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Latest news appear first.
(Cross-posted on appleseedhq.net)
Seven years ago I was stepping down as the head and founder of toxic, an early open source global illumination renderer, and my good friend Jonathan Perret was taking the lead of the project. I outlined the reasons for this in an October 2004 post on toxic's website. To summarize, I had decided to join mental images' core R&D; team and my employment contract didn't allow me to continue working on toxic.
Development halted soon after the transition but toxic continued to be a valuable resource for people interested in rendering algorithms and implementations. We kept the website running and made sure everything remained in order. Unfortunately we had to close the forums to prevent them from collapsing under spam. Amazingly, toxic is now within the first three results when typing "open source global illumination" or "open source renderer" in Google. Curious form of posthumous recognition!
I left mental images in May 2008 and a year later I started to work on appleseed, a new open source renderer that was first released in July 2010. Although some ideas were inherited from toxic, all the design decisions were reconsidered with the hindsight of several years of experience writing commercial renderers and production tools, and all code was written from scratch.
I expect to continue developing and promoting appleseed for many years. I have become more exigent about employment contracts, and I will think twice (at least!) before signing anything that would restrict my rights on appleseed.
There won't be any update to toxic, but we'll keep the website running indefinitely and we'll keep the domain name, as we did already during all those years.
Best to all of you,
Franz
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As you may have seen in the menu on the left, a Wiki link has been added to the community part. This is the place where you will find information and links to resources to help you use toxic.
Feel free to browse through this great tool, and to participate to its elaboration!
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Looks like I finally managed to get my first release out of the door. Grab it now in the download section.
Enjoy, and please remember to share your experiences in the forums.
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Hi all,
As you may have seen, toxic has just got a new home, hosted outside sourceforge's webservers, somewhere in Florida.
Jonathan and I tried to make the transition as seamless as possible, and hope you enjoy your time on this website.
It seems I am now the new webmaster of this place, so if you experience any problem during your visit, please drop a line in the forums. Talking about the forums, they should be more responsive now.
So welcome back everyone!
toma.
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Dear friends,
It has been a while since my last real post on this website -- I gave a tiny bit of news a few months ago, but at that time I was sitting in front of an internet-café computer running more spywares than there are lines of code in toxic. As you can imagine it wasn't exactly the most pleasant browsing experience :)
As you might know, I moved to Berlin, Germany at the end of June. I didn't move for the pleasure of the currywurst (curry-sausage), but because I've been hired by mental images to work on mental ray (I'm part of the rendering core team). I must say that I love my job so far: this company is full of extremely talented and commited people, and working with them is a real pleasure. And Berlin means good beer, cool parties and lovely girls ;)
I sincerely apologize to have let you all in the dark while things settled down. It took me a quite some time to find an apartment and to get the basic things people usually like to have at home, like water, electricity, and so on, before getting an internet access.
Unfortunately, as my friend toma stated in one of his recent post, my working contract explicitely forbid me to work on any other rendering product, including open source projects, hence including toxic. That's really sad because working on toxic has always been extremely interesting and enjoyable, partly thanks to you guys!
However, toxic is not an abandonned project. A few weeks ago, my friend Jonathan Perret (who also basically taught me programming in the early days) got the keys of the place, and he's now the official leader of the toxic project.
This will be my last post on this website. Before I leave, I would like to thank you all for your extremely enthusiastic feeback and your various contributions to the project: bakbek, che, craouette, Koba, manu, mrsinkers, Pistols (who designed the toxic logo), richie, SamAdam, toma (for the help with the website and the early testing), Vagabond and of course Jonathan (jperret).
And with this, I'll let Jonathan tell you of his plans for the future of toxic. Best of luck to him!
Have fun!
François (dictoon on the forums)
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(Jonathan speaking)
Well, I first want to extend a big thank you to François for entrusting me with his latest brainchild. I'm sure we all agree he deserved to join one of the leading renderer development teams, and best of luck to him in this amazing career start.
Next, a bit of background. When François first told me about his idea of building a new GI renderer from scratch, more than a year ago, I must admit I wasn't thrilled very much. After all, there seemed to be largely enough renderers out there already, with every year students the world around dumping another school-project raytracer onto the big pile (hey, François did manage to enter toxic as a school project as well! And yes, he got excellent marks). Still he worked on it on his own, day in and day out, and when he finally released it, what surprised me was not the quality of the product - I knew what to expect - but the (overwhelmingly good) reaction of people to it. You people showed that there was still a place for a good open-source renderer, and I'm excited to be part of it now.
I had to explain this because it is going to shape my efforts on toxic. To be clearer, my goal is to help the community move toxic forward. So, if you want toxic to succeed, be prepared to be called upon to bring what you can to the project:
- Developers: while toxic's rendering core is a complex beast that is hard to get into, there is still a lot of work outside of it for those who want to help. We're going to need people to work on:
- Improving toxic's integration with modeling tools (a tip of the hat to the people who made a lot of great stuff for Blender and Wings3D, by the way)
- Porting toxic to more platforms (OS X is right around the corner!)
- Packaging installers, RPMs, DEBs to facilitate deployment
- Making toxic understand more 3D file formats
- Users: if you like toxic and you want it to improve, there is a lot you can do:
- Tell your friends about toxic! While we're not firefox, our project needs all the attention it can get. Users are the fuel that make the project progress.
- Give us feedback! As the development resources are not infinite, we are going to need to prioritize new features. Now I know there is a lot missing in toxic right now, but ideally we should be able to identify a handful of features that could make it actually usable for you. And of course any bug you can find is of interest.
- Post your renders in the dedicated forums here, so we have more stuff to put in the gallery to show off.
- If you feel like moderating some of the forums, please apply! They are not exactly bustling right now, some animation would be good...
Please stay on board. This is going to be a lot of fun.
Well, that's enough talking for now... See you on the forums! By the way, I've added RSS support to them, so if you want an easy way to keep up-to-date on what's happening in the toxic community, just point your aggregator (I use SharpReader) to http://toxicengine.sourceforge.net/forums/rss.php.
Jonathan
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A new release of toxic fixing minor issues is available from the Download page. Comments are welcome.
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After less than two months and half (71 days, to be more precise), we reached yesterday the 100,000th page view!
Thanks to all the web sites that relayed the news, namely (in alphabetical order): 3D Fly, 3D Station, 3D Total, 3Dscena.cz, 3Dzine, CAD3D.it, CafZone, CGarchitect.com, CGTalk, Death Fall, Design Technika, Esmaya.org, flipCode, GameDev.net, Grafika On-line, Graphics.com, OPENGL CZ, OpenGL.org, pointZero, stefkeB, The Render Node Magazine, WWW.3D.PL, www.3DVF.com and all blogs and personal web sites that mentionned toxic.
Also, I would like to thank all the people already working to improve toxic, and specially Koba for his great work on the Blender exporter.
That being said, let's go back to work, the amount of work is HUGE.
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A new release of toxic fixing minor issues is available from the Download page. Comments are welcome.
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I've put online the first revision of the settings files documentation. Check it here.
Please use the dedicated forum topic for your remarks and suggestions.
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A new version of toxic has been released! Go to the Download page to check out improvements.
Post your comments and suggestions or discuss about toxic on the new forums!
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I've finally set up phpBB forums. They can be browsed here.
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I have completed and put online the first revision of the scene file format documentation. You can check it here.
As usual, comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated.
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After one year of development, here is the first public release of toxic. The features of this release are detailled on the Features page.
Intel/Windows binaries can be downloaded from the Download page.
Source code can be checked out from the CVS repository (CVS explained). Alternatively, source code can be browsed here.
Please report any issue with this first release of toxic.
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There it is! toxic website's first incarnation is now online. Thanks to toma (Thomas Arthus, dotan3 on sf.net) for helping me with with the development of the site, to Pistols (François Gilliot) for the nice logo (as usual), to Ramona Munteanu for proof-reading all texts, and finally to SourceForge.net for hosting this website.
This site is definitely not completed. For the moment, it provides essentially a way to download the win32 binary of toxic 1.0 alpha–1, along with some informations to use and to compile toxic. More details on toxic's internals will be included in the future.
Even though everything has been done to ensure compatibility with most web browsers, some of them may display this website incorrectly. Comments and feedback about your experience with this website are greatly appreciated.
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In memory of Robert Beaune (1936–2003).
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