Cycles render engine released with permissive license

[Nizar]

Good move. I really like cycles engine.
http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/ ... e-license/

[Hirazi Blue]

The possibilities are mind-boggling.
No, really, what does this mean for the simple license-unware folks like me?
Will we now, potentially, see an integrated Cycles in Softimage
and does the license change mean the developer of such a plugin
can even start asking money for it?

[Nizar]

If I understood correctly, yes, the (e.g.) softimage developers can integrated it or make a bridge and ask money for it, but the upgrading and development done inside cycles are open so are part of cycles (and blender in general)

[BenR]

If I understood correctly, yes, the (e.g.) softimage developers can integrated it or make a bridge and ask money for it, but the upgrading and development done inside cycles are open so are part of cycles (and blender in general)

Yes, that is my understanding too. In fact I believe a developer could already extend cycles or create cycles plugins when it was under GPL and ask for money for it, but they would also have to provide the source code. The new Apache license for cycles doesn't require that.

[Nizar]

Ton clarify:

Most of the successful libraries are under similar permissive licenses, and they didn’t disappear or get endangered either. In contrary, you can find many BSD/MIT/Apache projects out there with active contributions from commercial” users.

Abuse you would find first in circles of abusers and irrelevant projects. If a more serious company like Autdoesk/Maxon/Foundry would use Cycles, they’d for sure would consider to join our efforts. It’s in their interest.

Only when another party can whip up more energy and time and competence to take Cycles further entirely independently, contribution back might not happen. But in that case they probably won’t use it in a way that’s interesting for us to share either.

The most important thing is that we feel confident and strong enough to now handle this. It most likely will go all fine. If not, then we have another experience to learn from And then there’s nothing lost really.

[Maximus]

Nice news, altough i cant wait to see what stellar integration Autodesk will make out of it

[Hirazi Blue]

This is obviously the terrain of third-party developers,
as I don't see Autodesk touch this with the proverbial ten-foot pole.

And if such a third-party takes as little time as Chaos Group needed for its VRay integration,
we are in for a nice integration within the next couple of months (or even weeks).


This might be an interesting project do some crowdfunding on...

[SamHowell]

This might be an interesting project do some crowdfunding on...

I would pay gladly.

It would certainly make life easier than the .mdd and .chan combination I use at the moment.

[Mathaeus]

A bit off topic, but Blender people seems to be deeply in render business these days
Otoy just released a "real" Octane plugin for Blender. "Real" here means complete hard coded patch of Blender, able to provide the experience and performance, similar to what we usually expect from these plugins.
While there are dozens of render connections for Blender, including the one called "Blental" , all of them were created, using so called Blender Python Render API. Let's say, exporting more than 10k of particles or hairs, takes some minutes with them.

First 'real' rendering exporter for Blender is for V-Ray. There's rumor, that author of V-Ray exporter got steady job for Chaos group.

[BenR]

Just to emphasize the amount of work that translator plugins are, this is from the Softimage mailing list when V-Ray for SI was finally released:

From our point of view, 80% of the coding and support effort goes into
the translator plugins. Those years of development for V-Ray for
Softimage were spent on the translator alone, getting to terms with the
quirks of Softimage, implementing UIs, keeping pace with the changing
APIs, looking for work-arounds for bugs and so forth - in short
everything that is necessary to expose the V-Ray features to users who
don't have programming knowledge - and there is still much more to be
done. It also takes quite a bit of time and effort to train developers
for this task, as there is practically zero chance to find people who
already know the Softimage/Maya/3ds Max APIs (or the V-Ray SDK for that
matter) to the extent that we need. On the other hand, the effort spent
on the V-Ray core itself can be amortized across the various V-Ray
implementations - optimizing the core engine affects all the V-Ray
products. It is also relatively easy to work on the core as we have all
the code, whereas the translator plugins depend on things which are out
of our control. For this reason V-Ray render licenses are a lot cheaper
than a workstation license. And you can still share batch/standalone
rendering licenses between V-Ray for Maya and V-Ray for Softimage.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Lord Futzi Voldemort]

Just to emphasize the amount of work that translator plugins are, this is from the Softimage mailing list when V-Ray for SI was finally released:

From our point of view, 80% of the coding and support effort goes into
the translator plugins. Those years of development for V-Ray for
Softimage were spent on the translator alone, getting to terms with the
quirks of Softimage, implementing UIs, keeping pace with the changing
APIs, looking for work-arounds for bugs and so forth - in short
everything that is necessary to expose the V-Ray features to users who
don't have programming knowledge - and there is still much more to be
done. It also takes quite a bit of time and effort to train developers
for this task, as there is practically zero chance to find people who
already know the Softimage/Maya/3ds Max APIs (or the V-Ray SDK for that
matter) to the extent that we need. On the other hand, the effort spent
on the V-Ray core itself can be amortized across the various V-Ray
implementations - optimizing the core engine affects all the V-Ray
products. It is also relatively easy to work on the core as we have all
the code, whereas the translator plugins depend on things which are out
of our control. For this reason V-Ray render licenses are a lot cheaper
than a workstation license. And you can still share batch/standalone
rendering licenses between V-Ray for Maya and V-Ray for Softimage.

Best regards,
Vlado

I used vray blender even before vray for SI was in beta. It's pretty neat. And I can use all my maya and si licenses with it