[TriLUG] More Installfest questions ... (3D)

Sam Kalat samkalat at sneakrets.com
Fri May 3 13:35:24 EDT 2002


> I just remembered the 3D package I was thinking of, btw.  It's
> the Blue Moon Rendering Tools (http://www.bmrt.org/).  BMRT
> is a Renderman clone.  It's not open source, but it is free,
> even for commercial use.

There are other tools like this, that will render an existing Renderman file 
(.rib).  Linux has always been excellent for render farms and this is the 
sort of tool that you want.  Scheduling jobs is another matter, and I haven't 
found a good distributed rendering tool that will assign rib files and 
organize their output.

Of course you need to get a Renderman scene in order to use it.  Tools for 
that are often ungodly expensive, and don't always run on Linux (3D Studio 
MAX, SoftImage, Maya, etc).  Plus the export of a scene to Renderman format 
loses a lot of the lovely plugins that artists need, or claim to need, to do 
special effects.

> Well, you could always learn openGL and write your own. :-)

I have thought of this many times.  I already know OpenGL, and would love to 
see a 3D package that is to MAX what The Gimp is to Photoshop.  I'm sure I'm 
not the only one who's thought of it, but so far the 
wait-until-someone-does-it-for-me approach has not worked.  And after losing 
Blender there wasn't that to fall back on... but I'm not sure that is such a 
bad thing, Blender had a very strange UI that was hard to deal with.

Trouble is, even a basic 3D modeler requires a lot of work, and a lot of 
thought put into UI, and a lot of math.  So to get to the open-source 
critical-mass stage to attract real developers, it's more than a weekend hack 
session.

Video is another story, there's enough interest and good projects already 
that applications for video playing, archiving, and editing are actually 
getting somewhere.

Sam Kalat



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