You have no doubt seen the latest press release
announcing the settlement between Exluna and Pixar as
well as a teaser about the acquisition of Exluna by
NVIDIA.
We wanted to explain to you the ramifications of these
two pieces of information for you. As an Entropy
customer, NVIDIA will continue to provide you with the
same level of service and support you have come to
expect. If you need more copies of the product to
complete your production, you can get them by
contacting [email protected]. The product roadmap has
been frozen, and we will not add new features to the
product, however, maintenance and support will
continue. You can get that through [email protected].
BMRT will no longer be distributed by Exluna or
NVIDIA. If you have further questions, please donāt
hesitate to contact us either by email or phone at
xxx-xxx-xxxx. We look forward to continuing to work
with you and thank you for your continued support."
Perhaps someone else will pick up distribution. or maybe it will go the route of Blender & become opensource?
It has sounded for some time like something like this was gonna happen. What is the advantage of BMRT over other renderman compliant renderers (e.g. 3Delight)?
But letās look on the bright side- thereās still:
Virtualight
Lightflow
Blenderās Renderer (god forbid)
Aqsis
PovRay
Poor Manās Renderer (<-- I am not to sure about this one)
Moonlight
ā¦
to name a few, so BMRT isnāt the end of the world-- but weāll miss 2.7 and aā. And BMRT2.6 is still pretty good.
Know whatās goig on? Nvidia is taking istās share of traditional non-realtime-rendering! There are some posts on various newsgroups the deal with realtime-raytracing made posiible by advanced pixel and vertex shaders such as offered by the GeForce4+ GPUsā¦
With Ope4nGl 2.0 rising at the horizon, what would be more logical than to eliminate free competitors in the field???
I know the story behind this, but correct me if Iām wrong. Pixar was sueing the Entropy/BMRT people for copyright infringement on some coding process behind the rendering engine that Pixar had patented. Nvidia was able to buy the source code from them because it settled the case. Yes, Nvidia is entering the rendering market. The only point Iām not clear on is how Nvidia is going to stop Pixar from sueing them (unless they donāt include the Pixar special features).
Until Larry decides to tell the whole story we may never know all the dirt. However, from his and other posts, the following is not tooo far off:
Pixar sued Exluna for Patent infringement
Pixar sued Exlunaās founders (LG etc) for misappropriation of trade secrets (ie using knowledge gained while at Pixar to write a competing renderer).
Nvidia buys Exluna to get the IP and personel (probably for use on their Cg project)
Lawsuit is settled and Entropy and BMRT are removed from market.
Number 2 seemed to be the kicker since they sued the individuals in addition to the company.
Having talked with several people from Exluna at SIGGRAPH, I think I can clear a bit of this up.
Firstly, Entropy will still be suported by NVIDIA in the sense of techā support, and it will be ādevelopedā further in the sense of bug-fixes. However, no new features will be added to Entropy.
Secondly, BMRT, as was said, will no longer be distributed by Exluna of NVIDIA. However, as with Blender, BMRT is still out there on peoples computers, and thus I would not be surprised if some mirrors started popping up soon (if they havenāt already).
I didnāt ask them about any of the legal stuff (i.e. the Pixar vs Exluna stuff), so I donāt know any more about that than the rest of you. But as far as Iām concerned, it is just another instance of something that has become common practice in the computing industry (in addition to some other industries as well). It has gotten so absurd that youād think that sueing is all that the computing industry is aboutā¦