Ramen VFX compositing app is back in the game
Alexandre 
11. Jul, 2011
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Esteban Tovagliari continued development of Ramen as closed source VFX compositing application just as planned earlier this year, but now there is a build to test.
If you haven't heard about the project before, Ramen was a very promising node based compositing tool for creating animated special effects, much like The Foundry Nuke and Apple Shake. You can read an intro Ramen tutorial tutorial here at LGW.
The project never gained enough contributors to support itself as free software, so Esteban, its principal developer, decided to close source code and eventually make it commercial.
Since the last available open source version the user interface hasn't changed a lot, but there are many under the hood changes. In fact Esteban rewrote everything, and some parts of user interface are written in Python now. There are also some new features.
Apart from basic 2D tracking (hear, hear!) the project now has more polished use of OpenColorIO (a project by Sony ImageWorks) for color space conversion. Ramen works in linear color space, so all images that are in use are linearized. You can use some default configurations from OpenColorIO like spi-vfx, spi-anim and nuke-default.
Additionally there are several new nodes, GenerateX, ColorX and LayerX, that were implemented using SeExpr language created by Disney Animation Studios. The nodes do procuderal image generation, color correction and compositing.
Finally, the last new node is Move3D which does exactly what you think: transformations in 3D. So far there are no on-canvas control, so you will have to stick to numeric input for a while.
Esteban started a new blog and would be very glad if you forgot the previous website which wasn't even started by him. Currently you can only download a 64bit build for Linux, Windows builds will be available later. You still need a GPU that supports OpenGL 2.0, and NVidia is recommended over ATi (Intel won't work at all).
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