Category: software

Teaching computer graphics programming to regular folks. Original content written by professionals with years of field experience. We dive straight into code, dissect equations, avoid fancy jargon and external libraries. Explained in plain English. Free.

https://www.scratchapixel.com/

https://9to5mac.com/2024/06/06/change-to-adobe-terms-amp-conditions

The terms say:

Solely for the purposes of operating or improving the Services and Software, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free sublicensable, license, to use, reproduce, publicly display, distribute, modify, create derivative works based on, publicly perform, and translate the Content. For example, we may sublicense our right to the Content to our service providers or to other users to allow the Services and Software to operate with others, such as enabling you to share photos

Designer Wetterschneider, who counts DC Comics and Nike among his clients, was one of the graphics pros to object to the terms.

Here it is. If you are a professional, if you are under NDA with your clients, if you are a creative, a lawyer, a doctor or anyone who works with proprietary files – it is time to cancel Adobe, delete all the apps and programs. Adobe can not be trusted.

Movie director Duncan Jones was equally blunt in his response.

Hey @Photoshop what the hell was that new agreement you forced us to sign this morning that locked our ap until we agree to it? We are working on a bloody movie here, and NO, you don’t suddenly have the right to any of the work we are doing on it because we pay you to use photoshop. What the f**k?!

Should you ditch Photoshop with immediate effect?

https://www.creativeboom.com/resources/should-you-ditch-photoshop-with-immediate-effect/

Adobe’s response

https://hothardware.com/news/adobe-responds-to-creator-outrage-over-controversial-photoshop-tos-update

Adobe is not claiming ownership over the content you create in Photoshop. Likewise, it will not use customer content to train its Firefly generative AI model.

https://squoosh.app

https://www.awn.com/news/dreamworks-animation-release-moonray-open-source

https://openmoonray.org/

MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer, which has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Trolls World Tour, The Bad Guys, the upcoming Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, as well as future titles. MoonRay was developed at DreamWorks and is in continuous active development and includes an extensive library of production-tested, physically based materials, a USD Hydra render delegate, multi-machine and cloud rendering via the Arras distributed computation framework.

Note: it does not support osl and usd handling is limited. Cycles may still be a fair alternative.

EDIT

MoonRay review: DreamWorks Animations’ superb rendering software is free for all

A high-performance Monte Carlo ray tracer that’s capable of both DreamWorks’ trademark stylised look and photorealism.

It has all the required features for that setup, including Arbitrary Output Variables (AOVs), which allow data from a shader or renderer to be output during rendering to aid compositing. Additionally, Deep Output and Cryptomatte are supported.

With support for OptiX 7.6 and GPU render denoising with Open Image Denoise 2, MoonRay is able to deliver particularly impressive results, especially when working interactively.

MoonRay has moved to a hybrid CPU and GPU rendering mode for its default state. It’s called XPU, and in many ways combines the best of both types of rendering workflow.

VFX Reference Platform 2023 is probably the biggest addition because it enables the use of MoonRay directly in Nuke 15.

MoonRay has already achieved great success with an array of feature films. Now the renderer is open source, the CG world can expect to see a whole new swathe of MoonRay-powered animations.

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