Category Archives: News

Volume Test

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volume_spot (1)
volume_render

A long time ago in a version far far away, an anonymous user named ‘storm’ wrote a patch for volumetric rendering in cycles.

Recently, Thomas and Stuart (them crazy coder guys) made some changes and cleanups to the code – meaning it’s possible to download a patch, compile Blender and render some volumes!

Don’t get too excited just yet though, in it’s current state there’s no way to give it any fancy voxel textures from the smoke simulator or anything – all in due time!

volume_render_1

Images courtesy of Thomas Dinges, because I’m too lazy to compile it myself

Cycles changes license to accommodate for other 3D software

Good news posted today on the Blender Development Blog, the code for Cycles has been released with an Apache 2.0 license.

What does it mean?
Well basically it allows other 3D programs to use Cycles for rendering.

Why do we care?
More people using it means more potential developer involvement, which means more features, and more artists to provide professional feedback.

What will change?
Nothing bad.

“Note that Blender Foundation and Blender Institute remain committed to further developing Cycles as a render engine for Blender. We welcome other developers to integrate it in other applications, and especially to get involved with the Cycles development team at blender.org.” –src

Cycles will still remain as it is now, be developed just the same by the Blender devs, and probably gain additional improvements anyone makes for it outside of Blender context.

Read the full story on the Development blog:
http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/08/cycles-render-engine-released-with-permissive-license/

Gooseberry!

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I woke up late today, being Saturday, and lay in bed for about an hour aimlessly surfing the internet… when suddenly I see this on Google+ from Todd McIntosh.

I was out of bed before you could even say “Building BVH”!

This was shown at Siggraph apparently, but this is the first news I’ve heard since it was initially announced two years ago. I never doubted that Project Gooseberry would happen, but I never thought it would happen so soon. It’s kinda scary. Ever since receiving the nicest rejection letter I’ve ever had from Ton after applying for a position on the Tears of Steel team, it’s been my goal to learn as much as I can about shading and rendering so that one day I might work on one of the open movie projects.

I can only hope that I get to work on Gooseberry. And work my ass off of course.