Rob Bredow, chief technology officer at Sony Imageworks, has announced that they are releasing several internal projects as open source. This includes Maya Reticle – a customizable display for Maya cameras, field3d – a voxel file format, pystring – a C++ library which brings Python like functionality to std::string and Scala Migrations for managing database schema.

Most interesting though is Open Shading Language which provides a shading language that can be embedded in many applications. This is being led by Larry Gritz (creator of BMRT, Entropy at Exluna and Gelato at nVidia). He is also involved in the open source OpenImageIO image library. This provides a simple interface for manipulating images and comes with some analysis tools.

Imageworks isn’t the only studio involved in releasing tools as open source – Rising Sun Pictures has releaseed PyShake - giving Python support in Shake, Affogato – a RenderMan exporter for XSI, Earth for tracking disk usage, and have contributed to Sun Grid Engine. (web sites seem to be currently down).

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 30th, 2009 at 9:54 pm and is filed under news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.