Cycles being ported to Cinema4D

There is news that Cycles is being ported to Cinema4D, it wil be called Cycles4D!

Are a bit 'jealous I do not like that everyone wants to use cycles especially the software that do not consider Blender. And above all paid software, and that nothing in the way of sharing 'open source.
But surely I have a limited vision, so I don’t expect to be in the right.

According to a couple of posts in there, for some this might be their ‘gateway’ into moving more of their pipeline to Blender (not to mention that Cycles is literally the only Blender tech. that can stand as its own product due to its design and the Apache 2 license).

yay…

Hopefully people will stop being so ignorant towards cycles now.

before poser… now c4d then… the WORLD!

And Rhino6 :slight_smile:

Don’t forget Rhino :slight_smile:

But yes, it’s cool to see other 3D software adopt Cycles. I would like to see that pave the way for a “universal” Cycles material file that you can export from one package to another.

Oh, would be nice if materials could have own file format to be transported over. On second thought, they all should throw in support (i/o) for blender file format.

Don’t forget CyclesForMax.

MaterialX and USD are coming

Are they required to acknowledge Blender as the creators and on-going developers of Cycles, or can Cinema4D pretend like this is something they’ve created? Will they be able to promote it in their marketing under their name? If so, that would seem to be pretty weak licensing. At least charge a fee. It won’t do Blender as much good as it could if there’s no acknowledgment. I must be missing some key info on the matter.

Are they required to acknowledge Blender as the creators and on-going developers of Cycles, or can Cinema4D pretend like this is something they’ve created?

depends on what they do

if they ARE using the code then yes

but the CONCEPT for them is old , very old

I’m not sure if I understand you, just in case here’s Cycles permissive license:

With the Apache license, it seems to me you could do almost, all thing, no major obligations, even the sale of the engine, making a few changes. bad license this.

Yes, the Apache license is very permissive, and people can indeed do almost anything with it. We made that change a few years ago for a good reason. :wink: See https://code.blender.org/2013/08/cycles-render-engine-released-with-permissive-license/

I am pretty sure that without the relicense, Cycles wouldn’t be the same engine today. Likely we wouldn’t have gotten so many contributions from new / external developers. On top of that most other OSS render engines use permissive licenses too (Lux, Appleseed…).

I am very happy to see Cycles in other applications. Rhino, Poser and now even Max and Cinema 4D. That’s very encouraging to see!

That’s good to hear from a Cycles developer. One of my concerns was to know what would be the feeling of a developer seeing companies making money with their work, and knowing that these companies will not even be obligated to share anything.

My naive thoughts - I wish it could merge with Lux and also ported to Houdini :frowning:

And on top of that, the Luxrender developers decided to take the opportunity to ditch the GPL for good when they wrote the new Luxcore engine.

As of now, having a strong copyleft is nearly unheard of for opensource rendering (save for Mitsuba). Having that copyleft means they can’t ever become tightly integrated with commercial software (also a major reason for the re-licensing of Lux).

My hope with all these new developers is that we’ll see some work done on Cycles itself, and that the new code will be ported back to Blender Cycles eventually, the more developers, the merrier!

I think I read somewhere that Smith Micro agreed to share some of the work they’ve done on their port of Blender for Poser, no idea if that came through though!

As nice as it is to see these things adopted I do kind of regret BF cant charge some for-use-fee.
We don’t want commercial companies to take advantage of our meagre resources without contributing something somewhere. How about Ton sends them a congratulation email with a suggestion to sponsor further development, make a decent donation or such?

If a company improves their version of Cycles, they are very likely interested to have those changes in the official Cycles version as well. The more the versions diverge, the harder it becomes for those companies to use the updates from the official version. This can be a very challenging task after a very short amount of time.
Especially companies with a long term goal in using Cycles will have an interest to see at least some of their changes in the official Cycles version.

The developers consciously picked this license to allow commercial usage. Whether those companies give something back is their choice. If they extend or modify Cycles, I believe it is very likely that they want at least some of those changes in the official version as well.

I don’t see why they should be contacted by Ton at all. By that logic, Ton should congratulate every company that is using Blender as well and every individual who makes money by using Blender.