Open Shading Language

The forwarded announcement below describes an achievement for one of our optional dependencies, the Open Shading Language (OSL) from Sony Pictures Imageworks. OSL is basically an open source shader system that helps rendering tools make better pictures. Kudos to their developers -- it's quite an impressive achievement to have an entire film shaded with just OSL.

A former GSoC participant, developer Guilherme Kunigami, worked on an initial integration of OSL into BRL-CAD's rendering pipeline just last year. It's fun to see a direct industry relation to our development projects, why we work on the things we do, and how they relate to the "bigger picture".

We'd obviously need more work to provide some of the production shaders and lighting used by the likes of MIB3 or The Amazing Spider-Man, but Kunigami's results were impressive enough after just a couple months development. As our OSL integration efforts continue (developer needed), it'll become even easier to generate realistic renderings with BRL-CAD.

So the next time you're at the movies, know that quality may be coming soon to a BRL-CAD near you. ;-)

See http://brlcad.org/d/node/99 for more details.

Begin forwarded message:

From: Larry Gritz
Date: May 25, 2012 12:52:16 PM EDT
Subject: [osl-dev] Big day for OSL

"Men in Black 3" -- the first 100% all-OSL show that we completed -- opens in theaters today (at least in the US & Canada; I guess it opened elsewhere in the past couple days).

And it went off without a hitch, at least as far as shading was concerned, as did "The Amazing Spider-Man", which recently wrapped for us and will be released in July. These shows were as complex (visually, geometrically, and lighting-wise) as anything we've ever done. On deck: Hotel Transylvania (September), Oz the Great and Powerful (March).

So for everybody who was waiting for a big project to be completed with OSL before trusting it in production... that ship has sailed, and then some.

--
Larry Gritz