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Sony Delivers Five FOSS Filmmaking Apps, Adding to Existing Ones

If you followed the recent box office success of the Pixar animated film called Up, you may have heard that it was the 10th giant, animated box office success in a row for Pixar . Animated films are big business, and part of the reason that they're doing better than ever is because of improved technology.

Not everyone realizes, though, that open source software plays a big, behind-the-scenes role in how animated films are created. Partly as an acknowledgement of that fact, Sony Pictures Imageworks, the visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, is launching an open source development program focused on software for use in creating films. To launch the program, the company has announced five new open source technologies for anyone to use, where they will join many other ones.

Sony Pictures Imageworks' initial five applications being released as open source are:

  * OSL, a programmable shading language for rendering
  * Field3d, a voxel data storage library
  * Maya Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking
  * Scala Migration, a database migration tool
  * Pystring, python-like string handling in C++

The company also confirms that it uses several other open source technologies when working on films, including Linux. You can find the web site for Sony Pictures Imageworks' open source initiative here.

Of course, the open source community itself has also contributed mightily to notable animated fims, and the advancement of technologies for creating them. We covered Big Buck Bunny here. The Blender Foundation initiated the Big Buck Bunny project, and it follows the 2007 released Elephant's Dream. Blender is open source software for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, interactive creation and playback. Big Buck Bunny was primarily created using Blender, as was Elephant's Dream. Sun Microsystems also contributed to the open source effort behind Big Buck Bunny. The company rendered the film using Network.com's Sun Grid compute utility service, and hosts it.

If you've never seen Big Buck Bunny or Elephant's Dream, have a look. With the exception of elite scriptwriting, they're virtually indistinguishable from the animated films coming from major studios.
 

• Blender
• Big Buck Bunny
• Animated Films Sony Pictures Imageworks

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