Second Absolut Blender Contest

Stray Light writes "The second Absolut Blender Contest has officially started. A great opportunity for 3D artists to show what they can do. Animations are accepted this time around as well as stills like before. Prizes will once again probably be the Blender T-Shirts. Hope to see the entries coming in soon! " We're actually supposed to be reviewing the Blender Manual soon, so keep your eyes peeled for it. In related news Blender 1.56 is out.

Wow

[Trepidity]

Linux Bigot: Yeah well take a look at them apples

Micro$haft Zealot: Blender? We have 3D Studio Max and Bryce 3D. Why do I want Blender?

Linux Bigot: Blender is cool.

Micro$haft Zealot: but it sucks compared to Bryce 3D.

Linux Bigot: Oh.

Any efforts to provide such support?

[Deviant]

Many of the other posters are right, one of the main things
that Linux needs is real accelerated video support. From games
to rendering this is one feature that the system really needs to
gain user and professional acceptance.
I had a voodoo II card in my other machine, and I took such
hardware opengl support, and being able to play games like quake
II for granted, until I got my PII 350 and Riva TNT card. Now I
am a little annoyed at the lack of any support for this extremely
common card, and appreciative that 3dfx took it upon themselves
to write the support. I was relieved that there was even an X
server for the TNT when I got it. It is my understanding that
NVidia wrote the X server, they also wrote the opengl ICD and
drivers for windows, so is it not feasible for them to write an
opengl accelerated X server like 3dfx. Is there some licensing
issues standing in the way here?
But, even beyond my particular case with the TNT, there are
many manufacturers who don t even make X servers. I believe thatmuch of the problem here is the manufacturers perception that the
specs to their cards, and the information that people need to
make such drivers are trade secrets and useful to their
competitors. This shouldn t be the case, but I think that forthe time being we need to be the bigger party here and get some
people to sign NDAs and goto the manufacturers and write these
drivers. This should be a top priority for the community to get
this done. We will be in a much better position to ask for open
source once we prove that there is a large demand and that we let
them in on a new platform for free :) We have to go about it the
opposite way of microsoft. We have to prove our platform sabilities, speed, and demand, before apps and drivers will be
written instead of the other way around. Maybe we could get some
of our new buddies at IBM or SGI to goto the manufactures and
plead the case to get us the specs, companies might be more
receptive to SGI people than some college students and IT guys.
We can t complain about a lack of 3dStudio and Unreal unlesswe offer them the kind of APIs and base framework they expect
from the operating system. I would really like to see SGI step
up and help out with the manufacturer negotiations in this
regard, I would gladly pay for their distribution if they
provided this kind of support. Having linux run fantastically on
their Intel systems and allowing people to ditch NT can only make
them better. Everybody else, focus on building the framework
instead of bitching about how there are no apps. I am going to
look into learning how to contribute to such efforts myself, if
anybody has any advice on howto go about that I would also be
appreciative. If it is over my head I will see about
contributing to the other things that I see as critical to the
success of the platform whomping on NT, kde and linuxconf.

Great, but...

[Eric Sharkey]

These contests are great. I have absolutely no talent in this area, but I love seeing what other people can produce with contests like this and www.irtc.org [irtc.org] and so on, but what disappoints me most is that the images produced are always so small! 800x600 doesn't due many of these creations justice. I'd much rather see these contests run at 1600x1200, or at least 1280x1024. I'd even donate CPU cycles for something like that!

There are

[Pascal Q. Porcupine]

A little research goes a long way (I've actually been looking into this topic a lot recently). On the Mesa3D Homepage [mesa3d.org] at the bottom, there's a thing on the 3D acceleration status report. If you go to it, you'll learn about all the fun happy things going into exactly what you talk about. The most promising one IMO is the GLX XFree extension; it's already got the hooks for hardware-assisted rendering with complete software fallback, it just needs support and drivers. They've already got an early-alpha Permedia driver for it, though I don't have a Permedia card (I have a 3Dfx and will soon be getting a TNT of some sort, probably the Asus 3400, to replace my failing S3 ViRGE).

The GLX implementation with XFree is currently rather sluggish, due to some design issues within XFree (not really XFree's fault), but apparently it's only a latency issue. The nice thing about GLX is that, aside from being how SGI themselves implement it, it is network-transparent (it is technically an X protocol wrapper for OpenGL commands); it even apparently allows an SGI to display on a PC or vice-versa (of course, without hardware rendering, you would probably want the PC displaying on the SGI and not the other way around).

Of course, there's other developments going on (also referenced from the status report), but the GLX one seems most promising, at least for serious rendering. I think the latency issues would impact its usefulness for gaming. :/ It's also the one which is closest to viability; the GGI3D stuff, for example, is still in early design phases, and looks like it's going to be more of a Direct3D-ish thing (that is, a low-level API which OpenGL etc. would sit on top of), which means more APIs for the vendors to support. It's hard enough to get vendors to support both D3D and OGL under Windows, much less Linux.

Given nVidia's Linux-friendly history, though, I wouldn't be surprised if as soon as one of the APIs matures that they make a driver. Since the GLX scheme is the functionally-closest to the Windows ICD mechanism, I have a feeling that the vendors will adopt that first. And why not? It's robust, allows progressive implementation, and network-transparent. Can we say "thin clients?"
---

Blender sucks ass

[doog]

compared to 3D Studio Max, Lightwave, Truespace etc... Until Linux has a good 3D package no serious 3D Artist is going to switch. I wish SGI would make a port of Maya...

I predict this will be reported Sunday

[PD]

Absolut Vodka company sues innocent graphics oriented web site. Claims trademark infringement. Slashdot fans outraged.

Wow

[SkyWriter]

ah... actually it's not meant for that purpose.
Blender works best in a constructive capacity.

Blender sucks ass

[SkyWriter]

>Until Linux has a good 3D package

Actually Linux has nothing, GNU/Linux is your target. And it's not the packages but the
inadaquate 3D hardware support by Mesa (GPL heh).

Blender is impressive on SGI's running IRIX.

Wow

[XXIII]

Programs like that just beg you to go to your nearest Micro$haft Zealot and say "Yeah well take a look at them apples" :)