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Download Packages Updated!
Greetings,
After a lot of hard work the download packages have finally been updated with the latest stable version of MOSAIC from CVS beta-0.4.7
This release offers built-in shader/token integration to nearly every feature of Blender's material, light and world settings. Also included is a greatly expanded render pass system that adds support to nearly every technique currently available to RenderMan, this includes the standard depth and env maps as well as photon mapping for GI and caustics, irradiance caching, point cloud occlusion, point cloud GI, and point cloud baking of Ci and diffuse.
Also included are several experimental features for using render layers with Aqsis layered EXR display and using depth and env maps for advanced features such as SSS, color bleeding, area lighting, soft shadows and color bleeding in volumes. As always all shaders and RIB export have been tested to work with the latest versions of 3Delight, Air, Aqsis, Pixie and PrMan.
This will be the final release of MOSAIC for the 2.4x series of Blender and all development will cease in CVS (with the exception of any critical bug fixes). MOSAIC versioning will freeze at beta-0.4 and development will continue in SVN beginning with beta-0.5
Porting to Blender 2.5 will begin within the next few weeks however I will not create a SVN repository until MOSAIC's GUI and internal structure are complete so it may be several months. Fear not however as I will be blogging during this process to let everybody know how its going ;-)
Cheers,
Eric Back (WHiTeRaBBiT)
2009-11-16 09:40:03 UTC by dreamscapearts
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MOSAIC is now using hosted apps!
Greetings all,
After a good bit of work I've updated all project content into several new hosted apps provided by SourceForge, among them are:
1) MediaWiki - replacing the old wiki home page and manual, unlike the previous wiki this actually works like a real wiki
2) phpbb forum - replacing the old sourceforge forums, this greatly expands the forums including avatars, image and file attachments, and user to user private messaging
3) Gallery - This is new and will replace my offsite picasa gallery, this is fairly simple but allows me to keep test render together with over MOSAIC content
4) WordPress Blog - This replaces my old diary and will encourage me to more micro blogging instead of the big tutorial blogging I do over at BlenderToRenderMan
Also I'm getting very close to a new package release and intend of doing a new blog tutorial series demonstrating all the new features of the last 6 months :)
Eric Back (WHiTeRaBBiT)
2009-08-14 06:15:53 UTC by dreamscapearts
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RIB MOSAIC: Special early beta relase for BlenderToRenderMan blogs
This is a special early beta release specifically for the
Blender To RenderMan blog tutorials which can be found here:
http://blendertorenderman.blogspot.com
Originally the tutorials were done as a temporary place to
talk about the changes being made to MOSAIC. It seems
however the blogs have become so popular I feel it
necessary to do a early release of the CVS to prevent
confusion from non-CVS users. This package insures that the
CVS 1.39 version of MOSAIC stays in since historically with
the blogs.
I call this an "early" beta because of several missing
features in MOSAIC as well as a out of date Wiki manual,
please keep this in mind if you try this package!
This release represents nearly 8 months of almost daily
changes from the first down loadable release, there are so
many changes it would be useless to name them all so heres
a quick highlight:
- GUI complexity greatly expanded for better inteface design
- The addition to dynamic controls for user controls lists
- Greater control of the export, compile and render process
- The ability to automatically manage passes during export
- The ability to generate batches and logs for distribution
- The inclusion of a renderer preset system for easier setup
- The ability to "embed" MOSAIC settings in a blend project
- The addition of more exporter controls for finer control
- The addition of shader libraries with batch compiling
- The addition of a GUI driven shader fragment editor
- The ability to easily preview and manage fragments
- The inclusion of built-in shaders for tighter integration
- Tools for easier management of supporting text files
- Much more complex project tab with render pass controls
- The inclusion of RIBsets for more complex pass control
- The addition of map pass utilities for easy mapping setup
- The addition of scene controls for active object cameras
- User controllable display drivers
- The inclusion of raytracing parameter through all tabs
- The expansion of many new tokens to the token system
- More direct support for many controls throughout Blender
- More complex support for object and mesh material setups
- Better support for dupli's and the particles system
- Faster export times with much more complex setup schemes
- And much much more...
In general this is a completely new exporter compared to
the first release :)
Hope everybody enjoys,
WHiTeRaBBiT
2008-07-31 17:19:34 UTC by dreamscapearts
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Started tutorial blogs at BlenderToRenderman
Now that the planned new features have begun to taper off I've decided its time to start thinking about re-documenting MOSAIC. Since I still have a little more "intrusive" work to do I thought it would be nice to write a series of blog tutorials as a in-between step to completely re-writing the Wiki. These blogs will act as a temporary reference to the new features in CVS while being informal enough to not require updating with every new CVS feature (the way I would need to with the Wiki manual).
I'll be doing this for about 2 weeks and plan on covering the entire interface and every feature before getting back to development. You can check them out at http://www.blendertorenderman.blogspot.com :)
WHiTeRaBBiT
2008-07-10 20:32:03 UTC by dreamscapearts
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Full CVS package finally updated!
After a little over 8 months all content in the CVS is finally updated. Several example scenes have been added and the older examples have been updated with the newer features of MOSAIC. This also means that the entire CVS package is up-to-date with the latest version of Blender. There's a little more work to do with the built-in shaders and the Wiki manual will get a complete re-write, at which point I'll finally be able to release a new download package (for all those scared of CVS) :)
WHiTeRaBBiT
2008-06-21 06:34:41 UTC by dreamscapearts
