlow, a Blender based research paper accepted for Siggraph. 
• Had a good meeting with Khronos, discussing our COLLADA support and established tight connections to get further support. 
• Talked to many journalists; including 3D World, 3D artist, Renderosity. 
• Interest from new developers, among which Ari Shapiro of ILM/R&H fame 
• Several film/vfx/animation studios interested in integrating Blender in pipeline, but they need consultants to help them. (will be via Blender Network) 
• In general: so cool to see so many artists dropping by who already were using Blender professionally and with great results. 

You will note that one of them involves integrating Blender into pipelines at studios, a HUGE step forward and something that has been dreamed about by many Blender users, developers and of course Ton himself. THIS is what we have been looking forward to and now it looks like the professional industry is finally coming together and looking at Blender as a viable tool, not as a hobby toy. In the past few years many studios have released open source projects for visual effects and animation, which some of these in turn ended up in Blender, so it makes sense to look at Blender to do certain tasks which is compatible with said projects. Hence the purpose of open source.

The other factor is cost, as we all know the world economy is not exactly great and this does have a strain on the entertainment industry, since they are paid from the money we spend on their products, people are not spending as much so thus the industry is not making as much as before. A studio used to be able to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on software alone, during the early 90's this was no big deal since it was new and exciting, producers were willing to fork over millions to make the next blockbuster. Now visual effects are common in nearly every film made, so the luster is gone and the cost is rising each year to make even non visual effect heavy films, studios are looking to cut costs. One such measure was taken by replacing expensive SGI workstations with PC's, since hardware costs kept going down and computing power increased every couple months. 3D software in the early 90's were really a niche market and the internet was not as expansive or utilized then either, some software had to be purchased over the phone it was so specialized and expensive. The software that was affordable by the general public was not as powerful either. In the following decade studios have switched from expensive operating systems to Linux, an open source and cost free OS that functions exactly as the costly UNIX systems of the past. In general studios were forking over millions on hardware and software alone, something they can no longer afford to do. 3D software still costs a small fortune, even with recent price drops across the board so it only makes sense for these places to look at an open source and cost free software, one that can be modified at whim, one that can be installed on as many hard drives possible without licensing fees, one that is quickly becoming compatible with projects they developed, one that used by nearly every aspiring 3D artist world wide. THAT I think is the best cost solution, young talent cutting their teeth and all done without them having to spend anything on software, imagine the pool of talent in the upcoming years all trained on Blender.

Pixar artists looking at Blender is a certain glowing point for us on the Renderman area of Blender, as you can imagine, so even though it is no secret what we are doing in this corner of the internet, it feels good to know that certain people from Pixar have had a chance to see Blender itself and we just hope that this only adds to our cause.

Which comes down to our connection, the people involved with Blender and Renderman at least. In the Blender.org post, there is mention of the "Blender Network", which is a proposed network of Blender professionals that would be contracted to provide support, or something to that degree. Some people have already been doing this in their own way, including some of us. Morpho Animation Studios is beginning to incorporate Aqsis into their pipeline, as they already use Blender and Pixar's RenderMan with RIBMosaic, this should be fairly simple, though risky since Aqsis has not been used in commercial work. Regardless they are taking that gamble and have requested our help. This in turn almost requires the assistance of the various developers themselves so even though they may not directly have contact, due to people's network of connections, they are all interconnected, they also help each other out since the publicity generated works out in favor of all involved.

Funny about the image at the top, with Ton and Co. standing in front of the AutoDesk booth, the slogan "don't blend in stand out" behind them, almost nearly seems that the company is afraid and in some ways, they should be.

Morpho Animation Studio at Siggraph 2011

My friend Christian Vargas sent me an email about Costa Rica being at this years SIGGRAPH. The booth monitors were showing clips of "Grampa's Robot" so viewers were watching what Blender and Renderman can do together, regardless if they know about the various projects involved or not. Just by sheer luck, the booth was right in front of the line that lead up to the Pixar gifts, so people like Renderman TD's, visual effect supervisors, software developers and CG enthusiasts alike where asking questions. Christian explained to them the various projects related to Blender to Renderman as well as what they were doing and a LOT of them responding with a "WOW". Not only are they impressed with what they saw at the booth, they are very interested to see what will come in the next year.

More Morpho News and Blender for Dummies

Earlier in the week an email was sent to me from Christian Vargas, the Animation Director at Morpho Animation Studios. Included was a set of pictures that had been taken of the book "Blender for Dummies", which many of us Blenderheads know had been written by Jason van Gumster.

Jason had asked Morpho Animation Studios to render some images for him so that these could be included in the book, since the studio does use Blender of course, however the difference is that again the rendering was not done with Blender, instead Pixar's Renderman was used. While the book did in fact list Morpho as the creator of the images the caption did not reveal how the image was rendered, until now.

Another little known fact and example of how RIBMosaic and Renderman is creeping into media and professional content creation.

Earlier in the year I had the pleasure of viewing the images by Morpho and sadly I had not known about their inclusion into Jason's book, let alone the fact that Jason was in close contact with Morpho Animation Studio. Just goes to show us all that in the Blender community we are all linked together and you never know just who knows who, somehow little surprises like this pop up and make you smile. Good job guys!

Morpho Animation Studio

If there was ever proof that Blender and Renderman can produce real world imagery this would be it.

One little known studio in Costa Rica is making cartoons using Blender, which in the entire spectrum of small animation houses is not a big deal considering they would not be the first to do so. However the first they do have is that they are not using the internal renderer, instead they have opted to use Pixar's Renderman and are using RIBMosaic to do this. It is not a new thing either, they have been using these tools for well over a year and I have been in contact with them for some time. My relationship with this studio started with Daniel Salazar, also known as ZanQdo to the Blender community. He knows one of their employees, Christian Vargas, and told me about them during the middle of 2010, so I emailed him with an expressed interest in what they are doing. Since then some of us associated with Blender to Renderman have helped them out whenever they needed it and thus I decided to shed some light on this studio and what they are up to.

One thing to note though is that this studio is not just some small studio that is trying to break into the industry. While people in the USA or elsewhere may not be familiar with them, their work in the Central America region has been seen by millions. They have done TV ads in addition to other services and one commercial in particular is for Cartoon Network, which features 3D versions of Dexter, the PowderPuff girls and other CN icons. Other clients include Sony, Microsoft, Kraft and Subway. Are they established? I would say so.

Their first work in TV series using these tools is titled "Grandpa's Robot" which was directed by Christian. Due to NDA's I am not at the liberty to disclose anything sent to me, however from what I have seen has blown my mind, including stills from their next series in development.

"We have been working a lot lately. Right now we are really busy working for a videogame company in LA. We have been hired to develop 3d animated assets for a facebook flash based game. It includes creatures, cities, military units. Pretty fun stuff.

On the other hand we keep working on our properties "Grandpa's Robot" and "Poison Squad" We have been working a lot on this TV series with some writers from NY to polish the stories. This year we presented Grandpa's Robots at Kidscreen and it received good reviews from the audience. This year Gustavo is going to MipTv in France to present the TV series. Hopefully we will find somebody interested." Christian says.

Morpho does have a Vimeo account and here everyone can look and see exactly what it is I am talking about, such as a preview of "Grandpa's Robot" as well as other demo videos they have done.

Grandpa's Robot. Intro from Morpho Animation Studio on Vimeo.

Aqsis update leak : Point based GI ???

As some of you may know, Aqsis has been undergoing some serious work and has been overshadowed at times by news about Blender, RIBMosaic and other open source projects. In a recent IRC developer meeting it has been revealed that the developmental and experimental branch of Aqsis has point based microbuffer rendering, which allows for ambient occlusion, radiosity and subsurface scattering. It was incorrectly assumed this was ray tracing, until that was cleared up. The catch is that since it is a new code update, it is slow and not meant for public consumption and won't be for some time. Chris Foster is the one that has been rebuilding Aqsis and adding the new core, as well as other major overhauls and graced the IRC chat with an image of Aqsis rendering a Cornell Box with point based indirect illumination.

Pretty sweet eh? Again this is NOT ready for any type of release yet, this is all experimental code that is subject to change at a moments notice, not to mention if pairing with production assets might just make Aqsis explode and create a black hole in the universe, you get the idea. The capability is there though which is a huge moment as this is a feature that many people have been asking the Aqsis team to add, so exciting times are in store as more is revealed.

As a side note, it truly is a very special time to be involved with the Blender to Renderman movement and community. In 2005 all the recent software upgrades that have happened were a dream.

Literally we are at that moment in time that most of us only dreamed of achieving. With Blender and RIBMosaic at a more stable state, we can safely say that this is the start of that breath of air, the awakening, that moment in time where things that where only a dream a few years ago, are now in front of us. Now Aqsis has kicked it up a notch, revealing an image that inspires us to continue. There have been many times that a few of us really had no idea if this was going to catch on, the whole Blender and Renderman pairing. The whole concept of it is hard to grasp since the workflow alone is alien to most Blender users, and Renderman users were a bit frustrated with the lack of this or that, things that are nearly built into Maya and Houdini. Over the past 2 years much of that time was spent rebuilding code from the ground up, making advances in pipeline construction and flow, getting involved with the Blender community as well as the professional Renderman community so communication could be established, the thousands of hours testing scene after scene.

Now here we are. Blender is more powerful than ever, RIBMosaic has evolved and Aqsis is capable of modern illumination methods at an embryonic state. Welcome to the new way.

Pixar announces ProServer 16, Weta adds Deep Image Compositing to OpenEXR

Pixar released a press item on Monday May 9th, 2011 that Pro Server 16.0 is now available. What makes this version so important is because of the competition Renderman has faced in recent years, primarily the Arnold renderer and the fact that ray tracing in films is actually quite affordable now, in fact in some cases needed in order to really achieve the photo real look. Ray tracing in film is not new, in fact Pixar and ILM were the first houses that were able to do so, however these shots were few and far between. One of the first uses of ray tracing by Pixar was during a couple of shots in "A Bug's Life", then full use of ray tracing and global illumination in "Cars".

The problem is that while it is possible, ray tracing and global illumination is horribly expensive, long render times, huge load on the CPU and memory, requires baking the illumination similar to traditional shadow maps and in general slow to work with. Pixar's flagship product and grandfather of the REYES family tree has been considered slow compared to other renderer's like Arnold, VRay and MentalRay when it comes to ray tracing. This coincidently helped these competing products establishing a foothold on the VFX and animation industry as viable production renderers because of that very fact.

From the press release :

"This latest release features a large number of innovative advancements in RenderMan's ray tracing technology, including a new ray tracing hider, a radiosity cache, and physically plausible shading. These milestones allow RenderMan to take full advantage of the ever-increasing processing power of multi-core architectures, while also delivering the tools to implement these new features with efficiency and elegance. Moreover, RenderMan's new progressive ray tracing provides interactive re-rendering for production shading and lighting."

While nobody can prove otherwise, it remains a bit suspicious that Pixar added a new interactive re-rendering method, possibly similar to the Aqsis interactive re-rendering that was announced last year, possibly it is just great timing. It is still cool none the less. Aqsis still holds the title of being the first REYES renderer that can re-render at near real time on the CPU.

"RenderMan Pro Server 16.0 fulfills every need on our feature request list. It lets us focus on the customizations we really care about for ray tracing physically-correct lighting in the cleanest way possible," said Dan Evans, Head of Shaders at Framestore, London. "The speed of the new radiosity cache makes ray-traced global illumination practical in a single render pass, and we can now refine our test frames live using the new progressive ray tracing. Multi-bounce glossy specular, importance sampling, area shadows, and direct lighting are now a breeze thanks to the renderer supporting them all directly. Better still, regular ray tracing is staggeringly faster at 8X on some of our more complex stereo renders.”

Of course the products are commercial with ProServer 16.0 at $2,000 a seat, so this is beyond the price range of most of the population. A full price list can be found here if you want to check them out. This is one reason for this website's existence, much of the population that would be interested in Renderman simply cannot afford the software that these houses use, at best we get to use free limited use versions, so the importance of open source Renderman is very valid. While Aqsis still is not up to the level of features that PRMan does, it is far beyond just a hobbyist tool and as seen over the past couple of years, capable of producing film quality imagery.

Pixar always seems to kick it up a notch when it matters.

Weta also made recent news when it announced that it will be adding deep image compositing to OpenEXR, while at FMX 2011. More can be explained here at Colin Doncaster's website. Colin was the original developer of the Liquid plugin, a Maya to Renderman exporter that first saw use at Weta (see a pattern??). The Lord of The Ring's trilogy's visual effects were primarily accomplished via this tool for instance.

Animal Logic first produced a paper that described what deep image compositing is and what it is for, it was supposed to be at SIGGRAPH 2010 but was rejected. Why, nobody knows, SIGGRAPH paper judges are not known for their generosity. Since then several applications have had this added, such as Side FX's Houdini. Now OpenEXR will get another very useful addition that will allow other applications to take advantage of deep image compositing, so one could expect to see this in Blender as well as Aqsis in time, when this happens is uncertain and certainly not planned officially anywhere.

"The concept of a deep image isn’t brand new; ultimately it’s just the technique of encoding more than just the RGBA value in a pixel. Many applications and systems already store multiple channels of data to enhance the compositing workflow as well as re-using calculations already performed by the rendering engine. Side FX software’s Houdini is an example of one of the more recent applications to utilize this workflow via it’s custom camera image format.", from Colin's site.

Exciting times in all areas of visual effects and animation!

100 K Hits on BlenderToRenderman!

Well sometime this weekend this website has finally broke the 100,000 visitor mark, somewhat of a surprise considering this is a niche market of the Blender community. Seems that over time we have gathered quite a following, honestly there was no expectation that this site would get that many visits at all, let alone in 3 years. While the number pales in comparison to other websites like the official Blender site, it is a great achievement for this site.

The site began as an idea in 2005, the whole concept of developing some kind of "community" for Blender and Renderman users. At the time I was involved with an indie film that was to use Blender as the animation package of choice, however at that time the scope of the film required some sophisticated rendering that Blender was just not capable of at that time in history. So the idea to use Renderman was introduced, the project began there simply because the ONLY script available was the Blenderman script. Ultimately my involvement with the film stopped, I started to go to school and working 40 hours a week really limited my time for other things.

Then I started a forum that was intended to be a community for this idea, it was hosted on some free forum site and started the movement that exists today. Temujin, the co-founder of this site, had gone from user to moderator and we developed a friendship. Sadly that forum was shut down, with no explanation as to why, we STILL have no idea why the forum was removed despite several emails to the company. So Temujin started to build the beginnings of what you see here.

In Jan of 2007 the site went live, as a sub domain of Blogger, the first post was on Jan 31, by Temujin. Since then the site has evolved, has changed designs, added things, removed things and eventually on October of 2007 bought the domain name. While this site is still hosted on Google's Blogger, the domain has changed things, made the site more official sounding and easier to remember than a long URL. At times people have purchased renewals of the domain, so each year someone else is the "co-owner", currently my girlfriend is that person, previous co-owners included Eric Back (Whiterabbit, the original developer of RIBMosaic).

So here we are nearly 4 years later, with over 100K hits under our belt, an average of over 300 hits per day, from people and companies all over the world. Some of the biggest names in the vfx and animation industry have visited this site, including Pixar, ILM, LucasArts, Disney, Blizzard and more. Countless colleges and universities have made hits. Even some companies from areas where we never imagined interest have come by, such as GM, Ford, Lucent, AT&T and even government agencies, like NSA, FBI and CIA have peeked a look. We even had a couple Echelon hits.

So today, on Mothers Day, this post goes out to MY mother, who had she not given birth to me, would have never given rise to this website, nor Project Widow and in all honesty you would not be reading this post at all. So thank you Mom, for bringing me into this world and changing even a small section of it forever.

Disney releases expression editor SeExpr as open source

The studios just keep surprising us with more and more goodies. Just a day after LAIKA released SLIM templates, Disney releases an expression editor called SeExpr, a tool that can have uses in many areas of production.

"Arithmetic expressions appear in almost every animation system ever created. Being able to embed an expression language in a piece of custom software allows an amazing degree of artistic freedom. At Disney artists have enjoyed using expressions because they allow just enough flexibility without being overwhelming to non-programmer users. Developers have enjoyed them too for quick prototyping and deployment of fixes to production needs. SeExpr started as a language for our procedural geometry instancing tool, XGen. Work was done to generalize it into something that could be used in other contexts. Later it was integrated into paint3d, our texture painting facility, which opened the door to procedural synthesis. More recently, we have integrated it as a way of defining procedural controls to physical dynamical simulations and render time particle instancing."

"Expressions can be seen as a way of allowing customization of inner loops. This is contrast to scripting which is mostly aimed at glueing large parts of code base together. So in this sense, C++ forms the center of your application, python could be used to put pieces of it together, and SeExpr is used to customize tight inner loop."

As stated on the website the in house GUI at Disney is not being released, maybe it involves code that needs to be evaluated to be released under an open source license, it could be proprietary. Or they could just enjoy watching us squirm with anticipation, it is doubtful that it will ever be seen outside Disney though, either way Disney is understanding the power and reasoning for releasing production code to the public, adoption into other packages only helps spread it, just look at how fast Ptex was added to software, not to mention the other projects like PartIO, Munki and Resprado have quickly begun to collect followers and watchers. Who knows how many studios have adopted these projects into their own pipelines? While some of these projects may not be directly related to 3D production, their use in a pipeline can be invaluable.

• Source Code at github
• Documentation
• Main API Documentation
• Language Documentation
• Developer Tutorial
• Google Groups Discussion
• seexpr-discuss
• seexpr-announce

LAIKA releases SLIM templates to the public

LAIKA, the Portland, Oregon based animation studio, has released production SLIM templates on the Pixar website in an effort to help boost the Renderman Studio community. For those of you who do not know what SLIM is for, it is an application that is developed by Pixar to develop shaders, similar to how RIBMosaic makes "shader fragments" for Blender based off of RSL shaders made in a shader editor such as Shrimp, SLer and Shaderman. However SLIM is far more advanced and has been a staple in any pipeline that uses Maya and Pixar's Renderman.

SLIM templates are readily available on the internet, mainly released for free by Renderman users, however visual effects and animation studios keep these hidden away, just like any other asset in a production, so for LAIKA to release them to the public is a big deal.

You can grab these templates and example files at the Pixar Support Forum (free registration is required)

http://renderman.pixar.com/confluence/display/~laika/Home

LAIKA, Inc. is an animation company specializing in feature films, commercials, music videos, broadcast series, interactive content, broadcast graphics and short films. Owned by Nike co-founder and Chairman Philip H. Knight, the company is located in Portland, Oregon.

LAIKA has a 30-year animation history presenting the artistry of award-winning filmmakers, designers and animators. In addition to numerous international honors, the company has won two Academy Awards, 11 Emmy Awards, 11 Clio Awards, three London International Advertising and Design Awards, five Mobius Advertising Awards and two Cannes Lion International Advertising Festival awards.

New Blender to Renderman Wiki and other site news

Just a short update on the site. The new wiki is in place, though much work has to be done in order for it to be viewed as somewhat complete.
The previous wiki was hosted on Wikidot, which provided a decent working environment, it was just not visually pleasing as the new one, which is hosted by Google's Sites now. Why Wikidot was chosen first before the Google Sites is still a mystery, this is changed now.

Other sites related to Blender have also undergone some visual changes, such as Graphicall.org, a site started by Daniel Salazar, a friend of Blender to Renderman community actually.

BlenderStorm also has undergone the same visual design treatment, as well as being an OpenID provider.

BlendSwap also has undergone some updates!

The Blender community is getting connected! Now the next step is for this site is to follow suit, see what happens.

Blender 2.57 Released! Fourth Generation of BtoR is near!

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-257/

At long last the first official stable Blender has been released since the refactoring began over two years ago. Many changes have been done to get to where Blender is now and of course more is yet to come, however this marks a milestone in the development of the next generation Blender to Renderman tool set. RIBMosaic has been worked on some more, with Jeff Doyle picking up the project and so far doing some fantastic work in getting the code to work with the new API, since the last version released by Eric was built before the recent API modification. I have not tried it myself yet but I would assume that as of right now a functional modern pipeline with Blender, RIBMosaic and Aqsis has been laid down, now it's just working on beefing up the features and the long road of bug fixes. Do not quote me on that though.

So this means that Blender to Renderman has evolved. This is not the first such occurrence though, in fact it would be in it's fourth generation now, at least since the turn of the century when Aqsis and Pixie were first released to the open source world. The first such generation was the Blenderman script, which functioned at a basic level but was not so useful for animation and was bug prone, however it did find use in film visual effects over in Spain, which so far has been the only known such instance of professional work using these tools. The next generation was the Neqsus script, which I still have a copy of and was so unique in it's design that it deserves to be respected to this day. It is the only known Blender to Renderman plugin that allowed Renderman previews of shaders to be displayed inside Blender itself. Neqsus had it's own GUI system seperate of Blender, which is how this was able to be accomplished. As with the previous generation this tool did not allow for animated exports, only still frames and after Blender 2.44 came out the plugin failed to work anymore. Bobby Parker, who wrote the Neqsus script, stopped working on it and pursued ventures elsewhere but remains active in the BtoR community. Of course the third generation was the first version of RIBMosaic, a huge milestone in the history of BtoR as it offered the most complete solution to get Blender data to Renderman format. This tool changed the playing field of the community, now we had a valid production worthy tool that was everything we could want, well almost. To achieve the level of intergration of Houdini or Renderman Studio for Maya was not possible, due to the restrictive PythonAPI at the time. It did however do everything else we wanted it to, we owe our entire existance on the web to this tool. I think without this tool Blender to Renderman would have died out years ago.

So now this is the fourth generation, Blender and RIBMosaic as well as Aqsis. Aqsis has become the strongest ally in this community, they are a devoted bunch of developers that have been very supportive of the whole Blender to Renderman idea, in fact the whole reason Project Widow started was because of them. Pixie has kind become stagnant in the area, where Aqsis has taken the role of leading the pack. While the feature set of Aqsis is not as complete as Pixie, 3Delight or even Pixar's Renderman, the developers have been working hard at getting there. On the other hand Aqsis has things going for it that none other can touch, for instance the Interactive Viewer of the prototype Aqsis 2.0 core, something not seen by any other RiSpec renderer so far. GPU relighting tools exist yes but the video demos done last year show just how fast Aqsis will be running on the CPU, which of course is where rendering for film takes place. GPU relighting tools emulate RSL code with GLSL code, they also use GPU rendering methods which are not the same as CPU rendering methods. Things like this make GPU relighting tools very handy but the Aqsis demos were rendered on the CPU in near real time, something the original engineers at Pixar had imagined possible long ago but knew it would be decades before it happened. Strange twist of fate though when it was an open source program that achieved this first rather than the inventors of Renderman.

Project Widow opened the doors to other areas of Blender to Renderman that had not been in the original equation. Areas like compositing, project management, collaboration tools, software development and pipeline design. In the beginning of BtoR it was all about how to translate Blender data to Renderman data. Step by step this was figured out. Then it was how to animate it, that too was figured out in the third generation. Technical direction found the need to get AOV in OpenEXR, only multilayered so that it could be imported back into Blender for post processing in the same manner that it does with it's own rendered frames. This lead to the development of shader tools that would generate complex shaders that literally would plug into the pipeline without problem, which in turn would lead to the capability of AOV rendering and compositing. Project Widow really opened up the need to see the pipeline as a whole rather than a section of it, simply because a lot of it really depends on each other. These are the things the animation and visual effects studios don't tell you, the little details like that which make production easier to maintain, instead they just say "We have these set of tools that are custom built to make our jobs easier"... but they don't go into detail as to WHY, much less HOW. These are known as "trade secrets". Project Widow is not professional by any means but the production is an open one, in fact tools and tutorials on how to do everything else BUT export Blender to Renderman data has been written. As mentioned before that was figured out long ago.

So now in the fourth generation, everything has been rewritten from the ground up; Blender, RIBMosaic and soon Aqsis. This website will also undergo that process. As things change so do we and plans are in the works to change this site again. When this will happen is uncertain, though in some areas it already has begun. Facebook has replaced Myspace in the "social networking" area of www.blendertorenderman.org, Myspace seems to be lacking in areas such as point of existance but whatever Facebook certainly has proven to be worth the effort. The Project Widow Twitter account has been slightly useful, sending out impromptu screenshots or WIP renders for the sake of doing it with no regard to the fact if anyone would be interested, however it seems to be doing a decent job since it attracts more and more followers. There is no cohesion though between areas, such as the outdated and incomplete wiki, the groups... so on and so forth. Project Widow has taken up a considerable amount of time to complete which means in other areas, such as this site, things are not as complete as I want them. It happens. I just keep looking at the stats though, we are nearing the 100,000 visit and that is impressive for something that started as a small idea in 2005 after one ambitious young man had a movie idea and asked me to try to use Blender as the vfx tool of choice. Now several animation studios have made visits, motor companies, computer companies and countless universities worldwide. We have passed the point of crawling but we are only just beginning to stand. There is much more to do.