SIGGRAPH 2014 Report

Lock if old. I couldn’t find a post for it.

This was an awesome read. My favorite portions:

Several studios are considering adopting Cycles
Blender is the first app to implement gpu opensubdiv (is this true? I know that Maya defintely has implemented Opensubdiv. Is it not GPU accelerated?)
The Blender devs were given a lengthy demo of Presto. (DEVS! TAKE THE BEST PARTS OF PRESTO AND PUT IT IN BLENDER!! OMG!) Sorry, fanboy moment. :slight_smile:

Oh, and I REALLY want to see that Opensubdiv demo they were showing at SIGGRAPH, too! Discuss!

wow,thanks for posting this,
it all sounds great, it would be a joy to see a more recent Opensubdiv video.

The OpenSubdiv claim does seem a bit odd, especially since it hasn’t actually been included in a Blender release yet. The demo videos for Maya 2015

and the help documents

http://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2015/ENU/?guid=GUID-909B2D5F-D031-4372-B2D7-7D8BCCBE3183

certainly seem to indicate that their implementation is GPU accelerated as well. I’m definitely not an OpenSubdiv expert though, so maybe someone with a little more insight can comment.

Still scanning the report but on the Maya / OpenSubdiv comments - this is from 5 months ago:

Maya now uses the Pixar open source OpenSubdiv libraries, making it possible to preview animations that
are subdivided right in the viewport thanks to OpenSubdiv’s GPU acceleration of subdivision surfaces.

I’m guessing that Ton was just unaware of this earlier release by Maya as opposed to stating something he knew to be false. It happens and I’m sure, if notified, he’ll amend that comment somewhat.

I totally disagree with this:

I found OpenFX very disappointing though… no open release should accept this level of crappy overlay watermarks.

Is better to have OpenFX plugins that nothing (Blender). Blender should start thinking in implementing some kind of plugins, not only for composition but also for rendering, VSE and so on… We need to bring commercial products in someway to Blender or else Blender is not going to take seriously in the future. Just check other software, Maya, 3dsMax, Houdini, Nuke… they all have several commercial plugins, in fact these apps without the plugins are not half as good as they are.

Cool, Ton mentioned Blend4Web :eyebrowlift: However he mentioned p3d.in too :frowning:

Edit: Ton didn’t know that it is open source https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/505311573670625281

I specifically asked the guys from Pixar if we could say this, and yes we are releasing it first. I cannot verify what Maya does though.

There is also 3ds Max - with its 2015 Extension. But then again it is a subscription thing (and maybe because of that not a release ?).

Note that I talk about full GPU support, not about CPU. I also thought Maya had GPU opensubdiv, but according to my contacts that wasn’t ready yet. It’s not so important? The fact we have it at least can be verified.

I think autodesk may be only using a simple (ugly) marketing strategy. Note that they do not say that THEIR implementation of opensubdiv is gpu accelerated, they say that OPENSUBDIV is gpu accelerated. Perhaps they are abusing the fact that they have inside their software a GPU ACCELERATED subdiv method, but that it also works on cpu and that’s the way its working, and they are just staying quiet about that part…
I’m only speculating though, but it could be possible.

Hey UFOa: you guys do great work, that’s why I mentioned it in the presentation. I just thought you had some of the webgl code still under a closed license, just like sketchfab and p3d.in have (had).
I’ll definitely look into this closer. I also didn’t check all Blender Conference submissions yet, did you apply too?

+1 . I would like to Up Vote your post… :slight_smile:

It’s true - it is not that important (who is first with gpu opensubdiv). But it got you to post here on BA again. That is important ! :smiley:

…and that opensubdiv is comming to Blender of course. :slight_smile:

I’ve tried OpenSubdiv on Maya 2015 and I thought the performance was nowhere near what I expected it to be, suggesting that the current Maya implementation does not support the GPU, so you may be right!

Thanks Ton, we are doing our best. Unfortunately we don’t participate Blender Conference this time but hope we will do in future!

BTW we are planning to join the Blender development and hired a programmer for full-time work. He just started to study the Blender code. We implemented a bunch of features that would be nice to have in Blender.

I noticed that OpenSubdiv does not seem to support the mac version just yet. I’ve heard that this is due to some issue concerning Mac OSX. Can anyone shed some light on what the problem is, and what it takes to fix it? No GPU accelerated OpenSubdiv in Blender on Mac OSX would be… oh man, the pain! :slight_smile: i hope a solution can be found.

(Again) not because it is really important. But here is a short presentation of opensubdiv for 3dsmax 2015 (Extension 1) :

It seems to say that it supports gpu. Anyway, I’m not a expert here. :o

I thought it was said before that OSX’s compiler does not allow 3.x/4.x OpenGL code to be mixed in with code for older OpenGL versions. If you need to blame anyone, that restriction would likely be Apple’s idea.

Also looking at how Ton is praising Krita and their efforts over the GIMP, the GIMP may actually become the newest resident of the FOSS graveyard soon if nothing is done about the current way the project is handled.

Krita is pretty much the most exciting open source development since blender IMHO. The mac version can’t come soon enough for me. I’m actually biting the bullet and making an attempt to come to grips with Linux in order to use krita (it runs best there, I’ve heard). What an amazing piece of software, and a great compliment to blender.

Incidently, I feel that krita has a golden opportunity to become entrenched into major studio pipelines due to the fact it fills a void that neither gimp or even Photoshop could fill: a terrific 32-bit image editor running natively in Linux. I wish the krita (and blender) devs all the success in the world! :slight_smile: