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.

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.

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.

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).

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

Update – Lukas Vojir has used Processing to make monsters!

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

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!