Mauritius
06-09-2004, 05:52 AM
3Delight 2.1 has just been released Monday. With a Liquid/Maya 5 build, linked against 3Delight, available for Windows since yesterday (see this thread (http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=146328)) I though this might be worth posting.
Cheers,
Moritz
(official release announcement follows:)
About 3Delight
3Delight is a fast RenderMan®-compliant renderer designed to produce photorealistic images for serious production environments. Some of its features include ray tracing, global illumination, motion blur, depth of field, subdivision surfaces, programmable shaders, quality antialiasing and antialiased multi-depth shadow maps. It is available for a wide variety of platforms, including Windows, MacOS X, Linux and IRIX.
3Delight is available free of charge (with no feature restrictions) for non-commercial applications, as well as for limited scale commercial applications. The current version of 3Delight is 2.1. Version 0.9.6 is also available. Updates are provided on a regular basis (every 4 to 6 months).
3Delight 2.1
3Delight 2.1 is available for download. Here is a list of the most important improvements included in this release:
New Windows Installer
This should fix all reported path problems.
Motion Blur
3Delight now supports unlimited multi-segment motion blur for geometry deformation, transformation and camera movement.
Improved Image Quality
A new sampling strategy reduces noise when rendering motion-blur, indirect diffuse lighting, ambient occlusion, shadow maps and ray-traced shadows (when blurred). Environment map lookups give smoother looks than in previous releases.
Improved Visibility Culling
3Delight now discards geometry more aggressively with the "opacity threshold" attribute. This proves beneficial for scenes with a large number of layered semi-transparent surfaces (e.g. hair).
See image (http://www.3delight.com/ZDoc/3delight_18.html#ANC16).
Deep Shadow Maps
New analytical filtering of shadow lookups gives beautiful, precise shadows even for very thin geometry such as hair. A new compression algorithm roughly halves DSM storage requirements.
Ray Tracing
The new 'gather()' shadeop provides a flexible interface to hemisphere sampling. Ray-tracing performance improved significantly, especially for subdivision surfaces.
Geometry
Algorithms for dicing subdivision and implicit surfaces (blobbies) are three times faster on average. In addition, polygonal models made of triangles render better due to an improved dicing scheme.
Sub Surface Light Transport
'subsurface()' is now more robust, faster and uses less memory. A 'shadingrate' attribute gives more control over algorithm's performance.
See image (http://www.3delight.com/ZDoc/3delight_36.html#ANC71).
Rx Library Calls
The renderer now provides DSOs with access to some useful internal SL functions such as 'option()', 'attribute()', 'texture()' and 'noise()'.
Network Cache
In addition to its network texture caching functionality, 3Delight now caches RIB archives stored on network drives (e.g. NFS).
Shader Compiler
Error and warning reports are less intrusive and more accurate.
Thanks,
The 3Delight Team / www.3delight.com
(RenderMan® is a registered trademark of Pixar)
Cheers,
Moritz
(official release announcement follows:)
About 3Delight
3Delight is a fast RenderMan®-compliant renderer designed to produce photorealistic images for serious production environments. Some of its features include ray tracing, global illumination, motion blur, depth of field, subdivision surfaces, programmable shaders, quality antialiasing and antialiased multi-depth shadow maps. It is available for a wide variety of platforms, including Windows, MacOS X, Linux and IRIX.
3Delight is available free of charge (with no feature restrictions) for non-commercial applications, as well as for limited scale commercial applications. The current version of 3Delight is 2.1. Version 0.9.6 is also available. Updates are provided on a regular basis (every 4 to 6 months).
3Delight 2.1
3Delight 2.1 is available for download. Here is a list of the most important improvements included in this release:
New Windows Installer
This should fix all reported path problems.
Motion Blur
3Delight now supports unlimited multi-segment motion blur for geometry deformation, transformation and camera movement.
Improved Image Quality
A new sampling strategy reduces noise when rendering motion-blur, indirect diffuse lighting, ambient occlusion, shadow maps and ray-traced shadows (when blurred). Environment map lookups give smoother looks than in previous releases.
Improved Visibility Culling
3Delight now discards geometry more aggressively with the "opacity threshold" attribute. This proves beneficial for scenes with a large number of layered semi-transparent surfaces (e.g. hair).
See image (http://www.3delight.com/ZDoc/3delight_18.html#ANC16).
Deep Shadow Maps
New analytical filtering of shadow lookups gives beautiful, precise shadows even for very thin geometry such as hair. A new compression algorithm roughly halves DSM storage requirements.
Ray Tracing
The new 'gather()' shadeop provides a flexible interface to hemisphere sampling. Ray-tracing performance improved significantly, especially for subdivision surfaces.
Geometry
Algorithms for dicing subdivision and implicit surfaces (blobbies) are three times faster on average. In addition, polygonal models made of triangles render better due to an improved dicing scheme.
Sub Surface Light Transport
'subsurface()' is now more robust, faster and uses less memory. A 'shadingrate' attribute gives more control over algorithm's performance.
See image (http://www.3delight.com/ZDoc/3delight_36.html#ANC71).
Rx Library Calls
The renderer now provides DSOs with access to some useful internal SL functions such as 'option()', 'attribute()', 'texture()' and 'noise()'.
Network Cache
In addition to its network texture caching functionality, 3Delight now caches RIB archives stored on network drives (e.g. NFS).
Shader Compiler
Error and warning reports are less intrusive and more accurate.
Thanks,
The 3Delight Team / www.3delight.com
(RenderMan® is a registered trademark of Pixar)