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3d linux

From Philippe CABAL

Answered By Michael J. Hammel

hi

[The Graphics Muse] Howdy.

i am looking for a free multiplateform (win32 + unix) 3d modeling / rendering / animating software all i found is povray and blender

[The Graphics Muse] That's about it.

but id like a software as open as pov (data souces) as intuitive as a blender

[The Graphics Muse] No such beast.

actually i am a proggramer so i need to have a look at the scene-source isnt there a vrml stuff that do broadcast output ?

[The Graphics Muse] Nope. You have a few choices, but nothing that fits all your desires here.

If you want VRML, you can try SCED or SCEDA. Both have pretty primitive interfaces, but are fairly sophisticated underneath. They include a constraint-based mechanism. The source is available. They are the only ones I know of that produce VRML output.

Outside of these two, all the other tools do not provide source: Blender, Houdini, Maya, etc. Blender is by far the least expensive but the most sophisticated for the money. Houdini and Maya are high end, high dollar products. POVRay is just a rendering engine, not an interactive modelling tool. A better option for rendering is probably BMRT, the Blue Moon Rendering Tools, which is a Renderman compliant renderer. It was actually used for several movies. However, like POVRay, it is just a rendering engine, not an interactive modeller.

Nothing is available on Linux for free and with source provided that can do broadcast output. You have to string together a few different tools in order to do that - for example Blender for modelling, something else to convert Blender files to RIB files (it doesn't do RIB yet), and then BMRT for rendering.

Blender is really the best thing going in this department, since you can add scripting to it fairly well using Python. It's interface is production quality. It just doesn't export to formats that can be used by other rendering engines, like RIB for PRMan (Pixar's rendering engine) or BMRT.

As for cross platform, give it up. Blender I think is cross platform. POVRay doesn't much care where it's ported to and I believe BMRT has been ported to Windows (much to the consternation of the original author, no doubt). But cross platform graphics tools are pretty difficult to do since such tools are often very happy close to the hardware, and getting close to the hardware on different OS's is not quite so easy a proposition.

Hope that helps.

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Published in issue 66 of Linux Gazette May 2001

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