Open source happiness
Inside Stories >> Stories about play

We use a lot of open source tools at Pencil Sauce. The world of opensource is liquid and freeflowing and software have the habit of literally evolving on a daily basis. This often causes a perception of unstability, especially in production environments. How does one go about introducing a new open source tool into the existing workflow and tool pipeline? Here's a peek at our process.

I am George Supreeth and I suppose you could call me a technical director. Though I don't really illustrate on projects, one of my jobs is to research new open source graphics tools, test them for stability and integrate them into our tools pipeline. The trick is to add more tools to Pencil Sauce's  software tool chest each year with minimal cost overheads.

Our 3d pipeline is pretty solid and we've been using Blender3d for a few years. Blender is a solid industry standard solution and sometimes could be an overkill on simpler static 3d projects, for print. I had heard of Art of Illusion and regularly downloaded each release, mucked around a bit and set it aside. From AOI's interface, I had assumed that the software was too basic for any decent commercial illustration work. Brother, was I wrong!

Turns out AOI is pretty solid and it's built around a superb renderer. My first step is to download the latest release and try some quick experiments. First I check to see if the software has modern 3d features such as Radiosity rendering, sub division surface modeling etc.

I created these quick milk glasses to test the renderer... 

You can see that the interface is extremely simple. Here is what the render looks like. 

Some details... so you can appreciate the power of AOI's renderer.

Not bad for a free software huh? By now I'm pretty convinced that the software can deliver. I decide to head over to the AOI forums to get feedback on my renders. I also get to speak to the developers of the software who could guide me on workarounds or on functionality that is undocumented or brand new. Friendly Skies, the AOI community is a great sounding board and it spontaneously creates a whole series of glass renderings based on my project. There are now more combinations than I alone could have experimented with. And they all post their source file so I can learn about their individual settings.

Here are a few more experiments and test renders...

When I'm absolutely certain that AOI is rock solid and fits in perfectly, I then conduct a demo to the rest of the team and guide them through the initial stages. Constant work on projects gets them quickly accquainted with the software, and voila... we have a new tool to use.

I followed the same process with Blender3d, Wings3d, Gimp, Inkscape, Kerkythea, Terragen and MakeHuman. This ensures that our competition is kept at bay with an extremely convinient barrier to entry. We also recieve the latest technology releases the moment it's updated in the software's SVN repository. This gives us a huge lead over people dependant on timed software releases.