Commercial/free/open source CG software

There are no handouts for this lecture..

None of the following material (which are all links anyway) will be on your exams.. These links contain material for you to explore after you're done with this course.

Listed below are top-rated software names in each category. Note - there is a 'heavy bias' towards entertainment-oriented applications! The lists are indicative of where commercial CG is going..

If you get a job involving CG programming today, the programs mentioned below will figure in your life one way or another - you might work directly on the programs themselves (eg. at Pixar, Autodesk, etc.) or work at a movie/game studio where you'd write plugins/scripts to extend the programs' functionalities. That's the main point of the list below - these days, you hardly program CG from scratch!

3D, integrated (modeling/animation/rendering/fx..)

• Maya
• XSI
• Houdini
• 3D Studio Max
• Lightwave
• Animation Master (from Hash)
• Blender

3D, specialized (modeling, rendering, animation, etc)

• modo
• Rhino
• CAT
• massive
• RenderMan (RenderMan Studio, RenderMan ProServer)
• Mental Ray
• Brazil
• Maxwell
• Turtle
• Gelato
• ZBrush
• Mudbox

Note - RenderMan and Mental Ray are established high-end renderers with no compromise on image quality - that is why they are used to create CG to blend seamlessly with live-action imagery. They both implement global illumination, programmable shader capability, motion blur, depth-of-field etc, which collectively enable the synthesis of photoreal images.

2D ("cartoon") animation

• Flash
• Animo
• Toon Boom Studio
• Toonz

More links [some overlap with above material]

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