Moonlight|3D 0.5.5 Released

oxygene2k2 writes "I just finished the release preparations for Moonlight|3D 0.5.5. "Moonlight?" you might think, taking a look at slashdot's nice search function and see that there are two articles from 2000 claiming that it's dead. It's alive again and this release was made to show this. We hope to attract both users and developers with this. Take a look at the Release Announcement for the Mailinglist, our development site and the press releases in english, german, french, italian and spanish."

Re:what the hell is it?

[PinkX]

It isn't to hard to follow the given links [sf.net] and take a look at what is it about... anyways for the lazy Moonlight 3D is (as the last two letters from its name suggests) is a 3D modelling software.

Wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Perl language has a 3D modelling plugin (go to cpan.com) that removes the O(2^n) factor and makes it a O*1.5n task instead. I don't recall the name, but look under "graphics".

Re:KDE and Gnome all over again

[cioxx]

Yeah! Who needs choice? Screw that shit!

You misunderstood. Let me elaborate further.

Since developers allocate time out of their schedules and donate their skills (for free) to a project that powers the engine which essentially drives the open source movement. Blender3d was just freed. It's not a perfect 3d Modeling Suite by any means. It will be months, even years before it can reach the same playing field where discreet and Alias dominate the game.

Moonlight project was killed. Seems to me we got a negative charge within the OSS community where they try to counter each and every project with a similar initiative, and in turn it just divides the developers into two camps and never gives edge to a single one.

Suppose someone countered MS Exchange with an Open Source solution. I bet 3 days later there would be 2 different open source projects on freshmeat in a competition. Why? The first one isn't perfect yet!

To me the logical step would be to perfect something first, rather than have 2 half assed-solutions.

because...

[Patoski]

Moonlight 3D is a ray tracer and Blender is a scan line renderer. Blender will likely never have/be a raytracer natively (although export scripts to a few ray tracers exist). These are two *very* different approaches to rendering so by no means would I say that Blender and Moonlight are cut from the same cloth.

Best of luck to the Moonlight 3d team! Its a spiffy little app with a nice interface and plenty of potential!

This is SWEET!!!

[cnelzie]

I played about with Moonlight 3D some time ago and found it far easier to use then Blender 3D.

To me, the user interface was quite simply far more user friendly then Blender is. (Of course, that is a matter of opinion and that is my opinion.)

Re:3D modelers

[aridhol]

This is somewhat simplified.

O(n) describes how the processing time of a problem increases when more elements are put into the input set. For example, O(n) means that when you add 1 to the input set, you add 1 to the number of loops at runtime.

O(2^n) means that for each element you put into the input set, the number of loops doubles. Thus, while an input set with 3 elements in it would loop 8 times, an input set with 4 elements would loop 16, etc. The number gets unmanageable fast - 10 elements = 1024 loops, 20 elements = 1048576 loops, 100 elements = 1267650600228229401496703205376 loops. Basically, it means that for any significant amount of data, don't expect it to be finished in your lifetime.

Re:what the hell is it?

[quitcherbitchen]

From the development page [sourceforge.net]:

Moonlight|3D is a free software modeller and renderer for 3D scenes with an intuitive GUI and powerful editing capabilities.

Description:

[Palos]

from http://ml3d.sourceforge.net/ What is Moonlight|3D? 2002-10-12 Moonlight|3D is a free software modeller and renderer for 3D scenes with an intuitive GUI and powerful editing capabilities. This effort is based on the Moonlight Atelier sources (version 0.5.3) from 1998, which - unfortunately - was the last sourcecode release. Early 1999 the original author released a newer version (0.9.2) which has texture mapping and other important features, but he never released the source (he didn't need to). The development of Moonlight|3D aims for the features of 0.9.2 but also wants to go beyond that: the goal is to have a powerful 3d editing tool with animation capabilities which is still easy to handle for someone new to 3d modelling.

hmm this tool looks really

[Anonymous Coward]

linux - like.
honestly - wings3d is far more powerfull as a modeller. the interface of ml3d is worse than blender imho

:'( Moonlight went closed-source

[loren]

Yawn... Another closed source project with a cool name... Who cares.

What is really sad is that this used to be a GPLed Open Source project.

I'm a wee bit surprised RMS isn't all over them for continuing to call their project "free software"... (I believe the quote was: "Moonlight|3D is a free software modeller and renderer...")

Re:because...

[Patoski]

Yeah, I don't understand. In the end they both produce pretty
pictures of modelled objects, right?

Well, not necessarily (game modelers for instance don't make pretty pictures) but I'll see if I can explain myself a bit better about why these two approaches are so very different (and somewhat developmentally incompatible).

In the end that is the idea but there are many ways to skin a cat (or even a mesh). ;-) Scanline and Ray tracers are two approaches. Each of these approaches have their advantages and disadvantages. A scan line renderer for example is a fast renderer which generally produces nice looking results (by using shortcuts and certain assumptions). As a result of these shortcuts it is difficult or even impossible to implement some features well such as caustics or radiosity. A raytracer uses a highly accurate (but expensive CPUwise and render time) algorithm that calculates the paths of millions of beams of light and uses these paths to piece together a pretty picture. Using ray tracing you can implement the fancy stuff I mentioned earlier (caustics, radiosity, etc.) more accurately and generally more easily than you can in a scan line renderer. So basically raytracers are very slow but highly accurate but scanline renderers are fast and (at times) don't output highly accurate renders.

Also some other differences between Blender and Moonlight.

Moonlight 3D is more geared towards ease of use and to help newbies ease themselves into 3D w/a nice UI and basic modeling funtions.

Blender is currently geared towards the more experienced 3D artist with an ultra efficient UI (with a steeper learning curve) and a professional workflow that enables you to output tons of work easily (sometimes at the price of user friendliness).

These are two very different crowds that Moonlight and Blender are catering to. I think there's room enough in Free Software for them both. :-)

Journalism 101

[jheinen]

I am not often critical. Well OK, I am almost always critical. So to criticize this article I will say that the editors need to pick up a basic journalism text. If you did so you would notice that one of the canonical rules of good journalistic prose is to let the reader know what the piece is about in the first sentence. Nowhere in the entire posting does it mention what Moonlight 3D actually IS!!!! Before posting please proof read the content and ask yourself some simple questions; does the article in question clearly state the who, what, where, when, and why of the story? News is meant to inform, not send the reader off on a wild hyperlink-hunt and search engine expedition in order to figure out what the story is about. I read Slashdot because (I hope) it will present information that is of interest to me in a fairly concise, easy to read format, saving me from having to spend a lot of time hunting for the information myself. Please present articles that have the most important point right in the very beginning, and then fill in the expository details later. That way people can get the gist of a story with a quick glance, and those that want more detail can stick around for the juicy details. Pick up any decent newspaper for examples. It's quite simple really.

Art of Illusion

[dcuny]

How about Art of Illusion [sourceforge.net]?

This program never seems to get any publicity, but it's a free, highly functional open source modelling + renderer + animation package. It's got just about all the features you could ask for:

• Excellent documentation and tutorials
• Scanline rendering for quick & dirty previews
• Raytracing for slow and pretty pictures
• Bones and pose-based animation
• Inverse kinematics
• Global illumination
• User-friendly interface
• Actively being developed
• Cool procedural texture editor

It's written in Java so it performs nicely under Windows, Linux and the Mac. That plus Wings3D [wings3d.com] (a great open source modeller based on Nendo [izware.com] gives you a complete Open Source animation package.