3 Oct 2000 (updated 3 Oct 2000 at 11:00 UTC)
»
Andrei wrote:
Something that's been bothering me for a while is a lack
of really good advanced open source 3D modeling/animation
program, similar to 3D Studio MAX or Lightwave or even
Maya. Surely there is enough brainpower in the development
community to match the commercial companies, but I guess
it's really a matter of organizing the project and keeping
the people motivated.
You should look at OpenFX
andrei. It's been under development for years, and was a
commercial product, but we are going to release it really
really soon now.
Feature list includes a raytracer and scan-line
renderer simultaneously (which not even 3DS has I believe),
bezier/NURB support, skeletal animation, procedural
textures, a variety of conversion utilities,
PNG/GIF/JPEG/AVI/FLIC
formats, dynamic output plugins, etc. Check out the screenshot
gallery I
threw together for more ideas. this and this are two of my personal favourite
pictures :)
I've had it in a 'private' beta for a while now, but I
figure there's no harm in letting the advogato crew have a
look at it - we are going to release just as soon as we can
get the primary tarball and website ready. This is a Win32
binary ONLY at the moment - if you want source, I'll send
you an old snapshot to look at.
Feel free to download it from
ftp://ftp.openfx.org/pub/openfx/beta and send me
feedback at anil@recoil.org. Incidentally, offers of US
mirrors would be greatly appreciated (I run rsyncd).
The catch? It's a Win32 ONLY program at the moment.
I'm
using the excellent WINE project to compile it natively at
the moment, but time pressures on this mean that the dev
team eagerly
awaits release and other volunteers to help us get the
codebase into shape. Luckily, the code only uses pure
Win32 calls (no MFC or any of that malarchy) so converting
it to ANSI C and GCC will prove no great difficulty using
WINE I feel.