I’ve just stumbled across the indigo render ‘machine’ i suppose i can call it, have downloaded it and have been rendering a still image, a very simple image of Suzanne with a basic lighting rig, which has now been rendering for an hour and twenty minutes, and apparently isn’t finished yet.
Can somebody please explain indigo to me? as in what, why, how, and in what capacity
Indigo is an unbiased renderer. What it does is starts shooting random rays all around the scene and starts collecting them. At first, this means the image is very grainy and doesn’t look good. The longer you let it run, the more accurate and noise free it will become. This style of rendering takes into account all the ambient light in the scene and produces very accurate and realistic results.
These type of renderers are not suited currently for animations, but for stills, they produce awesome results (at the expense of time.) I also find that setting up a scene in an unbiased renderer easy since you simply place lamps where they would really be and start rendering. It’s easy to get started…
I use Lux render (www.luxrender.net) for my unbiased renders since it is open source and free to use. It also works on Windows, Mac and Linux so it’s ver versatile. I typically do some small renders to make sure things are looking decent and then let it run overnight. When I wake up…I have something that looks like a photograph.
I’ve created a video tutorial on how to export from Blender into Lux (it was made for the MOI3D guys so the tutorial starts there and then moves onto Blender and Lux.) You can view it here:
Indigo will keep rendering forever by default, you need to stop Indigo rendering and save out the image when it is clear enough.
thanks phil, I’ll give Lux a go as well, sounds a bit less restricting than indigo in terms of licensing