Double Negative open-source software

[MikeOwen]

Awesome work.
Great to see a big player releasing some of its technology into the community.
Point clouds are very interesting stuff, but the holy grail must be to create a mesh which is water-tight from them automatically?

[ple]

Well, you are thinking about point clouds created by 3d scanners or lidars, but this is not the same kind of point cloud.

The point clouds I am talking about are generated by Pixar's PhotoRealistic RenderMan to store baked/pre-processed data for later re-use. They can be used to render a range of traditionnaly expensive effects at a fraction of the cost (occlusion, global illumination and sub-surface scattering), or outside of the rendering pipeline to guide particle emission / collisions, relighting, etc.

You can read more about it in Per Christiansen's paper:
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/PointBasedColorBleeding/index.html

Other renderman compliant renderers like 3delight or Pixie use the same point-based techniques. They scale much better than ray-tracing in large complex scenes.

philippe

[jupiterjazz]

We recently decided to start contributing to the Open Source Community.
Our first project is a RenderMan point cloud viewer for Maya. It is extremely
useful in productions and you can find the code here:

http://dneg.github.com

The documentation is on our project's wiki.

All feedback welcome


Good work Philippe, thanks for sharing.


Paolo

[MinaRagaie]

This is something that I will certainly have a look on ASAP :)

[elvis75k]

who's going to compile this for maya 2009? Thanks!

[Mauritius]

Thanks for sharing this. :)

This works well with 3Delight too.
Tested so far under (K)Ubuntu 9.04 x86_64 and Gentoo x86, built against 3Delight 8.5.32 and Maya 2010, resp.

Cheers!

.mm

[Kel Solaar]

Nice Stuff guys, damn usefull :)

KS

[ple]

Thanks everyone.

If any of you guys want to contribute binaries, let me know and we'll host them in our download section.

Philippe

[marcuso]

For a smaller studio, is this applicable to Renderman for Maya?

[ple]

Absolutely, If you are using point-based occlusion or colourbleeding.

Edit: actually, I don't think RFM has the full version of the prman lib, which means that the plugin won't work. RMS might work. I will try to check with Pixar.

[Visor66]

This is really great, thanks a lot for sharing! Will be interesting to have a closer look at this code!

Greetz

[AlanW]

Thanks a lot for sharing with the community!

I've tested it on Fedora 10 x86_64 linked against Maya 2009 / RPS 15.0. Everything seems to be working good.

-Alan

[andrewhake]

Excuse my ignorance but I am more of an animator than renderer. I do love my renderman though. How exactly do you use this visualization? Just as a way to see exactly what you are getting? I guess I am just not clear in how visualizing this cloud is useful, but would love to know!

[RFX]

Pretty cool to see Double Negative join the release of open source material.

Now that Imageworks and Double Negative are on this, we might start seeing more companies pick up on this idea of sharing knowledge and maybe try to get companies sharing certain production tools, like the 3d voxel format from Imageworks open source.

Thanks D-Neg and Philippe!

[scrimski]

The documentation is on our project's wiki.
You got any link to that?

Thanks for sharing.

edit:Nevermind, found it(grr, need more coffee :argh: )

[ndeboar]

Good work guys, i always found the included point viewer a little clunky :)

[pix3lm0nk]

anyone with any compiled links yet?

[Wiro]

How exactly do you use this visualization? Just as a way to see exactly what you are getting?

Exactly. After baking out a pointcloud (for say indirect illumination) you can load this up in Maya directly and navigate there instead of loading up ptviewer and have to stick to it's clunky camera. You also see the pointcloud together with whatever other geo is in your scene. Much easier to visualise. Or you can playblast the cloud...etc etc.

Wiro

[Mauritius]

I have a CMake build system (Linux only) for this now, that DNeg will add to the repository soon.
If anyone is currently trying to compile this, it might come in handy. Drop me a note if you need it urgently.
We also need volunteers to edit the CMake files so they do the right thing on Windows and Darwin/OSX.

You can also choose whether to build against PRMan or 3Delight. Adding support for Pixie should be dead easy as well.

.mm

[noizFACTORY]

Lorenzo Angeli has a linux build for 3Delight 8.5 here (http://www.lorenzoangeli.net/index.php?mod=Download/maya_plugins#dneg-dnPtcViewerNode_3delight.tar.gz)

-Sachin

[hdd]

it's for linux , not windows ;)
L.

p.S
32 bit , maya2008 , 3delight 8.5 , gcc 4.1.2

:P

[noizFACTORY]

it's for linux , not windows ;)
L.

yeah, found that out after unzipping the pack ;)

[MinaRagaie]

yeah, found that out after unzipping the pack ;)
Means more waiting for me ;)

[julienTD]

Humm thx philippe and Dneg for sharing such tool, tested here on windows and linux and works like a charm, this is really cool to see pointcloud in maya viewport now with rms 2 and rps 15. ;)

jd.

[ple]

Thanks Julien. I sent you a private message.

[ple]

Hi there,

I uploaded Moritz's cmake config to our repository.
I should make building on linux for PrMan and 3Delight very simple. I updated also our wiki page with new building instructions. More platforms should come quickly...

philippe

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