I hope I dont sound bitter, but most decent graphics engine developers have created renderers that are a couple of generations ahead of the open source GUI toolkit renderers. There are several of us that can truely bring next gen rendering to the open source desktop, however we’re working for gamedev companies (they pay our bills), and we have no time to contribute to open source stacks. If the community can organise a regular budget to pay for such devs, then you’d see a significant rendered snd toolkit updates. Same with other open source apps.
- 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.
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.
"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).
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?
This isn't a Minecraft renderer I'm talking about. The Minecraft renderer would be the non-trivial project I said "might end up being pretty cool" if they open source it.
It's all cool and awesome, but why put all those resources into new renderer, when one could contribute to Blender and such, which are way more mature?
I don't really know what to expect. You want to see good production code, and the FOSS community is way way WAY better at this than some of the bubble gum you'd see in a professional setting.
Your question is too general, so I can't exactly give you a specific repository. I could direct you to BGFX[1] for a decent architecture of a cross platform renderer, but if you're not a graphics programmer, that may be a bad exercise, as you'd spend more time learning jargon than studying clean code. Or it uses patterns (or lack of, given graphics programming) that don't apply to your domain.
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.
I am curious why they chose to build their own rendering engine. They could have first written a terminal application with the same (at least functionally) collaboration features and gotten a cross platform solution almost for free. From a latency perspective, it's hard to imagine that they can do substantially better than, say, kitty + neovim. Hats off to them for pulling off a poc, but I do think the rendering engine is a liability for them that will potentially taketh as much as it giveth. In other words, is it worth investing a significant portion of their $10MM investment on rendering when it is still quite uncertain what the market for editor based collab tools looks like?
There are too many mature renderers and the competition is intense.
The current popular actively developed ones are: V-Ray (which we use in http://Clara.io), Arnold, Maxwell, Pixar's RenderMan, and KeyShot.
Less popular but actively developed ones are: RedShift, Furry Ball, 3Delight, NVIDIA iRay, Octane/Bridge...
And then the ones that are integrated into the 3D packages themselves like Blender's Cycles, Modo's renderer, Cinema 4D's renderer, Houdini's Mantra, Mental Images (included in most Autodesk products.)
Then the smaller opensource ones: Sunflow, Lux, Corona, Mitsuba, Pixie...
That is a lot of renderers and I am sure that I am missing quite a few.
When MS decides to release an open source rendering engine - we can start taking them seriously... until then they're never going to be worth taking seriously.
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.
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