An open source rendering engine like this can open doors for new products in simulation/training. Not having to write an image generator from scratch will sure be a huge time saver.
I won't really complain if there are just 2 render engines out there in the market, given that both are open source. It will make work hell lot easier for so many developers and the competition and development will stay healthy.
- Sony Pictures Imageworks open sourced Open Shading Language, Field3D, Alembic and OpenColorIO.
- Pixar opensourced OpenSubDiv
- Disney opensourced Ptex, BRDF Explorer, SeExpr and Partio
- Dreamworks open sourced OpenVDB
I wouldn't be too suprised if we would see an open source renderer within the next 10 years, especially if SPI is going to replace their in-house version of the Arnold renderer, as open source software has been extremely successful for SPI.
It has an open-source format, you can create animations yourself as well. Plus this renderer is literally a desktop app, isn’t it? It is as cross platform as it gets, with this project being the most optimized implementation.
Yeah. They've open sourced OpenVDB and other smaller things before, and have contributed things to Embree and OpenSubDiv, but those were libraries/storage formats, not entire production-capable renderers.
At the same time however, does their renderer give them that many advantages? As someone who works on a (sort of) competing proprietary renderer, it's a lot of work and effort to do it and support it, and maybe they want to build a community around that from smaller studios and compete with Renderman a bit for mindshare?
That's a really great comparison, and great point that this is just the renderer. I'm happy to see it released under an MIT license, but I wonder how many OSS tools there are to build compatible content, and how easy it would be to build exporters from other formats in existing tools.
Indeed, there is no shortage of open source ray tracers and renderers. That said, there are very few open source renderers with full OSL (https://github.com/imageworks/OpenShadingLanguage) support and the required features for animation and VFX works. I actually know only two (both actively developed): Cycles and appleseed.
Can someone explain what is special about this engine, as opposed to what you would use otherwise? I mean, rendering 3D scenes is something people have been doing for decades. Is it speed? Is it support for formats popular with animators? Is it the fact that it's FOSS?
I've written my own over the past 2.5 years, mostly on the Train to and from work...
Ignoring geometry and texture paging, curve support and volumetrics (all of which I'm slowly working on), it could be used in production.
But then I guess any renderer can produce a pretty picture with physically-based shading - but speed-wise (it's a brute force GI renderer only, no irradiance caching) it's competitive with the other CPU renders out there with similar settings.
The harder stuff is memory-efficiency - Arnold's amazing at this, and numeric stability over all different types of data.
Given the amount of research out there, it's really not that difficult - most of the hard stuff I found was decoupling the GUI (I've written my own context-creation / scene editor as well which hosts the renderer) from the renderer - that involved a lot of re-writes...
Even small companies can create competitive high-end renderers today so it's not much of a differentiator. Filmmaking is about human talent mostly, not technology. (Same thing happened in live-action filmmaking, anyone can afford the equipment today.)
But there's a huge advantage to being the first high-end renderer to go open source, so lots of small studios will adopt it if it's as solid as it looks.
It'll become available in Blender.
Maintenance will then get extended to the community, including (most likely) support for alternate shading schemes (Material X/Lama has decent momentum right now, converging with Sony's OpenShadingLanguage).
Apache 2.0 is an ideal license for this kind of project.
"I'm just curious about the goals for open sourcing this"
I suppose, continue to make money with the proprietary editor, but have an open source renderer to deploy and enable an ecosystem, where other people target this renderer, as it might be superior. I am definitely interested, I routinely hit the limit of 2D drawing with my limited 16ms per frame (currently I use the canvasAPI and pixi).
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