Home Page: http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/partio.html
Project Page: https://github.com/wdas/partio
Language: C++ Python
Platform: Linux, OSX, Windows
License: New BSD
Sponsor: Walt Disney Animation Studios

At the moment this project features the following shaders:

• Jupiter SGI Skin

Jupiter Spherical Gradient Illumination Skin is a 3Delight RenderMan shader that reads scanned RGB world space normal maps for 3 different wavelengths (red, green, blue), and a fourth normal map to be used in the specular term.

This technique, presented at:

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/FaceScanning/

allows the user to re-create the appear of the subtle subsurface effects of skin, together with self-shadowing and inter-reflections.

Once the texture are acquired:

• The three normal maps for the Lambertian diffuse term contain increasing detail as the light wavelength decreases.
• The normal map for the blue wavelength contains more detail than the normal map for the green wavelength, which in turn contains more detail than the red wavelength map.
• The specular normal map is used to drive the specular contribution (and the reflections), with the specular term being comprised of two specular lobes based on the Torrance-Sparrow model.

The user has the possibility of selecting between two microfacet distribution functions used:

• the Beckmann microfacet distribution, as suggested in the publication by Robert L. Cook and Kenneth E. Torrance, “A reflectance model for computer graphics”

• a Gaussian distribution, which is cheaper to compute and produces slightly softer results.

The weight of each of the specular lobe’s contribution can also be controlled directly by the user, or it can be made automatically via the extracted data in the specular intensity image.

Notice also that this shader provides optionally a full two pass (point cloud based)subsurface term as well for greater flexibility.

This work has been sponsored by Srinivas M. Mohan (Indian Artists Computer Graphics Pvt. Ltd.) for the movie *Endhiran*, and it is based on:

• “Rapid Acquisition of Specular and Diffuse Normal Maps from Polarized Spherical Gradient Illumination”.
 By Wan Chun Ma, Tim Hawkins, Pieter Peers, Charles-Felix Chabert, Malte Weiss, Paul Debevec. 
University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies.
 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2007.
• “Estimating Specular Roughness and Anisotropy from Second Order Spherical Gradient Illumination”.
 By Abhijeet Ghosh , Tongbo Chen, Pieters Peers, Cyrus A. Wilson, Paul Debevec.
 University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies.
 Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2009.

Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/jupiterskin/
Language: Renderman Shading Language
Platform: Linux, OSX, Windows
License: New BSD License
Sponsor: Jupiter Jazz

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

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

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).

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

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