Hello,
for those who are interested in the renderman-renderer 3Delight, here’s an update and the message the developing team send out into the world:
"A beta release of 3Delight version 1.0 is now available for download
at http://www.3delight.com. It incorporates the following improvements:
-
Primitives - Subdivision surfaces are now supported. Trim curves
are now fully supported by the ray-tracer. Also, the “facevarying”
variable class is now supported. Finally, it is now possible to
attach u, v varyings to polygons (as well as other geometries). -
Memory - Memory usage has been reduced significantly. In some cases,
scenes that required 200MB now require about 50MB of memory. -
Motion Blur - 3Delight now implements the GeomtricApproximation
“motion” attributes which accelerates motion blur rendering. -
Ray-Tracing - 3Delight’s ray-tracer speed has been greatly improved
for polygonal (or other planar) geometries. A tenfold speed increase
has been achieved. -
Global Illumination - Two new functions are now available in the
shading langage for Global Illumination: “occlusion” and “indirect-
diffuse”. The first one for Ambient Occlusion computation. The second
one for calculation of diffuse-to-diffuse indirect light transport
and to simulate effects such as color bleeding. It can also be used
with HDRI (High Dynamic Range Images) as environment maps. -
Deep Shadow Maps - The file format has changed and is now compatible
across multiple platforms. We have also added an option to the DSM
display driver to disable “mipmap”. Finally, we have improved speed
at the consultation phase. -
Textures - A new very high quality texture alghorithm has been
implemented (without speed trade-off). Part of the quality
improvement comes from the texture preparation/optimisation tool
(tdlmake). So, to get full benefit, users should pre-process again
their textures using “tdlmake”. Note that the efficiency of the
“tdlmake” tool have also been improved significantly: for very
high resolution textures such as 16K x 16K, the gain is more than
tenfold in speed and uses only 6MB instead of 512MB of memory. -
Filtering - Filtering speed and quality has been improved. For low
complexity scenes, with high oversampling (pixelsamples) and wide
filters (filterwidth), we have mesured gains up to 20%. -
JPEG - 3Delight’s texture preparation/optimisation tool (tdlmake)
now accepts image in JPEG format. -
TIFF - 3Delight’s TIFF display driver now supports output of 16 and
32 bits (IEEE floating point) per sample. -
Shader Compiler - 3Delight’s shader compiler incorporates many small
improvements that make it more friendly to programmers: warnings on
uninitialized variables, more precise error reports, no more complains
when “extern” variables are not declared as such and some typecasting
and promotion problems are solved. Also, some limitations were lifted:
array indices are no longer restricted to be uniform and DSOs can now
incorporate more than one shaderops. Finally, “__nondiffuse” and
“__nospecular” inside light shaders are now correctly interpreted by
diffuse(), specular() and phong(). IMPORTANT NOTE: this new release
of 3Delight requires shaders to be recompiled. -
RenderFarm - 3Delight now offers a unique feature to automatically
cache texture files on the rendering servers local hard drive. The
important benefits in large renderfarm applications are to signifi-
cantly reduce network traffic as well as file server load. -
Other noteworthy changes:
. textureinfo() is now fully functional. The following fields are now
accessible: projection matrix and resolution.
. In the previous version, the “zfile” display driver directly
created a “shadowmap” file. Now, for compatibility reasons, the
“zfile” display driver creates a “zfile” file (pretty much raw
depth values) compatible with RiShadowMake to create a “shadowmap”
file. The “shadowmap” display driver continues to directly create
a “shadowmap” file.
Even though this is a beta release, we feel it is very stable given the
feedbacks we have received from a limited pre-release over the past few
weeks. If you experience any problems, let us know as soon as possible.
The 3Delight Team.
ps: Ray tracer speed will be further improved in the final 1.0.0 release."
Tobur.