Blue Moon Rendering Tools
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Blue Moon Rendering Tools | |
| Developer: | Exluna |
|---|---|
| Latest release: | 2.6 / November 2000 |
| OS: | IRIX, Linux, Microsoft Windows |
| Use: | 3D renderer |
| License: | Proprietary |
| Website: | |
Blue Moon Rendering Tools, or BMRT, was one of the most famous RenderMan-compliant photorealistic rendering systems and was a precursor to NVIDIA's Gelato renderer. It was distributed as freeware. BMRT was a popular renderer with students and other people who were trying to learn the RenderMan interface. It also had some features PhotoRealistic RenderMan did not have at time, for example, raytracing. Even Pixar used BMRT for raytracing before PRMan had such features. According to Exluna, it was used in for 3D rendering in movies such as A Bug's Life, Stuart Little, The Cell, Hollow Man, and Woman on Top.
BMRT was originally developed by Larry Gritz while he was at Cornell. He developed it during the early 1990s and first published it in 1994, and was subsequently hired by Pixar to work on their PhotoRealistic RenderMan product.
The last version of the renderer under BMRT name was 2.6, released in November 2000. First version of Entropy, BMRT's successor, was 3.0, released in July 2001.
In 2000, Gritz left Pixar to form a company called Exluna, whose flagship product was Entropy, a RenderMan renderer based on BMRT with additional features and optimizations. NVIDIA acquired Exluna and Entropy in early 2002. Amid the acquisition, Pixar sued Gritz and Exluna (now NVIDIA) for a variety of patent, trade secret, and copyright issues that were flatly denied by Exluna. The case eventually settled, leading to the discontinuation of BMRT and Entropy. Gritz and other Exluna employees stayed at NVIDIA to develop the Gelato renderer.
Pixie is an open source RenderMan compliant renderer for generating photorealistic images, developed by Okan Arikan in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas At Austin. Like BMRT, Pixie is popular with students learning the Renderman Interface, and is a suitable replacement for BMRT. Contributions to Pixie are facilitated by SorceForge and the internet. Pixie can be downloaded free of charge as source code or precompiled. You can compile Pixie on Windows (using Visual Studio 2005), Linux and on OSX (using XCode or unix style configure script).
Pixie is an open source project licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
[edit] External links
- The Demise of BMRT & entropy, from the RenderMan Repository
- BMRT website, archived version through The Internet Archive
