Pixar gives the Open SubDiv program to Open Source and waives patents

Animation company Pixar was created as a software company. At first, she didn’t even think about producing cartoons, but developed and sold software. Actually, it still does. All the more surprising is the announcement that Pixar made at the Siggraph 2012 conference. The company published the source code of the Open SubDiv libraries , and also promised that it would allow free licensing of some of its patents so that anyone could easily use this development.



The Open SubDiv program provides a detailed rendering of the surfaces ( subdivision surface ) based on reduced models. The screenshot shows the model (right) and the result of rendering using Open SubDiv (left). The program is optimized for high performance parallel threads on the CPU and GPU.

Manuel Kraemer, technical director of Pixar, spoke at the Siggraph conference. He told how the Pixar studio uses this technology, starting in 1978 and ending with the latest cartoons.
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Currently, Open SubDiv is published as a beta version under the Microsoft Public License. For obvious reasons, Pixar could not use the GNU GPL, because Open SubDiv is part of Maya and other software products.

PS As the ScuFF user explained competently in the comments, Open SubDiv is a Catmull – Clark subdivision surface implementation with fast hardware-accelerated geometry division. Written in collaboration with Microsoft Reserch. This library can be connected to their programs. An example of a plugin for maya using this code is shown. By opening this library, Pixar is promoting its proprietary software PhotoRealistic RenderMan .