Any volunteers to revive RamenHDR?

Hello everybody,

Can we have a couple of interested developers to revive the Ramen Compositor project anew?

I’m a web developer, and I’d say I’ve lost all my C/C++ skills over the years, but I’m willing to give it a shot once again. I had emailed the original author about a year ago, and we spoke a little bit about the project, and he doesn’t mind to revive it; however, he requested a name change and to not use Ramen.

I’m using Ubuntu Linux, so if we can get a willing developer or even a couple we can start with understanding the code and writing the documentation that will get us a better idea of what we’re dealing with, then we can start with re-writing some parts of the software and get rid of the long list of dependencies, we can make them dynamic modules or plugins that can be hooked at any given moment, and from there we can kick the development.

I’ve started playing with the code a couple of days ago, and it looks really robust, and got everything compiling under Ubuntu 14.10, but it fails on the Linking level, and that’s due to Libagg.a, which the Linker tries to link it Dynamically, and I’ve emailed Esteban about it, and I’m yet to receive anything from him.

I hope I can find at least someone interested to help with bringing Ramen back to the scene.

Any ideas?

PS:

  • No, Blender has better developers than us/me, and I can contribute nothing to it as I lack the skills, and it has advanced too much that it takes a life time to get an idea about its code and how it works.

  • Yes, I have very little knowledge about VFX programming, but I’m willing to learn, and I’ve been learning new stuffs all the time in my work, and it should be the same for the new interest.

  • There is so far nothing like Ramen in the FOSS community, and Blender has its own field, and they can be made to compliment each other like the Foundry’s NukeX and Mari!?

  • Yes, I’d work with anyone willing to learn, even if he has no idea about what to do as well, we can learn together.

  • Yes, I know, it’s too much optimistic, but rather I’d try and fail than not even trying to succeed then regretting that.

I think all the hype moved to Natron: http://natron.inria.fr/

I agree with J_the_Ninja, Natron is taking the spotlight as far as open source compositing goes.

However, because you are very excited about coding on a compositing program, please keep in mind that Natron only has 2 guys working on it, and they would absolutely love to have some coding help. You should check in with them and help them out!

I’m lost checking the project, and I’m not pretty sure, if this is the same project made by some French students as a final graduation project? I’ve seen a video of something like this a little while ago, and I just couldn’t remember exactly, but back then it was still very new, however, this looks very mature, and the code is complete to an extent, let alone the UI feels like you’re inside Nuke.

Any ideas if they used Ramen as a basis or they started fresh? I couldn’t locate any Ramen based code, but the structure looks very similar!

Totally worth checking if I can get a hold of what they’re doing :slight_smile:

No, they did not use Ramen, they started fresh. Yep, it’s the same project made by the French students, unless you mean this other compositing program, Buttle https://buttleofx.wordpress.com/

Natron is very quickly becoming mature, and has a lot of interest. At Siggraph this year, Alex (the creator of Natron) discussed the program with department heads from many major visual effects studios, and they were all interested in it and contributing suggestions.

There used to be many FOSS compositing projects happening, even before Ramen, but they have all failed. Natron is going strong. There’s also a facebook group worth joining if you’re interested. https://www.facebook.com/groups/NatronNation/
It’s a good place to get quick feedback and answers about stuff.

Dude! You’ve nailed it! Yes, the Project I’ve checked earlier was ButtleOFX, I recognized the faces from the video.

Yeah, Natron is really powerful, I’ve been playing with it alongside my GenArts OFX plugins, and man!

The Keying is not that perfect, and Blender does it way better, so may be some functionalities should be borrowed from Blender as they are.

It’s a good project to use as a new hobby, to learn new concepts, and get hold of how a VFX pipeline should work.

I’m studying the code, but their Wiki isn’t that newbies friendly, although I understand it’s the newbies’ problem to analyze the code more deeply, but just saying.

I’m so grateful I’ve posted here, and even more grateful for your responses, that have opened a whole new world for me. I don’t know how did Natron escaped my Radar!