Pixar is also committed to free software

Pixar has decided to open source the code of its evaluator subdiv. Under the name of OpenSubDiv is described as a collection of libraries open source that implement evaluation by subdivision of surfaces high performance on parallel CPU and GPU architectures.

The 2012 SigGraph convention got a bit shaken when Pixar, the company founded by Steve Jobs and owner of unrivaled successes in animation, said it would release to the public a bundle of libraries to create surface subdivisions, a technique Pixar has used outstanding in the making of his films. With OpenSubdiv, Pixar releases part of the code that has made it successful and hopes that it will become the standard for the quality of 3D video effects to homogenize their quality.

In absolute simplicity, subdivisions are a technique used to generate smooth curves and surfaces. Now, if you want to know exactly what a surface subdivision is, Wikipedia has the best answer for now: “In the world of 3D computer graphics, a surface subdivision is a method of representing a smooth surface by specifying a less detailed polygon mesh. The subdivided surface can be calculated from a coarser mesh, iterating the process of dividing each polygon face into smaller faces that best approximate the smoothed surface. " That's accuracy, but in Spanish it would be that the surface subdivision implementation takes a rough mesh of low-count polygons and smooths them out. This tends to improve the performance of various effects, such as creating wrinkles and folds on textures. With the implementation of the package released by Pixar, the evaluation of the GPU on the surfaces is faster and more effective.

The importance of the release also lies in the fact that there are many different ways to implement subdivs out there, but Pixar believes that the best is hers. And the truth is that millions of people believe the same thing. By making it open source, Pixar's intention is to make it the industry standard and homogenize quality in terms of redrawing curves and surfaces.

Source: neotheus