News Disney open-sources 3D code

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2010/01/21/disney-open-sources-3d-code/1

 

*clap clap disney*

 

If I had oozes of free time and lots of money. I would have used it to happily render all day/week/year. But since I need to work to pay my food and other stuff to live and need my spare time to see the world and sleep. I can't.

 

If they have released it in order to gain, they are probably giving far more than they will ever gain. Fantastic show Disney!

 

This makes a whole lot of sense.

Commercially they are unlikely to make much out of selling the software, but may have come to a dead end with their own development team. This way they get a much larger pool of creativity working on it and will probably gain themselves in the long term with improved tools.

The main income is from the films themselves, so a speedier or improved set of tools is very beneficial.

Big thumbs up to Disney for playing the long game.

 

Plus this way they effectively publish a prior art that prevents their competitors from patenting a similar method.

 

So they have a large pool of people working on it, thats a huge plus for them...maybe they're considering prospective employees. If they're tools are out there and people want to work for them or even just get to know what the industry uses then you can. Allowing you to apply for jobs and for Disney to hire people who already have experience using their own software and thus removing he time needed for getting used to working with their tools.

I mean, obviously this sits on top of having a huge community of people who will make improvements and changes to it so all in all...nice one Disney, nice to see some companies these days still know how to play the game.

 

Everybody wins. The 'community' gets a damn good toolset to use, and will make beautiful things. Disney gets potential employees pre-trained in their proprietary software, plus possible optimisations and developments in the s/ware, plus happy open-source-save-the-planet kudos, plus may possibly make their Ptex so ubiquitous that other companies license it from them rather than develop their own.

 

They've just released the specifications for the file format, like TIF's, JPG's or openEXR's and the API to get data in and out. I don't think much development will happen to that outside of disney. What this will allow is other companies to intergrate it into their pipelines, and in the next couple of years for it to filter down into commercial packages.

The software shown in the demo is disney's propriety inhouse 3dpaint sofware which they aren't releasing :/ But hopefully Zbrush or Mudbox will support it soon enough, then it just needs to be picked up by more renders than PRman or other renderman compliant one (which I think will probably take the longest out of all the above)

 

a BSD License