Anyone know if Deep Shadow images are planned for Mantra? Maybe it's there and I'm just not aware, I don't use mantra much

thnx

d

No, they're not there. I may be mistaken, but I believe there are patent issues *cough* with Deep Shadows…AFAIK 3DElight has, or had them, but it's free. I'm not sure commercial products are willing to take the plunge with Pixar - not worth it. This may have changed - someone else will correct me if they have.

Cheers,

J.C.

Hmm.. that's too bad. We used them extensively on Polar Express for more then just shadowing. Pixar has released the api hooks to read/write deep shadows which we've incorporated into our custom particle renderer, in this way our renderer can self shadow as well as cast/receive shadows from a renderman render. I suppose we could write our own plugins to mantra to support them in the same way

d

JColdrick
AFAIK 3DElight has, or had them, but it's free. I'm not sure commercial products are willing to take the plunge with Pixar

3Delight has them and it is – despite the belief of many people – indeed a commercial product. The developers are DNASoft, a subsidiary of Taarna Studio, Montreal. Taarna is the only paying “customer” they currently have. In fact, 3Delight is the only other publicly available renderer that – like PRMan – is produced by a company that too absolutely depend on it for producing their imagery.
It is “sold” for zero bucks to other “customers” currently but this is expected to change in the near future.

Regarding their implementation: it works very well now.
There where some issues in the past (aka six months ago) but we use 3Delight's deep shadows here (on a full cg feature) all the time since then w/o any problems.


Cheers,

Moritz

Ahh, K - thanks for the update Moritz. Anyone, of course, can implement something that has a patent out there - the question is: will they get a letter from Pixar's lawyers? Just my personal opinion, the moment they go “fully commercial”, I'll bet they get a knock on the door. That is, of course, unless Pixar has loosened the hold on DS. Kind of neat they publish the API hooks - but then I'll bet that's probably intended more for those wanting to massage them, rather than create them. They're the same way with creases in subdivs - they don't care if you implement creases in a modeller, but the moment you pass a crease value to a renderer and do it there - trouble.

Cheers,

J.C.

John,

I remember that being a topic in one mail with these guys about a year back. I believe it was about creases but the bottom line was that they said they didn't fear Pixar. There are many ways of implementing creases, I guess. And there have been sooo many papers on new shadow mapping algorithms in recent times…
Last but not least there's the issue with software patents per se. In Europe they luckily don't exist (yet), and it seems we might continue to be lucky and they won't come to be here soon.
Remember that MentalRay only became available after Microsoft bought Softimage? M$ had licensed the patent on stochastic sampling Pixar holds in the US from the latter. So MentalRay could be sold there too.

Pixar has been granted this patent in Europe too btw., but they needed to file it to each and every European country separately –; it's that way here currently with most patents sadly. I have the German version and the text is an “Altavista-Babelfish”-style translation of the US English original that not surprisingly doesn't make the least sense in many paragraphs. Mental Images knew that they could make Pixar loose this patent literally in hours had they been forced to do so by Pixar suing them for using stochastic sampling in a product sold in Europe. My uncle happens to be a patent lawyer, so I have quite some insight into these things.

I also don't agree on your point with 3Delight costing anything.
The renderer is very good and stable now and comes for free; it is faster than PRMan under quite a few circumstances. So even people that have hundreds of PRMan licenses might be tempted to download it and use it on special occasions where more licenses are needed (and I know of at least two very well known companies in the US that did exactly that). The fact this renderer is free makes it much more likely that people take a look at it than if they had to pay st. imho.
From that pov, if Pixar wanted to sue them, now'd be the time, no? (or maybe rather three years back when deep shadows first appeared on 3Delight's feature list) :>


Cheers,

Moritz

I also don't agree on your point with 3Delight costing anything.
The renderer is very good and stable now and comes for free;

I think you mis-understood me - I wasn't knocking it - I've never used it.

From that pov, if Pixar wanted to sue them, now'd be the time, no? (or maybe rather three years back when deep shadows first appeared on 3Delight's feature list) :>

Not really…it depends on how they perceive the product. A freely distributable product is one thing, but if it starts to potentially hit on rman sales, believe me - they'll take notice.

The issue of “fearing” Pixar - well - they can take whatever stance they want. Typically in a business model you want to be innovative and provide a good product, but you also need to be aware of the possibility of lawsuits tying your company in financial knots. More often than not, it's settled out of court with Pixar effectively winning and the challenger either ceasing and desisting, or going out of business. It's simply not worth it, unfortunately.

Cheers,

J.C.