LuxRender to be used on professional animated TV show

[ckbrd]

"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."

I very much agree with you here Radiance - I see it the same way. However also with academia starting now to look also upon Blender this might change - but slowly I predict. Few of my fellow study friends who started on Maya use Blender now. What they learned in Maya was easy to transfer to Blender.



Congratulation to the job and Lux being considered for the render job. I think this is a very good news, for you guys and also the community. Isn't Maxwell also used for animations? I hope that this will enable you guys to bring Lux onto fast legs and to optimize the render tool set and output.

Good luck with the job and Lux.

[Sukrim]

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...

Uhm, you know that these are rather projects to promote Blender and get more features into it (Elephant's Dream --> SSS, BBB --> Fur) and just for the fun of it than making profit? These are more like the Short Movies from Pixar that are (great!) tech demos, not like their real production work like Wall.e, The Incredibles & co.

I'm sure Blender is a great application, but it's just far from being used by more than a few enthusiasts or open source fanatics to be honest... I hope tha interface-rewrite scheduled or 2.50 will bring some more changes to that but until then it simply males no sense for any company to use Blender since other apps are great as well and they don't require as much training and are (imo) much more intuitive and even "prettier" than Blender - and in most packages there is guaranteed support included...

[Koba]

Uhm, you know that these are rather projects to promote Blender and get more features into it (Elephant's Dream --> SSS, BBB --> Fur) and just for the fun of it than making profit? These are more like the Short Movies from Pixar that are (great!) tech demos, not like their real production work like Wall.e, The Incredibles & co.

I would like to point out that both these projects sold thousands of DVDs at around $35 each to support the 6 months of so production. Also, while they are indeed shorts designed to support Blender, that doesn't mean it isn't "real" production work (consider the lengths of the average advert). Indeed the whole point was to place Blender is a production environment - using Sun render farms, the first European movie *ever* released on HDDVD and so on - even if it is just for fun!

For a full-length feature film using Blender there is http://www.plumiferos.com/index-en.php from Argentina. To be honest, a tiny proportion of the world's CG work is in full-length 100% CG films due to the massive resources needed - most CG work is with short FX sequences, TV adverts, magazine adverts, architectural visualisation, game clips and so on.

Anyway, it isn't my intention to argue - no doubt the industry's infrastructure has grown up around the Max/Mayas of this world making many things easier with those tools. All I'm saying that to suggest that a fledgling GPL project at Beta level like Luxrender is more suited to production (having not been tested in production) than a well established GPL program like Blender seems a little strange!

Anyway, I'm glad Maya is being used: there is no hope of improving the Maya sources giving more opportunity to improve Lux!

Koba

[rusted]

Congratulations to luxrender team and esp. Radiance for their dedication and hardwork bearing fruit...

[anderslanglands]

This is fantastic news for lux and for you radiance. Congratulations!

[CTZn]

there is no hope of improving the Maya sources giving more opportunity to improve Lux!

Koba

That's not totally right, Maya itself is a MEL (Maya Embedded Language) parser (3MB of RAM load in its command form, based on the text buffers for the command window in fact), and all Maya tools are mel scripts you can tweak and edit. This is really where Maya is quite unbeatable in a real production environment, that is with a developer team. Now with python...

Mmmh if more people use Maya I'll have to switch to Houdini, I run with outsiders only

;

[ckbrd]

Mayas internal structure is MEL script?

this sounds a little unbelievable. All tools are simple scripts?

[Sukrim]

Well, not every script has to be simple... Perl + Python for example are also scripting languages, but they have quite some "power"

[dougal2]

Even maya's UI is completely MEL script on top of the Maya Library.

[Koba]

Interesting.

Of course Max has Maxscript and Cinema 4D has its scripting - lots of proprietary, closed source programs have scripting languages. However *if* what you is true and *the vast majority* of vanilla Maya is script - UI, tools, renderer etc then I accept your argument (and my respect for Maya would go way up). How a completely scripted (interpreted) app could be as fast as native C/C++ I don't know. That in itself seems a disadvantage - though a fully customisable UI is nice - I'm waiting for Blender 2.5 to compete in that area.

To be honest, I suspect you are overstating the degree MEL ships with vanilla Maya and how much of core Maya is customisable with MEL. However, I've never used Maya so I don't really know. Talk of Maya MEL always left me with the impression of an equivalent of Blender Python, even if it has nicer UI support (and goes a little deeper). Generally, scripting ability is not source code editing and is no replacement for access to the source. The C source is always where the fast, important code lies - no production worthy app would leave intensive code to the mercy of an interpreted language or even bytecode (which will always be slower).

MEL is what the luxrender exporter is probably written in, in the same way Python is what the blender exporter is written in. And to be honest, I would pick a complete, open source and very well known and respected language over a small proprietary scripting language any day. You should look at some of the free Python scripts made by the Blender communtity - vector renderers, physics simulators, L-system generators and much more.

Actually having the source is nice too.

Koba