LuxRender to be used on professional animated TV show

[Sheltem]

Awesome news!

Gratulations! Can't wait to see the result of this!

[GustavTheMushroom]

Some renders from the show would be nice when they'll let you!

XD.

[diffid]

Congratulations Radiance and the whole Lux team for your hard work. Fantastic news. The great thing about open source software, everyones a winner! Everyone benefits.

[GustavTheMushroom]

The only thing that would worry me is that they would kinda have acontrol over where the engine is going... Or its your job.. If you know what I mean, They can tell you what to implement etc etc.

Is it a permanent position? Or is it a one year contract or something similar...

[Radiance]

hey,

it's a temporary contract position, so don't worry about it

from our point of view, it's just more testers.

Radiance

[SMISRA]

Great news. ...We are starting a SIGGRAPH Chapter in our city. May be in the meeting I will intro luxrender here too. Another thing is in for the next ACM conference I am planning to design the poster and render it using luxrender. Its just my machine is not much powerful to render a complete scene.lets see.

[Insquall]

This is just the most AWESOME THING EVER!!!!

I'm also glad to see someone finally using unbiased rendering for animation. Usually people just complain "its too noisy, takes too long to render" (only because they don't like the idea of change), but IMO it is the closest rendering method to true film.

Well done Radiance & team!

[Koba]

Hi Radiance!

Its been ages since we talked! Sorry about that, studies caught up with me this year. That said, luxrender has made huge strides since then! Well done!

Now it is summer, I would be happy to help with some documentation work again (what happened about that?) though I'm now working on a Blender project (pynodes) so again I'm a bit busy.

Sukrim:

No, they're using Maya (I doubt Blender is a tool to be used in real production work...)

Well Blender has been production at least twice (http://www.elephantsdream.org/, http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/) while this will be the first time for Luxrender. Hopefully, Luxrender will benefit from being used in a production environment the same way Blender has. So to say Blender is not production capable seems a tad biased...

Anyways...
Congratulations, Radiance, and best of luck!

Koba

[Radiance]

I think the reason why they prefer maya is that it's easy to find professional animators in the job market who can use it.
There's heaps of blenderheads around, but not a lot of them can rig and animate a natural walk cycle

I've been working with maya for a couple of days now, and although i'm much more comfortable with blender's interface due to experience, i can see maya is very powerfull and makes things very simple for animators.

But from the modeling/texturing side of things it's a bit too slow and complex to use imo and offers not much benefit over blender.

Radiance

[Koba]

Hi!

Well that is true!

Proprietary tools have been around longer than most open source ones and certification and education has traditionally focused around those. What I really hope is that Luxrender gains "critical mass" in terms of quality, userbase and number of devs to have the sort of momentum Blender has acquired. This commercial project should hopefully bring a huge number of new production-worthy features and bug fixes to the table.

Perhaps one day, Luxrender will be able to turn some more profit by selling books, training DVDs and through more projects like this one. One thing I've noticed is that the most successful project in the 3D open source world build strong ties to Blender. Yafray had close connections at the hight of its success, Sharpconstruct became sculpt mode, Freestyle in now being integrated right now and when nurbana died, its code was donated to the Blender foundation.

Not that support for Maya and Max isn't important - because it is (for "professional image"). But the natural ally for GPL code is other GPL code and the associated communities. In general, when two open source communities have strong,mutual benefit from working with each other, forging close ties makes each project stronger than staying aloof and separate.

Of course, I'm not saying where you should take Luxrender to. I'm just observing typical patterns of success for projects like this one! So excuse my rambling - I think this news bodes extremely well for the future of Luxrender, which is very exciting, that is all!

Koba