Infinity 3D is a cpu based real-time graphics engine and which now has an addon for Blender.
The main features include a unique geometry feature which makes subdivision surfaces always look high-poly and real-time ray traced shadows and transparency.
There’s not yet general support for node based materials but basic combinations of material nodes work. The geometry feature works transparently through Subdivision Surface modifier.
v1.14.10 is available to download for Windows, Intel based Mac and Linux and the separate addon works with Blender 2.9.2 and newer. A planned but not yet available for purchase early bird price is 45€ one off payment, no subscription.
Hi,
The point is fast rendering with more usable image quality compared to rasterization and also better accessibility as only a cpu is required.
Potential use cases in Blender include fast video rendering e.g. for game cutscenes, real-time viewport usage e.g. modeling or exploring models with ray traced subdivs and ray traced shadows features on and image composition and rendering when one wants to work with a real-time engine instead of a path tracer.
Compared to Cycles this ray tracer is real-time and has a ray traced subdivs feature but doesn’t calculate path traced lighting.
Compared to Eevee the primary visibility is ray traced which gives a basic image quality comparable to any ray tracer such as Cycles, ray traced shadows, ray traced transparency and the ray traced subdivs feature.
Of course, some things are also missing. There isn’t yet general support for node based materials and no soft shadows which both Cycles and Eevee have in some form. Eevee also has screen space effects that are not yet feature matched.
Clear,
Now I understand and certainly seems to make sense compared to Cycles for animated images, coming from ArchViz applications where most time static images of the highest quality are usually the target, this was not immediately apparent.
What is appreciated compared to Eevee, is ray-traced shadows, lack of sharp shadows (with any settings I tried, I tried a lot) was a problem for me and certainly if I don’t need to set up all the Eevee gizmos to simulate light transmission. For static pictures I pretty much gave up on anything but Cycles, since with faster software, cpus, gpus and denoisers, it’s a small wait for a good end result.
My 2 cents, find a way to use/interpret the same shader nodes, as Eevee does with Cycles (for most cases). It will help your app pickup momentum, by making it easy to test. Surely you won’t get the same results and some features will not make sense but find the analogies and work reading info “off” the same nodes.
Thanks for trying to add one more fascinating feature.l
Here’s a picture I originally planned to add into the top of this post to give an idea about what works and show the addon in Blender. I didn’t obviously model this scene. There’s no baked lighting unless one counts an environment texture. It renders interactively.
