Blue moon rendering tools
| Blue moon rendering tools | |
|---|---|
| Basic data
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| developer | Exluna / Larry Gritz |
| Current version | 2.6 (November 2000) |
| Current preliminary version | Development stopped |
| operating system | IRIX , Linux , Microsoft Windows |
| programming language | C. |
| category | 3D software |
| License | proprietary |
Blue Moon Rendering Tools ( BMRT for short ) was a RenderMan -compatible, photo-realistic renderer and the forerunner of Nvidia's Gelato renderer. Its use was free for non-commercial purposes. BMRT was popular for learning the RenderMan interface. It also had some features that Pixar's PhotoRealistic RenderMan (PRMan) didn't have at the time, such as: B. Ray tracing . Pixar also used BMRT to integrate its ray tracing functionality into RenderMan (from PRMan 3.8). With DSOs (Dynamic Shared Objects) it is possible to implement your own functions in a RenderMan-compatible renderer . Thus a specially programmed trace () function call was implemented in PRMan , which was ultimately used to call BMRT from PRMan in order to use its ray tracing function. In the case of BMRT, one speaks of a ray server ( this became possible from BMRT Release 2.3.6). The advantage was that PRMan only called BMRT if there was something to raytrace in the 3D scene that was to be calculated. The data precalculated by PRMan was passed on to BMRT and sent back to PRMan after the ray tracing process was completed. According to Exluna, it has been used to render films such as The Great Crawling , Stuart Little , The Cell , Hollow Man, and Woman on Top .
BMRT was originally developed by Larry Gritz while working at Cornell University . He developed it during the early 1990s, released it in 1994, and was subsequently recruited by Pixar to work on their PhotoRealistic RenderMan product.
The last version of the renderer under the name BMRT was issue 2.6, released in November 2000. The first version of Entropy , the successor to BMRT, was issue 3.0, released in July 2001.
In 2000, Gritz left Pixar to start his own company called Exluna, whose main product was Entropy, a RenderMan-compatible renderer based on BMRT with additional features and optimizations. The company Nvidia took over Exluna in early 2002 and its product Entropy. In the middle of the takeover phase by Nvidia, Pixar sued Larry Gritz and his company Exluna for alleged patent , non - disclosure agreements and copyright infringements , which Exluna consistently denied. The lawsuit was ultimately resolved and resulted in Exluna discontinuing development of BMRT and Entropy. Gritz and his employees were taken over by Nvidia to develop the combined hardware and software render Gelato.
literature
- Anthony A. Apodaca, Larry Gritz: Advanced RenderMan. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco 2000, ISBN 1-55860-618-1 .
Web links
- The Demise of BMRT & entropy , from the RenderMan Repository (English)
- BMRT website ( Memento from December 1, 2001 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Anthony A. Apodaca, Larry Gritz: Advanced RenderMan. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco 2000, ISBN 1-55860-618-1 , p. 481.
- ↑ See web links: BMRT website ( Memento from December 1, 2001 in the Internet Archive )