Welcome to Project Widow

Project Widow

Project Widow is a collaboration to produce a high quality short film showcasing the capabilities of Blender combined with the power of a RenderMan compliant renderer.

Blender

Blender has already proven itself many times as a capable modelling and animation package, not least of all through the various projects run by the Blender foundation. It has a comprehensive set of tools that often exceeds those found in commercial packages.

RenderMan

For many years RenderMan has been used as the renderer of choice in the vast majority of commercial productions. There are two main reasons why RenderMan has been so successful…

  1. It provides an unparalleled level of control to the user, rather than forcing an artist to conform to the ideas of the renderer developer, RenderMan simply opens up all the controls and allows an artist to do things the way they want, be that physically correct, or cheating completely, the final result is king.
  2. The primary implementation from Pixar is world renown for it's stability and reliability, it just gets the job done.

Challenge

The challenge is to bring these two together. Relatively recently new implementations of RenderMan have been popping up, both commercial (3Delight, AIR) and Open Source (Aqsis, Pixie). However, the sheer power provided has tended to put off the casual user. To attain the best results from RenderMan a user must have either some level of technical ability, or the support of someone with that ability. More recently a script for Blender has been developed to effectively bridge the gap between the two products, MOSAIC provides an extremely powerful, and yet usable, interface between Blender and RenderMan, allowing the artist to work comfortably within the Blender interface, while still exposing the high levels of control that RenderMan offers.

Now, with all the parts in place, is the time to put this combination to the test, hence Project Widow. We aim to put together a team of talented people covering both the artistic and technical aspects of 3D animation production, and show that the various components can all work together to result in a greater sum than their parts.

pgregory

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