Interesting news from the Reality site:

"...I decided to release Reality as an Open Source Software (OSS) covered by the very permissible BSD License. I hope that this will inspire other developers to pick up the project and update it. The good news is that Reality is designed to work with multiple hosts and multiple renderers. The system itself is not tied to LuxRender. You want to make Reality run as a plugin for Blender or Modo? That requires just a bit of Python code on the host app. You want to take the Eevee code from Blender and connect it to Reality? It can be done. The source code is in a repository on BitBucket. I will provide the necessary information to replicate the compilation of the project and on how to start making the first modifications to any developer who is willing to pick up the baton..."

http://preta3d.com/reality-now-open-source-software/

Hmmm...been trying to download the resource from bitbucket, but when I try to unzip it, it is corrupted/invalid. No problems downloading similar large archives.

Have you informed Paolo about this?

Greymom posted at 6:52PM Sat, 05 October 2019 - #4366018

Hmmm...been trying to download the resource from bitbucket, but when I try to unzip it, it is corrupted/invalid. No problems downloading similar large archives.

It's a git repository, which works a bit different. Using Git means you have to clone it first (then you can fork it.) This way you can get the whole thing in one go, and it will have the same directory structure and file placement. It also means you gotta install a Git client if you want the whole thing.

(there may be a zip download, but if it's a proper repo, I'd prefer to get that via Git, SVN, CVS, whatever...)

Well crap, that's broke too - not Git, but Mercurial, but that seems to cough up the same permission errors...

...and I got it sorted. (This is why I use Git :/ )

A small news piece at another blog

http://www.jurn.org/dazposer/?p=11634

Penguinisto: Thanks for the info! Not familiar with GIT, but will give it a try.

@Greymom - I was almost right... it actually uses Mercurial. not Git.

Get it while you can.

Bitbucket is sunsetting Mercurial in less than a year. June 1, 2020 is d-day.

Someone needs to migrate it, go someone can "git" it in the future.

Tech can be sooooo annoying. Betamax. PPC. HDDVD. 3DTVs. 32bit. Google Inbox, Wave, Plus, Nexus, Android tablets. A compelling laptop from Apple (for devs).

I had to use an MacOS VM (4 or 5 MacOS versions old) to compile a compatible version of QT for Reality. That was a while ago. Not sure that VM still exists. It requires a very specific version of QT.

Here is the forum thread where Paolo seems to be active and responding to questions:

http://preta3d.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=1128

An update:

I just added a few instructions in the Reality repository on how to compile it. I also added two large zipfiles with the Qt libraries that are necessary to compile Reality on Windows and Mac OS. This repository is called reality-libs.

The whole project is here:

https://bitbucket.org/%7B4306b2ca-f3b1-474d-b79b-d59633e23dc3%7D/

Ah, nice. I'll give it a go. :)

Looks like it's time to fire up "the beast". My little laptop is not up to it.

Any luck compiling Reality?

Any chance Reality or Lux will be written to render in Metal? Here's an article about Apple's new rendering mode: https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/10/18/editorial-mac-pro-puts-the-pedal-to-metal-in-apples-race-with-nvidia

Look in the Luxrender forum for more info on new features. They usually only support open standards since developer time is limited. The next release lists other new features, one of the skipped features is NVIDIA only RTX support, since it would lock out AMD and Intel.

OK, I understand, 3Drendero. I'm wondering, though, for the Mac side, since Open GL and Open CL are deprecated, and the Mac OS does not come with the latest versions of these open standards -- I'm wondering if, during compiling, it would be possible to include the latest versions of Open CL and Open GL, and get the Mac OS to use them, at least when Reality and Lux are being employed. Is that possible? I don't know. But it was a mistake, I thing, for Paolo, in essence, to neglect the Mac OS, and go with "Windows Only" in his ads, when he had been promising a great speed boost to both the Mac and the PC users. I know he lost some of the Mac people at that point. And he himself had been writing on the Mac, I believe. Anyway, that's the past, and we can't send time travelers back, as in Travelers or Continuum, so looking to the future, is it possible to get the Mac OS (Catalina, especially, the latest OS), to use the latest versions of OPEN GL and OPEN CL when the user starts up Reality and then Lux? I'd be as happy as Kiera to travel into this new future timeline.

I had to rebuild my laptop from bare metal after Catalina destroyed it.

I have not gotten Reality to compile. An issue with 32/64 bit near as I can tell. Haven't had time to drill down but I hope to this week.