3Delight software is a very fast RenderMan-compliant renderer designed to produce photorealistic images for mature production environment.
3Delight is RSP's renderman renderer of choice, and it was the only render we used to complete Superman and Charlotte's Web. Not having to wait months for bug fixes or feature requests just plain rocks, without DNA being able to give us this level of service we could not have finished our shows. 3Delight does what it says on the tin!
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Here are some key features of "3Delight":
· ray tracing
· global illumination
· motion blur
· depth of field
· subdivision surfaces
· programmable shaders
· quality antialiasing
· antialiased multi-depth shadow maps
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· The shading interpreter (the "virtual machine" which is responsible of shader
· evaluation) is now using propetary just-in-time compilation technology which
· translates RenderMan RSL 2.0 shaders into SSE2 machine code. This makes
· the shader interpretation up to three times faster and gives a 30% speed
· improvement on a typical beauty render.
· Ray-tracing of occlusion and transmission rays has been greatly improved.
· Speedups can go anywhere between 10% and 300%.
· Ray-tracing of displacements has been optimized, speedups of up to 300% are expected.
· Added automatic ray thresholding for improved performance on highly reflective/ refractive surfaces (for example, glass).
· Improved performance of area lights when using the ‘illuminance’ sampling
· mode. Acceleration can reach an order of magnitude with high sample counts
· and deep ray levels.
Features:
· A new point-based global illumination algorithm gives very high quality results and supports transparency, a first for this class of algorithms.
· Added support for Ptextures.
· Added support for multi-channel exrs. Writing such files doesn’t require the
· installation of additional libraries anymore.
· Per-frame shading for multi-segment motion-blur can greatly improve performance.
· Point-cloud baking process produces a more even distribution of points and
· the IO (reading and writing PTC files) has been multi-threaded.
· Point-based occlusion() and indirectdiffuse() can receive a list of input
· files. An example usage is to separate static and dynamic elements for a more efficient baking process.
· Introducing dynamic output variables (using the new outputchannel()
· shadeop). This unique feature enables shader writers to create output
· variables on-the-fly inside shaders, lights and co-shaders. Along with
· the previously available “display subsets”, this feature adds unparalleled
· flexibility to layer-oriented rendering.
· Added ability to use OpenEXR image files directly as textures. Additionally,
· arbitrary “tags” can be passed to the OpenEXR display driver.
· The ray-trace hider can now render in progressive mode. This makes it more
· suitable for faster lighting work.
· Multi-camera rendering can now shade grids once per camera to correctly
· render view-dependent illumination such as reflections and specular highlights. This feature, unique to 3Delight, can be enabled on a per-primitive basis using an attribute.
· • The renderer accepts a list of cameras to act as “dicing cameras”. For some
· particular geometry, 3Delight will use the most suitable camera to perform the dicing. This feature can be used to properly bake geometry in preparation for a fly-through (by providing a number of dicing cameras along the fly-through path).
· The subsurface scattering algorithm has been considerably improved: varying
· absorption and scattering properties are now accepted, artifacts resulting
· from low point density are fixed and memory usage has been cut by half.
· Additionally, the pre-processing phase has been multi-threaded for a reduced
· “time to first pixel”.
· Ray-tracer’s building phase has been multi-threaded. Furthermore, the raytracer now supports features that were only available in REYES such as AOVs and matte objects.
· Photon mapping quality has been greatly improved and photon maps are now 50% smaller. The photon-casting process has been multi-threaded. Speed improvement is linear with the number of cores.
· Texture mapping blur quality (during texture() calls) has been improved.
· Additional improvements include better tessellation quality for subdivision
· meshes, better non-raster oriented dicing and better distributions of rays for
· ray-tracing functions.
· Added ability to read and write TIFF textures larger than 4GB.
· Shader Compiler
· Shader compilation speed has been improved for large shaders.
· Improved RSL 2.0 support. This include better support for structures, dynamic
· arrays, etc... .
Pipeline & APIs:
· Introducing the 3Delight Gx API for evaluation of arbitrary geometry and
· attached primitive variables. This very simple API allows the user to evaluate
· any geometry supported by 3Delight (including subdivision surfaces).
Geometry:
· can be evaluated both during an ongoing render or separately from any
· rendering context. This makes 3Delight usable as a general purpose geometry evaluation library.
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