RenderMan is produced by Pixar and is used to render all of their in-house 3D animated movie productions. It is also available as a commercial product licensed to third parties. RenderMan has been used in creating digital visual effects for Hollywood blockbuster movies such as Titanic, the Star Wars prequels, and The Lord of the Rings.
On May 30, 2014, it was announced that Pixar would be offering a free non-commercial version of RenderMan that became available to download as of March 23, 2015.
VLC media player (commonly known as VLC) is a portable, free and open-source, cross-platform media player and streaming media server written by the VideoLAN project.
VLC media player supports many audio and video compression methods and file formats, including DVD-Video, video CD and streaming protocols. It is able to stream media over computer networks and to transcode multimedia files.
The default distribution of VLC includes a large number of free decoding and encoding libraries, avoiding the need for finding/calibrating proprietary plugins. It also gained distinction as the first player to support playback of encrypted DVDs on Linux and OS X.
Celestia is a free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy. All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A ‘point-and-goto’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit. Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that’s not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.
