VirtuaLight 1.4 out soon!!

Hi!

VirtuaLight 1.4 is coming soon! I always loved the look of this free raytracer but sadly I never managed to use it with blender. The old python scripts I found never worked for me which was a shame. That is why I went over to yafray when I discovered it as it has a lot more (now almost exclusive) Blender support. VirtuaLight is in some ways better than yafray (as much as i love yafray) as it supports juicy effects such as volumetric caustics and dispersive optics. The new version of Virtualight will have HDRI input/output, spectral photon mapping and lots of other cutting edge eye candy. I thought the project was dead till I decided to have one last look. It was a pleasant surprise.

Is anyone willing to write a python script for VL 1.4? It seems that as VL has been rewritten, the old scripts won’t work anyway (if they ever did). It would be very satisfying to use VL in conjunction with Blender to show how good freeware CG can get.

Here is the link to the site: http://www.3dvirtualight.com. Information on the old blender/virtualight combination is on http://www.dotblend.com/.

Regards, Koba

100 views and no posts. Is no one interested? Or should I have posted this topic in the “Blender Python and Plugins” section?

It looks really cool, but it isn’t available on anything but Windows. That leaves me and my rendering machines out.

Hmmm, maybe it could have gone into the ‘News & Chat’ forum, because it is Blender related.

I think there was an address in the script for who wrote it.
Might be worth it to contact them.

akator: If you read the March 1, 2004 news post at:

http://www.3dvirtualight.com/news.html

it says:

““VirtuaLight AERE” will be completely freeware and available for Windows and Linux…”

Thanks. I saw that before, but I have a tendency not to count my chickens before they hatch. Maybe the AERE version will be out soon…

akator:

Yes, I know what you mean.

I seem to recall a long time ago also, a Linux version would be released and nothing became of it. Hopefully this time it is different.

(I thought maybe you might be one of those people on an Apple). :slight_smile:

Although Vlight produces some of the best renders around (especially glass), maybe some people may be hesitant to pour their efforts into 1.4 when the new version (AERE) won’t be backwards compatible with earlier versions. Though, I imagine they would take steps to make the transition fairly painless.

Actually… I’m on Macs and sometimes use a Linux box for rendering animations. The Linux box was a freebie, a machine someone was getting rid of so I put it to use. In the next few months I’m getting rid of that and replacing it with another Mac…

Hi.

I understand your concerns about VirtuaLight not being compatible with Linux: I should have realised that a lot of Blender users would be on Linux due to the whole open source ethos as well as Linux being so much better than windows. :frowning:

We can just hope that a Linux version will be made available to you as is stated on the site.

As a hobbyist I would love to experiment with some of those upcoming features. Yafray is great and no doubt will on day rival Virtualight in its feature set (especially this being the last version of Virtualight) but that is a long way off.

This is the last version of Virtualight and it would be a shame if it would be kept out of bounds of Blender users. I understand that Blender has had a major update of the Python API and so any script that could be written can remain compatible with Blender for some time to come.

I see this final recoded version of Virtualight as an opportunity to get VL working with the latest Blender versions. All I can say is I think it would be a shame to see a great, free, raytracer go to waste.

Koba.

P.S> I may well post a copy of this topic in the “News and Chat” forum as you suggested.