Blender.org

It's not exactly portable .NET Framework 1.1 ATI Radeon 9500 (and higher) or NVIDIA GeForce FX (and higher) Windows 2000 or Windows XP operating system It also seems to be subject to artifacts. Check out this image from their site: http://www.rusteddreams.net/faogenmanual/step_mode.jpg Look at groun...

Check out this list of renderers.

You might have a look at pbrt ("physically based ray tracer"). It's got a great book written about it, so you can easily understand what the code is doing, and it's written to be extensible. Or if you don't like pbrt, you can write your own renderer.

I suspect one problem is that the occlusion information is stored at each vertex, and the occlusion at any point on the surface is interpolated from the vertex. This means that the resolution is dependant on the surface. So if you have a single polygon for a floor, you're going to have to interpolat...

I hate when simulators try to do the animator`s job. Yeah, almost as irritating as when an animator tries to do a stuntperson's job ;) But you're right, it's probably not particularly valuable for Blender, since most users aren't working with motion capture in the first place. It's not like you cou...

Urm... JLipSync and Yolo both have Stop buttons... There's a bit of delay before the sound actually stops, but that's due to how often the sound thread is awakened, and the size of the playback buffer. Getting it to work well using Java for multiple operating systems is a bit of a challange. :? If y...

Here's the link to Yolo , which is my latest program. (Credit where due: Yolo is a clone of Papagayo , while JLipSync is a clone of Magpie ). Since this is a developer's forum and not an advertisment for my (free and open source) programs, I should try to make this thread relevent... :P In case peo...

It seems to me that the basic idea here is quite sound. You should be able to run a quick photon lighting simulation, and pare down the lights to some fraction based on how much the contribute to the scene. It doesn't matter if the result is correct - just as long as it's plausible, and remains cons...

I've written a free Java-based lipsync program called JLipSync you might want to look at. I think a much nicer approach is Lost Marble's free Papagayo (Win32 and Mac only) program. This sort of thing would work quite nicely into Blender's timeframe-based approach if someone felt the urge to code it....

My impression wat that there was some delay getting Animanium past the beta and to market because of stability issues. The latest version has an option where you can explictly mark parts of the skeleton to be ignored in IK solutions (for example, the fingers of the hand), so there are apparently tim...

I'll suggest that the approach taken by the Animanium folk is just way too freaking hard . Have a look at Art of Illusion , which implements a functionally equivalent version using traditional IK methods. It's an Open Source (so you can see the code), written in Java (so it's fairly well structured)...

Throwing out the internal renderer would be a bad idea, if for no other reason that (as other people pointed out) it makes Blender dependant on some other application. So if that application failed, so would Blender. It also would lock Blender into doing things that "Renderman" way, which isn't alwa...

You might also want to play with Art of Illusion, an open-source Java based 3D program.

AoI's IK system is based on the Animanium ideas (although the implementation is classic recursive descent). It's open source, so you can see the code and get an idea of how it works.

I'm not sure that the demo is really that complex. One important feature is that it's only 2D. The only real constraint is that the distance between the links is a constant value - let's call that value d . So if point P1 moves, you have to ensure that P2 stays a constant distance d . So you calcula...

Hrm... I see that Toon_Scheur posted a nice explanation first, but 'll go ahead and post this anyway. SSS actually encompasses two different phenomena: "forward" and "back" scattering. "Forward" scattering is a sort of "thin" scattering, typically what you think of as the skin SSS effect. Light ente...

I should also note that the quality of the shading is dependant to some degree on the tesselation of the surface. That is, it's going to interpolate the occulsion over the surface based on the values at the vertices. So if you've got a large triangle (for example, part of the floor) with relatively ...