An advert for an add-on programmer on Redshift’s forum points to the popular GPU renderer making its way to Blender in the future. No details about timescale are offered and the ad points that out “developing a good rendering plugin can take time, so this is a long-term project”. We’ll share more news as it becomes available. If you’re interested in the job you can find more details in the original forum post.
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F**K YEAHHHH!!!!!!
Holy redshift, baby! (:
Now lets just get Houdini engine and make my life complete!
I wonder how how did they go around GNU-GPL Blender license restrictions? Can’t imagine Redshift become opensource.
Well, it´s not that hard for some middleware, AFAIK they just have to do one of two things:
Option 1: create an exporter, the exporter is pythonn based and open source and it talks with the standalone version of redshift (this is probably the one they picked)
Option 2: They have to create a middleware communication library based on Apache or MIT license (both GPL compatible) and from that they can communicate with their closed source software, in fact Cycles is Apache based and it can communicate with a closed source library with the proper middleware.
The restriction comes to parts of the software that makes use of the Blender API, with that middleware you can create an intermediate API so you won´t be breaking any licenses, there has been a lot of discussion about possibilities for things like this in the Blender Artists forums, people wants that GPL is respected, but also wants a way out for other developers to be able to implement their commercial software, the key thing here is to know that GPL is not going to change, at least not anytime soon, but there are ways to adapt to it, GPL is not the end of the world, it just takes a bit more of work 🙂 You can imagine that if this were not possible linux won´t be having any commercial software 🙂
Cheers!
Thanks Juang for the explanation! Good to see you already worked on it 😀 I am slowly learning how to try to move our software to blender…
Do you know what impact it would have on the speed? Rendering is all about speed, and if one need to translate needlessly 10 times the stuff via bridges and adapers to get a result, how dramatic is the speed decreese?
Personally i do not care about GPL and commercial issues: if software delievers something unique and special, i will pay for it. For example, i have nothing against having Blender and buying proprietary RedShift plugin for it.
What i abhor is the religous ideology – which i sometimes see and find in Blender GPL. 🙂
In fact is similar to how other render engines work with other packages, even Arnold works with a translator, in the case of Vray, the only version of it that is directly integrated into the software is the 3dsmax version, AFAIK the other packages work with an exporter and some kind of standalone behind the courtains, the same happened with other render engines, translation is always something needed, in the case of Corona they have their own scene description format, and the same happens with Vray.
So in the end it should be similar, the difference in time is present just in the translation at the begining, but during the render stage the speed should be the same.
I´m no expert in GPL or licensing, I´m just telling you what I think I´ve learned reading a lot in several places, but I may be wrong.
I think everyone understands that things have to be paid one way or another, the problem does not come with paying for things but rather for being abused by the companies because they think they can, and they decide to do crazy things.
It´s curious but in the blender ecosystem and community there is no piracy at all, there are several markets with different prices and addons adn tools are being sold, even when they are open source, you can ask the developer for the code at any moment and they will give you the code, and you are free to publicly distribute it with no problem, obviously no one does that because it would be in detriment of the developer and future improvements, but is curious to se how self-contrained that community is with all this things 🙂
Now regarding the religious ideology, I agree with you, even when many will argue that I´m in some way part of that “ideology” and behaviour because my constant criticism against Autodesk and it´s licensing scheme, I´ve found the exact oposite thing here, in favour of Autodesk, in BlenderArtists for example you will find both types, the ones that are taking blender as their lives, and the ones that think that Blender is just a tool more in their toolset, but I think this type of behaviour is normal up to some point, the 3d apps are something soooo complex that everyone that masters those tools have dedicated so much time of their lives that they have an emotional link towards the tool, so if you go to a max forum and starts talking about C4D you will find someone with that mindset, but in general that kind of behaviour in the blender environment has decreased a lot, and I think the reason is the amount of people that are pros that are making the shift towards Blender.
The thing with GPL in Blender is that it cannot change becuase it would need a lot of effort to make the change possible, and on the other hand, the Blender foundation don´t want it to change, they don´t see any reason to make the change, Blender has evolved well and it can evolve pretty well in the future without a change in the licensing, developers will have to find a way to work with it if they want to reach the growing Blender user base, or simply ignore it 🙂
But there are developers looking for ways to make their plugins Blender compatible and RedShift is a good example, will see what the future brings here 🙂
Cheers!