This is a C++ library that allows caching files in remote (network) locations onto the local client to speed up future accesses to these files. This reduces network traffic, but also, more importantly disk access, on the server. Modern network infrastructures are rarely the problem, but a server’s disks often don’t cope well when hundreds of clients read large files, often repeatedly, by querying small pieces of data, all at the same time.

It comes with a SWIG interface to be easily accessible through scripting languages (e.g Python) without the need to use a C++ compiler.

As a example use-case we provide an RSL shadeop implementation, modeled after the automatic network cache in DNA research’s 3Delight. It allows caching files like textures, point clouds or other heavy data, on a render farm client, automatically, by simply specifying the cache location with an environment variable, or in the RIB (with an option). In your shaders you can use the cacheFile() shadeop. It should work with any renderer that has an RSL shadeop API but was tested & used in production with Pixar’s PhotoRealistic RenderMan.

Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/jupiterfilecache
Language: C++ Python
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: Creative Commons 3.0 BY-SA

Features of the rmanPtc SOP include:

• Independent control for limiting the number of points loaded and displayed.
• Geometry output for all point attributes in the cloud.
• OpenGL display preview for attributes as point or disk primitives.
• Ability to cull points based on a reference bounding box.

Home Page: http://danbethell.github.com/rmanptcsop/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: New BSD License

This code is a reference implementation of our paper Wavelet Turbulence for Fluid Simulation. The code is intended as a pedagogical example, so clarity has been given preference over performance. Optimizations that inhibit readability have been removed, so the running times experienced will be longer than those reported in the paper.

Home Page: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~tedkim/WTURB
Project Page: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~tedkim/WTURB/source.html
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: GNU Public License
Sponsor: Cornell University

All programs in the package exchange image data using unix pipes and a simple generic HDR image format – pfs. pfs in not just another format for storing HDR images (and there are already quite a few of them), but is rather an attempt to integrate the existing HDR image formats by providing a simple interface for exchanging data between applications.

pfstools is a base set of tools and more advanced functionality can be found in related packages, such as pfstmo (tone-mapping) or pfscalibration (recovery of camera response curve and merging multi-exposure LDR image). If you are not comfortable with a command line interface or you want to save yourself compilation problems, you may want to check Qtpfsgui, which packages some functionality of pfstmo and pfscalibration in a nice GUI interface.

Home Page: http://pfstools.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pfstools/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: GNU Library or Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

Like other GUI front-ends, hugin provides an easy-to-use unified point-and-click interface to a whole range of other command-line tools including:

• autopano-sift, autopano-sift-C, panomatic or autopano for automatic creation of control points.
• nona for remapping input images and rendering output images.
• enblend and enfuse for seamless blending of output images.

The Hugin project’s mission is not only to provide a powerful GUI, but also to provide opensource replacements for the small number of closed source components of Panorama tools, especially PTStitcher. A PTStitcher replacement, called nona has been developed, supporting its most important features.

Among the many flexible Hugin workflow options, it is possible to correct exposure, Vignetting and White balance between photos; generate HDR or exposure blended output from bracketed photos; or use 16bit and HDR input data natively.

Home Page: http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hugin/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

• creation of DCP from source files
• support for multi-reel DCPs with several audio and subtitle tracks
• development of an intuitive, multi-lingual user interface

Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/opencinematools/
Language: C++
Platform: Windows, Linux
License: New BSD License

• No UV assignment is required! Ptex applies a separate texture to each face of a subdivision or polygon mesh.
• The Ptex file format can efficiently store hundreds of thousands of texture images in a single file.
• The Ptex API provides cached file I/O and high-quality filtering – everything that is needed to easily add Ptex support to a production-quality renderer or texture authoring application.

Home Page: http://ptex.us/
Project Page: http://github.com/wdas/ptex/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, OS X, Windows
License: New BSD
Sponsor: Walt Disney Animation Studios

Home Page: http://kickstand.tv/openpipeline/openpipeline-information/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/openpipeline
Language: MEL
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: Common Public License 1.0

Earth is initially focused on managing the explosion of data that occurs in digital visual effects work.

Project Page: http://open.rsp.com.au/projects/earth
Language: Ruby
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, etc
License: The GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2
Sponsor: Rising Sun Pictures

The generic service DrQueue provides allows the distribution, monitoring and management of tasks across a network of computing nodes. A queue of jobs composing of a number of tasks are spread over the computing nodes and processed in parallel.

DrQueue started as an application to provide distributed render queueing and management services for rendering animations.
The generic service DrQueue provides allows the distribution, monitoring and management of tasks across a network of computing nodes. A queue of jobs composing of a number of tasks are spread over the computing nodes and processed in parallel.

Supported Renderers and Batch Processors

So far DrQueue supports 3Delight, 3DSMax, After Effects, Aqsis, Blender, BMRT, Cinema 4D, Lightwave, Luxrender, Mantra, Maya, Mental Ray, Nuke, Pixie, Shake, Terragen, Turtle, V-Ray and XSI.

Python bindings

Ruby bindings

Home Page: http://www.drqueue.org
Project Page: https://ssl.drqueue.org/project
Language: c++
Platform: Linux, Mac OSX, Irix, FreeBSD and Windows
License: GNU GPL Version 3

• Support for 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color channels of deep paint.
• High fidelity image file types such as DPX, OpenEXR and 16-bit TIFF.
• High Dynamic Range.
• Onion-skinning.
• Flipbook. Movie playback of short sequences of images in RAM.
• Color Management System. CinePaint uses LittleCMS.
• Gallery-quality printing. B&W photographs have only one color channel and degrade quickly when manipulated as 8-bit images. CinePaint has higher fidelity and offers a 16-bit printing path to the print-head using GutenPrint.

Home Page: http://www.cinepaint.org/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cinepaint/
Language: C
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, BSD
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Processing is also used in VFX read more

Home Page: http://processing.org/
Project Page: http://dev.processing.org/
Language: processing, java
Platform: Linux, OSX, Windows
License: GPL, LGPL

The Aqsis tools provide a comprehensive list of features that are considered necessary for production use, the following list details some of the important high level capabilities.

• Programmable Shading
• High Level Primitive Support
• Sub-Pixel Displacement
• Motion Blur (MB)
• Depth of Field (DoF)
• Shadow Mapped Ambient Occlusion
• Arbitrary Output Variables (AOV)
• Subdivision Surfaces (SDS)
• High quality texture mapping
• Level of Detail (LOD)
• High Dynamic Range (HDR) Output
• Extensible through plugins (DSO/Procedurals)

Home Page: http://www.aqsis.org/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/aqsis/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)

Tracksperanto allows you to track once in a program of your choice and then export the resulting features to all suppoorted 3D solving apps. Once there, it’s a 15 minute job to configure the camera and see if the solve comes out well or not. This method tends to yield very good results since you track at least one of the many 3D solvers on the market will give a correct computation.

Tracksperanto assists in translating 2D tracks between many formats so that you can move your 2D tracks from one application into all of the others, and the translation is multidirectional – most of the formats are supported both for reading and writing.

Format support

The following formats are supported, both for reading and writing:

• Nuke scripts
• Shake tracker export (many trackers in one file), also supported by 2d3d Boujou
• SynthEyes tracker export
• PFTrack .2dt tracker (both for PFTrack 4 and 5)
• MatchMover Pro .rz2 files
• 3DEqualizer V4 and V3 curve exports
• MayaLive exports

The following formats are supported for reading only

• Flame/Smoke .stabilizer file (also exported by Combustion)
• Shake script file

For all formats that record the tracker correlation (how sure the algorithm was about the precision of this particular keyframe) the correlation data gets translated as well

Intermediate processing

Tracksperanto can assist in transforming the tracks in various ways, namely

• Slip all the tracked keyframes a number of frames forwards or backwards
• Scale your tracks proportionally or non proportionally, or to a specific pixel size (track on proxies, apply to 2K! – or the other way around)
• Prefix tracker names
• and some more…

Home Page: http://guerilla-di.org/tracksperanto/
Project Page: http://github.com/guerilla-di/tracksperanto
Language: pure ruby (no compilation required)
Platform: Windows, OSX, Linux
License: MIT

Project Goals

Home Page: http://code.google.com/p/pymel/
Language: python
Platform: windows, osx, linux
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Luma Pictures

Home Page: http://danbethell.github.com/rmanconnect/
Project Page: http://github.com/danbethell/rmanconnect
License: New BSD

Aimed world-wide at media professionals and artists, Blender can be used to create 3D visualizations, stills as well as broadcast and cinema quality videos, while the incorporation of a real-time 3D engine allows for the creation of 3D interactive content for stand-alone playback.

Originally developed by the company ‘Not a Number’ (NaN), Blender now is continued as ‘Free Software’, with the source code available under the GNU GPL license. It now continues development by the Blender Foundation in the Netherlands.

Key Features include:

• Fully integrated creation suite, offering a broad range of essential tools for the creation of 3D content, including modeling, uv-mapping, texturing, rigging, skinning, animation, particle and other simulation, scripting, rendering, compositing, post-production, and game creation
• High quality 3D architecture enabling fast and efficient creation work-flow
• User community support by forums for questions, answers, and critique at http://BlenderArtists.org and news services at http://BlenderNation.com
• Small executable size, easy distribution

Home Page: http://www.blender.org/
Project Page: http://www.blender.org/development/
Language: C, Python
Platform: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD 5.4 (i386), Sun Solaris 2.8 (sparc)
License: GNU GPL

GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions.

Key features include:

• Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
• Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
• Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
• Supports custom brushes and patterns
• Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
• Layers and channels
• Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
• Editable text layers
• File formats supported include bmp, gif, jpeg, mng, pcx, pdf, png, ps, psd, svg, tiff, tga, xpm, and many others
• SVG path import/export

Home Page: http://www.gimp.org/
Project Page: http://developer.gimp.org/
Language: C
Platform: Windows, Linux, OSX
License: GPL

Imagemagick provides a rich feature set including:

• Format conversion: convert an image from one format to another (e.g. PNG to JPEG).
• Transform: resize, rotate, crop, flip or trim an image.
• Transparency: render portions of an image invisible.
• Draw: add shapes or text to an image.
• Decorate: add a border or frame to an image.
• Special effects: blur, sharpen, threshold, or tint an image.
• Animation: create a GIF animation sequence from a group of images.
• Text & comments: insert descriptive or artistic text in an image.
• Image identification: describe the format and properties of an image.
• Composite: overlap one image over another.
• Montage: juxtapose image thumbnails on an image canvas.
• Motion picture support: read and write the common image formats used in digital film work.
• Image calculator: apply a mathematical expression to an image or image channels.
• Discrete Fourier transform: implements the forward and inverse DFT.
• High dynamic-range images: accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from the brightest direct sunlight to the deepest darkest shadows.
• Encipher or decipher an image: convert ordinary images into unintelligible gibberish and back again.
• Virtual pixel support: convenient access to pixels outside the image region.
• Large image support: read, process, or write mega-, giga-, or tera-pixel image sizes.
• Threads of execution support: ImageMagick is thread safe and most internal algorithms are OpenMP-enabled to take advantage of speed-ups offered by the dual and quad-core processor technologies.
• Heterogeneous distributed processing: certain algorithms are OpenCL-enabled to take advantage of speed-ups offered by executing in concert across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, and other processors.

Home Page: http://www.imagemagick.org/
Language: C with API's provided for C++ and Perl
Platform: Windows, Linux, OSX
License: Custom open source license that requires attribution. Free for commercial use. GPL compatible.

Home Page: http://pyode.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyode/
Language: C++
Platform: Windows, Linux, OSX
License: GNU Lesser General Public License or BSD-style license.

Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/houdini-ocean-toolkit/
Language: C++, VEX
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: GNU General Public License v2

In the nearest neighbor problem a set of data points in d-dimensional space is given. These points are preprocessed into a data structure, so that given any query point q, the nearest or generally k nearest points of P to q can be reported efficiently. The distance between two points can be defined in many ways. ANN assumes that distances are measured using any class of distance functions called Minkowski metrics. These include the well known Euclidean distance, Manhattan distance, and max distance.

Based on our own experience, ANN performs quite efficiently for point sets ranging in size from thousands to hundreds of thousands, and in dimensions as high as 20.
(For applications in significantly higher dimensions, the results are rather spotty, but you might try it anyway.)

The library implements a number of different data structures, based on kd-trees and box-decomposition trees, and employs a couple of different search strategies.

The library also comes with test programs for measuring the quality of performance of ANN on any particular data sets, as well as programs for visualizing the structure of the geometric data structures.

Project Page: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~mount/ANN/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: LGPL

The code is written entirely in C with an object-oriented approach based mostly on the design of GTK+. Careful attention is paid to performance related issues as the initial goal of GTS is to provide a simple and efficient library to scientists dealing with 3D computational surface meshes.

A brief summary of its main features:

• Simple object-oriented structure giving easy access to topological properties.
• 2D dynamic Delaunay and constrained Delaunay triangulations.
• Robust geometric predicates (orientation, in circle) using fast adaptive floating point arithmetic (adapted from the fine work of Jonathan R. Shewchuk).
• Robust set operations on surfaces (union, intersection, difference).
• Surface refinement and coarsening (multiresolution models).
• Dynamic view-independent continuous level-of-detail.
• Preliminary support for view-dependent level-of-detail.
• Bounding-boxes trees and Kd-trees for efficient point location and collision/intersection detection.
• Graph operations: traversal, graph partitioning.
• Metric operations (area, volume, curvature …).
• Triangle strips generation for fast rendering.

Home Page: http://gts.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gts/
Language: C
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: LGPL

• Policy based allocation of distributed resources (CPU time, software licenses, etc.)
• Batch queuing & scheduling
• Support diverse server hardware, OS and architectures
• Load balancing & remote job execution
• Detailed job accounting statistics
• Fine-grained user specifiable resources
• Suspend/resume/migrate jobs
• Tools for reporting Job/Host/Cluster status
• Job Arrays
• Integration & control of parallel jobs
• Python bindings

Home Page: http://gridengine.sunsource.net/
Language: C++, Python
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, Solaris
License: SISSL

Main features include:

• Extremely simple but powerful ImageInput and ImageOutput APIs for reading and writing 2D images that are format agnostic — that is, a “client app” doesn’t need to know the details about any particular image file formats. Specific formats are implemented by DLL/DSO plugins.
• Format plugins for TIFF, JPEG/JFIF, OpenEXR, PNG, HDR/RGBE, Targa, JPEG-2000, FITS, BMP, and ICO formats. More coming! The plugins are really good at understanding all the strange corners of the image formats, and are very careful about preserving image metadata (including Exif, GPS, and IPTC data).
• An ImageCache class that transparently manages a cache so that it can access truly vast amounts of image data (thousands of image files totaling hundreds of GB) very efficiently using only a tiny amount (tens of megabytes at most) of runtime memory. Additionally, a TextureSystem class provides filtered MIP-map texture lookups, atop the nice caching behavior of ImageCache.
• Several image tools based on these classes, including iinfo (print detailed info about images including metadata), iconvert (convert among formats, data types, or modify metadata), idiff (compare images with statistics), igrep (search images for matching metadata), iv (an image viewer). Because these tools are based on ImageInput/ImageOutput, they work with any image formats for which ImageIO plugins are available.

Home Page: http://www.openimageio.org
Project Page: http://www.openimageio.org
Language: C++ (Python bindings under development)
Platform: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
License: New BSD

• Multi-Platform
• Playback both image sequences and movie files
• Support for industry standard file formats including Cineon, DPX, OpenEXR, and QuickTime
• Includes command line utilities for batch image processing

Home Page: http://djv.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/djv/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, Solaris
License: BSD

• Used by many game companies in AAA titles on Playstation 3, XBox 360, Nintendo Wii, PC and iPhone
• Modular extendible C++ design with hot-swap of most components
• Optimized back-ends for pthreads/Win32 Threads multi-threading and PS3 Cell SPU
• Preparation for OpenCL data parallel optimizations for upcoming Bullet 3.x
• Discrete and continuous collision detection (CCD)
• Swept collision queries
• Ray casting with custom collision filtering
• Generic convex support (using GJK), capsule, cylinder, cone, sphere, box and non-convex triangle meshes.

• Rigid body dynamics including constraint solvers, generic constraints, ragdolls, hinge, ball-socket
• Support for constraint limits and motors
• Soft body support including cloth, rope and deformable
• Bullet is integrated into Cinema 4D, Lightwave and Blender, and a Houdini and Maya Plugin is available
• Supports import and export into COLLADA 1.4 Physics format
• Support for dynamic deformation of non-convex triangle meshes, by refitting the acceleration structures

Home Page: http://bulletphysics.org/
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/bullet/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: ZLib License, free for commercial use.

Home Page: http://www.cgal.org/
Project Page: http://www.cgal.org/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
License: LGPL or QPL (if used for open source projects, or proprietary projects that are internal to the studio), or a commercial license (if distributed in a commercial product).

Home Page: http://www.ode.org/
Project Page: http://www.ode.org/
Language: C/C++ (the public APIs are all C)
Platform: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
License: New BSD or LGPL (your choice)

Home Page: http://opensource.imageworks.com
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/pystring/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, etc
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Sony Imageworks

The value of predefined parameters can be displayed in selectable areas, such as the camera focal length and name, current aspect ratio; frame number, name of the show and shot, Maya scene file name, current user name, etc. Finally, arbitrary textural information can be displayed as well.

Home Page: http://opensource.imageworks.com/?p=mayareticle
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/imageworks-maya-reticle/
Language: C++, MEL
Platform: Windows, Linux, OSX
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Sony Imageworks

The package is based off Ruby on Rails Migrations and in fact shares the exact same schema_migrations table to manage the list of installed migrations. The Scala Migrations library is written in Scala and makes use of the clean Scala language to write easy to understand migrations, which are also written in Scala. Scala Migrations provides a database abstraction layer that allows migrations to target any supported database vendor.

Home Page: http://opensource.imageworks.com
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/scala-migrations/
Language: Scala
Platform: All
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Sony Imageworks

Features :

• Object instancing / delayed primitives
• Displacements
• Programmable shading (using RenderMan Shading Language)
• High quality texture/shadow/environment mapping
• High dynamic range input/output
• Scalable, multi-resolution raytracing using ray
  • Pixie now has a new raytracing engine that automatically tesselates surfaces on the fly to a desired accuracy determined using the ray differentials. This means rays tracing blurry reflections or computing global illumination are faster to trace and sharp reflections and shadows are more accurate. Pixie also contains a memory manager that keeps the memory that is used to keep these tesselations around under control. Similar to texture caching, Pixie will maintain a set of active surfaces and only those surfaces will consume raytracing memory.
• Motion blur
• Depth of field
• Level of detail (LOD)
• Reyes style rendering (very fast)
• Occlusion culling
• Network parallel rendering
• DSO shaders
• Global illumination
  • Pixie supports global illumination thru photon mapping and irradiance caching — The same machinery described in the latest RenderMan interface.
• Automatically raytraced smooth reflections / shadows
• Caching/baking computation with LOD (bake3d / texture3d)
  • Using this functionality, you can save any value you compute in a shader to a file that you can later re-use. This allows you to perform expensive shading computations at a lower resolution and re-use these computations in the beauty passes. This functionality will also enable exporting shading data from Pixie into your own applications.
• Scalable, multi-threaded rendering
  • Pixie rendering core has been first completely reorganized/optimized and then multi-threaded. We are very proud of this change. You will see significant speed improvements over the Pixie v1.
• Arbirtaty output values
  • Pixie can save arbitrary variables (built in ones such as N, P as well as arbitrary, user defined variables) just like rgb values into images. Using this machinery, you can generate multiple outputs from a single pass and combine them as a post process.
• 64 bit compatibility
• Inline archives
• Conditional execution
• Named resources

Home Page: http://www.renderpixie.com/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pixie/
Language: C, C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, all POSIX OSes
License: LGPL

Currently, the entire kit consists of the following parts:

• The Python package cgkit that extends Python with 3D-related functionality.
• The Maya plugin sourcepy that integrates the Python interpreter into Maya, and the accompanying Python package maya that makes Maya functionality available in Python.
• A collection of small stand-alone utilities written in Python, MEL or MaxScript.

cgkit features:

• New 3D data types such as vec3, vec4, mat3, mat4 and quat
• Contains a Python binding of Pixar’s RenderMan API
• Provides access to specialized input hardware such as SpaceMouse/SpaceBall, data glove or tablet via wrappers around the 3DxWare 3Dconnexion, the Wintab Developer Kit by LCS/Telegraphics and the Data Glove SDK by Fifth Dimension Technologies.
• Additional 3D utility functions such as various noises or the functions found in the RenderMan Shading Language
• Parse RenderMan shader source files to extract shader parameters
• 3D data can be stored and manipulated in memory
• Imports 3DS, VRML, X3D, OBJ, OFF, IFS, STL, PLY, MA, ASF/AMC, BVH (using the following libraries: lib3ds, CyberX3D, RPly)
• Exports RIB (shaders are generated on-the-fly), OBJ, OFF, PLY
• Turns Python into a scene description language which can define scenes that can then be rendered with RenderMan or OpenGL.
• Interactive OpenGL viewer tool
• OpenGL stereo output (vertical split or quad buffer)
• Offline render tool that feeds a RenderMan renderer, can also be used to bake texture maps
• Connect arbitrary attributes of the same type to create animations
• Rigid body dynamics via the Open Dynamics Engine
• Extensible via regular modules or plugins

Python/Maya features:

• Integrates the Python interpreter into Maya by providing two new MEL commands py and pySource that can execute Python source code.
• Provides dynamic Python wrappers around all MEL commands found in Maya.
• Provides new convenience classes for creating GUIs
• Exposes the Maya C++ SDK to Python
• Allows writing plug-ins in Python

Home Page: http://cgkit.sourceforge.net/
Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/cgkit/
Language: C++, Python
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: GPL, LGPL, MPL1.1

pyshake is being developed by Rising Sun Pictures.

Home Page: http://open.rsp.com.au
Project Page: http://open.rsp.com.au/projects/pyshake
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: LGPLv2.1.
Sponsor: Rising Sun Pictures

Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/affogato/
Language: c++
Platform: Linux, Windows
License: LGPL
Sponsor: Rising Sun Pictures

OpenEXR is used by ILM on all motion pictures currently in production. The first movies to employ OpenEXR were Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, Men in Black II, Gangs of New York, and Signs. Since then, OpenEXR has become ILM’s main image file format.

OpenEXR’s features include:

• Higher dynamic range and color precision than existing 8- and 10-bit image file formats.
• Support for 16-bit floating-point, 32-bit floating-point, and 32-bit integer pixels. The 16-bit floating-point format, called “half”, is compatible with the half data type in NVIDIA’s Cg graphics language and is supported natively on their new GeForce FX and Quadro FX 3D graphics solutions.
• Multiple lossless image compression algorithms. Some of the included codecs can achieve 2:1 lossless compression ratios on images with film grain.
• Extensibility. New compression codecs and image types can easily be added by extending the C++ classes included in the OpenEXR software distribution. New image attributes (strings, vectors, integers, etc.) can be added to OpenEXR image headers without affecting backward compatibility with existing OpenEXR applications.

Home Page: http://www.openexr.com/
Project Page: http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/openexr/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, etc
License: Modified BSD
Sponsor: ILM

Project Page: http://sourceforge.net/projects/liquidmaya/
Language: C++, MEL
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: Mozilla Public License
Sponsor: Weta

The GTO library includes the low-level reader and writer classes, a slightly higher level raw data reader/writer, and source code for a Maya scene and particle export, particle display, a Maya deformer to use GTO as a geometry cache, Houdini plug-ins, a number of command line tools, a Wavefront .obj parser (for a command line converter), and a Python module for reading and writing GTO files. The GTO reader/writer and tools have been tested thoroughly in feature film and game production on GNU/Linux and OSX as well as Windows XP, Vista, and 2000. GTO is also used as part of Tweak Software’s commercial products.

Home Page: http://www.tweakfilms.com/products/open-source-software/gto
Project Page: http://github.com/jimhourihan/gto
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X, etc
License: GNU Library General Public License with exceptions for static linking.
Sponsor: Tweak Films

The library was initially developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks as a replacement for the three different in-house file formats already used to store voxel data. It is the foundation for Imageworks’ in-house simulation framework and volume rendering software and is actively being used in production.

Home Page: http://opensource.imageworks.com/?p=field3d
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/field3d/
Language: C++
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License:

BSD

Home Page: http://dneg.github.com/dnPtcViewerNode/
Project Page: http://github.com/dneg/dnPtcViewerNode
Language: C++, MEL
Platform: Linux OSX Windows
License: BSD v3
Sponsor: Double Negative

Originally the brainchild of Andrew Chapman, the Cortex project is now being developed around the IECore library developed in house at Image Engine and subsequently released as open source. Initially, Image Engine are providing the core library and Python bindings, along with their RenderMan, Maya, OpenGL, and Nuke support libraries.

It is hoped that the Cortex project will attract contributions from the wider visual effects community, and grow to provide a rich set of functionality and support for further 3rd party applications.

Home Page: http://opensource.image-engine.com/
Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/cortex-vfx
Language: C++, Python
Platform: Linux, Windows, OS X
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Image Engine