Just a guy, drifting.
Sunflow
A great, Java built, open source renderer.
Image Planes Part 4 (Object IDs)
Nov 19th
Didn’t think the image plane series was complete enough so I tacked on this little diddy. I covers how to get object (or primitive) ids using image planes in Houdini and what you can do with them in the compositor using the lumakey COP. The compositor part I learned from SYmek, who I feel is an integral part of the Houdini community (and who I had an argument with about points on the Sunflow forum a while back 
).
Sunflow Wiki
Dec 5th
Yes, I made one. I made one despite a poll that showed a pdf manual would have been preferred. I just found using a wiki so much easier to update and way faster than sourceforge when I want to remember some code block, grab a janino shader, or recall a tip someone mentioned in a post 8 months ago. I consider it totally unofficial and I’m not going to advertise it’s out there by mentioning it all the time but I will add a link on my site and I’ll point to it in my signature on the Sunflow forums. Hopefully, a new Sunflow user/developer will stumble upon it and find it useful.
What’s amusing is the addictiveness that comes with creating a wiki. I find myself constantly adding to it or tweaking it here and there. The truly daunting task will be to do the new Sunflow .sca format. Since it’s not yet finalized I’m not going to start on it, but when the next version hits I’ll scramble to get all the .sc info moved to the .sca section.
P.S. I’ve been off and on with a WIP, but I put an early version of it in the gallery.
Sunflow Distributed Rendering Now Housed Here!
Aug 26th
Earlier this year, Szabolcs Pota used a Jini based grid system called JGrid and hooked Sunflow to it. Needless to say this was a cool thing since it is entirely open source – no CPU limits here! – and it gave Sunflow real distributed rendering capability. It seems that the site that had all the files on it was no longer functioning, but luckily I collect files, so I had everything but I was concerned that Sunflow users wouldn’t have access to it. A quick e-mail to Szabolcs, and an offer to house it all on my site brings us to the title of this post. The site is as it was at its new location. So now all Sunflow users can once again have access to this amazing tool!
WotC Community Page