You wait for ages, then 2 open source vfx releases come along at the same time!

Disney Animation Studios’s 3d paint format and API Ptex is available to download.  Ptex avoids the need to UV complex meshes by saves out a set of texels for each face of a subdivision surface. These are independent, so it is possible to have different resolutions on adjacent faces. It does rely on adjacency information to filter across face boundaries, so you need to transfer your texture if mesh topology changes. I think it also only works if you have quadrilateral faces. Hopefully this will be picked up by the popular 3d paint packages soon – the author of 3D Coat has started experimenting with ptex.

And Sony Picture Imagework’s has released the first specification and code for Open Shading Language. This is a set of libraries and a compiler that can be used in any rendering engine, and will be used in SPI’s internal renderer – developed from Arnold. The language has been designed for raytracing from the start, and introduces the concept of radiance closures. These are functions that return a sampling pattern based on the material BRDF to the renderer. The renderer can then bundle coherent rays from several materials together to exploit raytracing caches better. Shaders can be linked in a similar fashion to coshaders, although the language does not define a scene description API (like RIB or mi) so the implementation is up to the renderer developer.

They also have some things which should have been added to RSL a long time ago such as more string tools, runtime determination of varying vs uniform variables, and arbitraryderivatives.  They also have an interesting approach to secondary outputs called Light Path Expressions. This uses regular expressions to express which ray types you want in your secondary image. This looks powerful, but also a bit intimidating.

There is a good introduction to OSL by the lead developer, Larry Gritz, and a story by fxguide here.

Dan Bethell and Johannes Saam released RmanConnect today. This is a RenderMan display driver and Nuke node which communicate over TCP/IP so that you can render directly into Nuke. This has been primarily been developed for 3Delight, but should work with other RenderMan renderers, such as Prman. The source code has been released under a BSD license. Also Libero Spagnolini has an impressive shader building tool called  Shaderlink available to download which is built around 3Delight and PyQT. 3Delight itself was recently updated to version 9.0 and 3delight for Maya to 5.0. Highlights include support for Maya 2010, an unlimited thread license, multi-camera rendering and RIB fragments – see all the changes in the changelog.

Also the openSourceVFX.org website opened recently. This is intended to be a central portal of open source VFX projects and is being run by Larry Gritz, Chad Dombrov and Philippe Leprince. their goals include listing and presenting valuable open-source projects for the VFX community and giving a voice to OS project leaders and VFX pros to promote their work and keep us updated.

Sitexgraphics’s AIR  9 was recently released. Vshade now has a toolbar option to reverse the graph flow and an option to use TweakAIR for interactive parameter tweaking, TweakAIR  can record a series of incremental changes to a scene, and  TweakAIR and BakeAIR can be used with a single AIR license. See the release notes for more details. Also a beta version of AIR Stream, a new Maya-to-AIR plug-in from developer Hai Nguyen, is available for testing by AIR users.

Also Aqsis 1.6 is now available. This includes many optimisation and performance enhancements, multiple layer support in the OpenEXR driver, and a Side Effects Houdini plugin. See the official announcement for more details.

Double Negative has released it’s first Open Source tool dnPtcViewerNode - a tool for viewing RenderMan point clouds (.ptc files) in OpenGL in Maya, written by Philippe Leprince and Michael Jones. This is only available as source for now, but has been compiled sucessfully against Pixar’s RenderManProserver, 3Delight and Maya 2010. Hal Bertram has an initial  release of his Interactive Tool for download. This is based on his 2005 Stupid RenderMan Interaction Trick.

Kevin Manners – one of the founders of TD College – has created FractureFX - a procedural, event-driven destruction plugin for Maya (2008 & 2009) which is currently being beta tested. There is a AutoDesk Siggraph MasterClass which demonstrates it’s capabilities. He also a book called Professional MEL Solutions for Production. 3D World magazine has a review here.

Finally, you can now paint on your iPhone using Autodesk Sketchbook. Other good painting apps for iPhone are Colors! and Brushes.

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).

Scot Iverson has recently released AIR 8, and a new demo is now available.This has several inovative features that you will not find in othr renderers. The main new feature is shader-based procedural modeling – here are the details:

AIR 8 has two new shader types for creating objects during rendering: a procedure shader that populates a bounding volume with new objects on-demand, and an instancer shader type that creates new objects based on properties of a parent object. AIR 8 ships with a sample procedure shader for growing trees and a companion instancer shader for placing trees that demonstrate the flexibility, control, and efficiency possible with these new shader types.

A more detailed description is included in the AIR 8 press release:

http://www.sitexgraphics.com/html/air_8_0_press_release.html

Other AIR news since the last update on RenderMania:

• RhinoAIR, a Rhino-to-AIR plugin for Rhino 4
• An extensive set of user notes and additional tools for rendering Massive crowds with AIR
• Detailed information on using AIR with Houdini 9

Here are some amazing example of Tilt Shift Photography. This uses a shift lense to get very shallow depth of field, so that real landscapes look like they are minatures. Keith Loutit has combined this technique with time lapse photography get some very impressive results around Sydney, Australia.

Moritz Moeller writes to tell us her has added RIB export to the modelling tool Structure Synth and the tree generation program Arbaro. Structure Synth is a procedural modelling tool similar to the 2d procedural tools Processing, Shoebot, Drawbot, and Nodebox.

Update – Lukas Vojir has used Processing to make monsters!

Disney/Pixar have announced their 3d animated lineup until 2012. Next year’s Disney release Bolt already has a couple of trailers out, and it’s looking pretty good. The Hollywood Reporter also has an article about Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter and his career at Disney and Pixar. Disney is also breaking into India’s Bollywood market with their joint animated feature Roadside Romeo. Apparently it was rendered on the 8th fastest supercomputer in the world. And finally Pixar’s Toy Story even has it’s own religion Universal Protectionism, fashioned after Buzz Lightyear’s Star Command.

And just to get you in the mood for Halloween Ray Villafane has some amazing sculpted pumpkins on his website.

This year’s Stupid RenderMan Tricks is available to download from The RenderMan Repository. This year the presentations are available as pdf and quicktimes. Not all the tricks are online yet, but the ones that are, are very good. Update: Dan Piponi’s quine trick is here.

Not on quite the same scale, but nice none the less, J. Adrian Herbez has some nice advanced MEL tricks, such as making a OpenGl like API in MEL and creating classes in MEL – using Maya nodes to hold their data.

Keep an eye out for Thomas Bitmatta – he may only be 7, but might be your next supervisor soon at the rate he’s going. And finally all hail the mighty greeble!

There is some interesting computational photography news from this year’s Siggraph from Microsoft Research with the University of Washington, Seattle and the University of California, Berkeley. Firstly Finding Paths through the World’s Photos is an update on last year’s Photosynth. It uses a set of images to recreate an environment from the cameras they were shot through. You can then move through that environment, through the most approriate images. This includes stabilisation and colour matching. Also Unwrap Mosaics is a method of texture mapping video footage directly without 3d geometry. It can also be used to track in other 2d layers. And finally Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene uses the parallax information to generate depth information from video footage. This is used to blend a set of photographs of the same scene to enhance the resolution and dynamic range of the footage. Hopefully this technology will be commercialised soon!