Big Lux Symfony
Hey, here’s a small update after a long while because I’m still not dead and I know my viewers want one (yes, all 6 of you!)
- Big Buck Bunny
My DVDs arrived last week and I’ve been playing with the content since and I must say that its fun! For those that don’t have a clue, Big Buck Bunny is the second open movie by the Blender Foundation which is not only really cool but also makes all the source files available for free, since it’s licensed as Creative Commons. You can also order the DVDs, as I did, to help them make the next movie and to show off to your friends too.
Making custom scenes is a breeze since everything is neatly packed into libraries and the characters are very well rigged. The only problem is that they recommend 4GB of memory since fur/grass is really memory intensive. I’m planning on making a nice dual-screen wallpaper featuring all characters but for now here’s Big Buck:
- LuxRender v0.5
Slightly old news but LuxRender v0.5 was released last week too! There are many, many new features and bug fixes over the previous officially released version (0.1) but, most importantly, I think this marks the beginning of a more constant release schedule. Lately, most of my free time goes to helping develop Lux but it’s not always that I manage to do a proper render with it so I decided to reuse an old scene I rendered with yafray some years ago and render it with Lux:
V2 Comparison
Lighting is not the same, neither are the materials but it’s cool to see the “evolution”. I used the new procedural textures to render this and it’s really flexible since it can mix many types of textures to create some really unique stuff like Radiance’s Voronite® .
- Symfony 1.1
In another bit of old news, Symfony 1.1 is out. I took this opportunity to upgrade the site and fix the comment system which now uses reCaptcha to authethicate humans. It’s kind of hard to read sometimes but at least you help digitize books.
There’s not much difference between Symfony version 1.0 and 1.1, especially if you leave the compatibility mode on but things are stricter, especially regarding routing, and some changes were necessary. I’m planning on adding support for the upcoming dual-screen wallpapers, so stay tuned. 
—Ratow
