“Brian Paul’s answers to your questions. Even if you’ve
never heard of Brian or Mesa, his comments give insight into how an
“essential but unsung” Open Source project runs, and why Brian has
devoted endless time to Mesa.“
“Are there any plans to develop a “professional” tool based on
Mesa for “professional quality” 3d rendering?”
“I think most of the commercial 3D vendors provide render farm
support. SoftImage, for example, uses Mental Ray as its
(distributed) renderer. However, these renderers are not based on
OpenGL/Mesa. They’re typically scan-line renderers which don’t need
or use graphics hardware. All you need is a lot of memory, disk,
bandwidth and CPU power.”
“A few people have experimented with parallelizing Mesa either
on multi-cpu systems or on network clusters. I used to have the URL
for one such project but have misplaced it. I’m sure that if you do
a web search for “Mesa” and “parallel” you’ll find something. I
don’t have plans to personally work on that sort of thing- I’ve got
too many other things to do.”