BMRT News

Late-breaking News

• 21 Sep 2000 - This weekend is the opening of Woman on Top. Is it a coincidence that the movie billed as "the sexiest comedy of the year" had some effects by Hammerhead Productions rendered with BMRT?

• 18 Sep 2000 - BMRT in The Cell - Another interview at VFXPro of Richard "Doc" Bailey of Image Savant plugs BMRT and describes its use to generate imagery for the "Novak's Ride" sequence.

• 16 Aug 2000 - BMRT in Hollow Man - I hope you've all seen Hollow Man. Was it the #1 film at the US box office for two weeks because of the witty dialogue, or because Tippet Studio used BMRT (as a "rayserver" for PRMan) for the scenes of the invisible dude underwater? You be the judge. There's an article at VFX Pro mentioning BMRT and Hollow Man.

Old News Reports

• 31 July 2000 - RenderMan Interface Specification 3.2 Released - as announced at SIGGRAPH, the long-awaited and updated RI 3.2 spec is now on the Pixar web site. The spec can be found in both PDF and PS formats at the Pixar product documentation page. The new spec has quite a bit of new material. BMRT 2.5 is compliant with most of it, but not all. The next major BMRT release will bring it into full compliance with the new spec.

• 31 July 2000 - as revealed at SIGGRAPH, I (Larry Gritz) am no longer with Pixar. I'd been there since early 1995, most recently as head of rendering research and chief architect of the RenderMan Interface Specification. Now I am one of the co-founders of Exluna, a graphics software start-up. We are not yet ready to announce the specific products.

• 28 Jun 2000 - There are several events at SIGGRAPH 2000 in New Orleans that folks interested in RenderMan should be aware of:
  • Course: "Advanced RenderMan 2: RI_INFINITY and Beyond", all day Tuesday. Speakers include Larry Gritz, Tony Apodaca, Tal Lancaster, Mitch Prater, and Rob Bredow.
  • User Group: the RenderMan User's Group meeting will be held Wednesday, 6:30-8:30 at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside. The meeting features the 2nd Annual Stupid RenderMan Tricks (deadline for submission entry: July 7!). RSVP required -- send mail to renderwoman@pixar.com.
  • Panel: Larry Gritz speaks on the How Free is Free Software? panel, Thursday 8:30-10:15am.
  • Book signing: drop by the Morgan Kaufmann booth at (tentatively) 1pm on Thursday for author signings of the Advanced RenderMan book.
  • Papers: two papers are presented by prominant PRMan authors Maneesh Agrawala, Tom Lokovic, and Eric Veach, Friday 8:30-10:15.

• 23 Jun 2000 - BMRT 2.5.0.8 is released! See the BMRT Download section for details.

• 24 Apr 2000 - BMRT 2.5.0.7 is released!

• 14 Apr 2000 - BMRT 2.5.0.6 is released! This fixes several bugs found in BMRT 2.5.0.3. (Don't ask why I skipped to this release number; it's too long a story.)

• 27 Mar 2000 - BMRT 2.5.0.3 is released.

• 15 Mar 2000 - BMRT 2.5.0.2 is released.

• 7 Mar 2000 - BMRT 2.5.0.1 is released. This fixes a serious bug that was found in BMRT 2.5.0.0.

• 1 Mar 2000 - BMRT 2.5.0.0 is released.
  

• 24 Nov 99 - BMRT 2.5 beta is released.
  

• 11 Nov 99 - BMRT 2.4h is released.

• 13 Sep 99 - BMRT 2.4g is released.

• 4 Aug 99 - BMRT 2.4f is released.

• 26 Jun 99 - A RenderMan User's Group meeting is scheduled for SIGGRAPH '99.

• 14 Jun 99 - BMRT Images in Computer Graphics World. I know, it's not exactly news, but I forgot to mention before that BMRT-rendered scientific visualization images were shown (and the renderer nicely plugged) in both the April '99 "Insight" column (last page), as well as the May '99 "Tech Watch" column (pp. 15-16). Thanks much to David Bock of NCSA. The articles are really about his Visualization Shading Project.

• 7 Jun 99 - BMRT 2.4d now has a RedHat 6 build. Apparently some people were having trouble with the regular Linux build after upgrading to RH6.

• 1 Jun 99 - BMRT 2.4d is released.

• 14 Apr 99 - BMRT 2.4c is released.

• BMRT Won Animation Magazine's "1998 Golden Pixie Award" (Peter Plantec's Annual Totally Biased 3D Animation Awards) under the category of "Special Awards". My favorite quote is: "I'm not sure why Pixar allows Larry to do this but they apparently do."