Group Chat about the Future of Shade?

[Lynn Fredricks]

Hello all,

Lynn Fredricks here from Mirye Software. With the release of Shade 9 in January and the recent review by Juan in 3D World Magazine, interest in the future of Shade has blossomed.

I was wondering if there would be any interest in a having a group chat conference? We are a supporter of Content Creator's Guild, and CCG's site has a very functional chat system (when you join and visit, check the bottom edge of your browser - just like here). Depending on the level of interest, we can set a date and time.

If you are interested and want to help set up a date and time, please reply to the thread here.

[Joseph R. Saylor, III]

Yes, Lynn, I absolutely would be interested in participating. Please let me know any other information about this possibility. Thanks!

[Larry N. Bolch]

I am an experience Shade user and always glad to share my experience. For the most part, my time is entirely flexible. On the other hand, since Shade9 is an interim product, would it not be wise to wait for 10.5? Or is it still too far in the future?

larry!
http://www.larry-bolch.com/shade/

[Lynn Fredricks]

Hi Larry,

We can actually discuss some things about Shade 10. Id like to collect feedback from everyone so we can also share it with our friends in Japan about wants and desires for future versions. If we want too long, then next versions could already be set in stone. We can also do more group chats in the future, too :-)

[Larry N. Bolch]

Not waiting for the chat, if there is any way you can urge our Japanese friends to incorporate OpenCL, ASAP, the world would be most grateful. It was finalized as a standard late in 2008, and SDKs are now in distribution. It is an open standard and companies can use it freely.

Graphics cards that support it have been on the market for a couple of years now, and can be quite affordable. I expect that most of us already have a usable card in our machines. OpenCL unites nVidia's CUDA, ATi's Firestream and enables development of any future parallel processing solutions.

I have an ATi application that runs on a less-than-state-of-the-art GPU that cut video transcoding from an hour and a half for a one hour show to 12 minutes!

While GPUs are currently being used as number crunchers in oil-patch seismology, fluid dynamics and weather modeling, they are uniquely suited to 3-D. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU Nothing has more potential to cut render times so greatly for so little money.

[Juan Manuel Bautista Hoepfner]

I would like a group chat, it sounds like an excellent idea!
Any time would mostly be o.k. with me, just would like to know a bit in advance, so I can be sure to be in front of my computer when that happens.

[Stefan]

Hi Lynn,
i´m also interested. However i´m not in the same timeozone as all of you guys and could only participate during weekends (Sat, Sun or late Friday evenings).

Regards
Stefan

[Lynn Fredricks]

Hi all,

Take a look at the Time and Date Converter for Meeting Planning - Ive set this to calculate between times between Los Angeles/Portland (we are in Oregon) and Berlin, Germany.

The Green/Yellow bands look to be the best - here is a good one:
Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 15:00:00
Los Angeles/Portland Wed 8:00 AM
Berlin Wed 5:00 PM

Being over on the "left coast" this puts it early in the morning and around quitting time throughout Europe. What do you all think? Can you make this?

[Stefan]

If all others don´t mind that would be a time schedule for me, during the week. were i can make it (even a bit later if it´s nessesary for you).

BTW. are there some things users of the chat system at CCG should be aware of (special commands etc.), because it´s long long ago since i did that.

[Lynn Fredricks]

We use NING, so its whatever works with NING - I haven't tried yet to incorporate HTML links, for example, during a chat.

Its on all the time - so go ahead and experiment :-)

[Larry N. Bolch]

I am in the mountain time zone - an hour earlier than the left coast, and am always awake at the crack of noon. I become somewhat more coherent after the first adjustment of blood in my caffeine system.

[Juan Manuel Bautista Hoepfner]

From what I can understand from the japanese e-frontier website, Shade10.5 has gone a long way, what with render passes, collada support, epix image export, snap functions, better local axis manipulation... sigh, so much good stuff!
OpenCL would be awesome, as well as implementing a QT interface.
But mostly, a "python for Shade" book would be heaven sent.

[Stefan]

I post the link for the Python Reference Manual (japanese) at Shader Cafe, because i can´t currently add a link here. I do it just in case you don´t have the link or in case others might be interested in...

"See" you all tomorrow...

Regards
Stefan