The GI system has many parts, so I here’s an approximate break-down:
Interactive ray-tracer : 2-4 years
Path-tracer (with arbitrary BRDFs, physically accurate metals, importance sampling, caustics, motion blur, depth-of field etc.) : about 3 years
Photon mapping renderer (caustics, spectral rendering with dispersion, volumetric effects, multiple scattering, sub-surface scattering etc.) : about 5 years
Light-map rendering support for all the above : about 3 months
Spherical harmonics support (including pre-processing for per-vertex and texture-based SH) : about 6 months
All these are happening in parallel and I have a full-time job, so I can’t dedicate all my time to EQUINOX-3D. Otherwise it may have been faster.
Also, the whole system is still under constant development. I add new features as the field evolves and new techniques are invented.
I think this might shed some light on approximate time estimates for Blender Internal.
Thanks for the heads-up Claas; just got a quick glide on Equinox website and must say that the software (and the renders) look very interesting, but… is it still developed?
Last release was on December 2008.
Maybe it’s not as depressive as it seems. Depends on how many hours the guy from Equinox3D was thinking to spend per week. As he mentions, he has a full-time job.
If he was thinking for instance to work 10 hours per week, with two full-time coders you have 80 hours of work per week, so each year of those would be 1 month and a half.
Also he seems to be talking about starting from scratch.
Did he already have the knowledge about those features at the time he started writing them? If not, it’s not a fair comparison (plus, it’s not his day job).
This isn’t a realistic scenario if the BF would hire a skilled programmer.
(not saying the equinox guy isn’t skilled, I really mean knowledge about the features…)
edit: ack, basically what Eclectiel already said (I’m slow…).
And @endi: congrats, you’ve got yourself a nice place on top of my ignore list.