Pixie Renderer 1.7.6 review
DownloadPixie is a RenderMan like photorealistic renderer
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Pixie is a RenderMan like photorealistic renderer. It is being developed in the hope that it will be useful for graphics research and for people who can not afford a commercial renderer.
Pixie Renderer project is an open source project licensed under Gnu Public License (GPL).
Pixie is an open source project. None of the people contributing to Pixie is making any money out of it and we're not asking for money. We need your feedback to keep this project alive. Use Pixie, submit bug reports, pictures you rendered with Pixie or just your good wishes.
One of the biggest considerations in Pixie's development is the modularity. If you're interested in developing additional features / improving current features, improving the web site, optimizing Pixie, please let us know.
Here are some key features of "Pixie Renderer":
All RenderMan 3.2 primitives
Quadrics: Sphere, Disk, Cone, Paraboloid, Hyperboloid, Cylinder, Toroid
Parametrics: Bilinear/Bicubic patches, NURBS
Subdivision Surfaces including crease/hole/interpolateboundary tags
Points
Curves
Convex / Concave polygons with or without holes and their meshes
Object instancing / delayed primitives
Displacements
Programmable shading (RenderMan Shading Language)
High quality texture/shadow/environment mapping
High dynamic range input/output
Raytracing
Motion blur
Depth of field
Reyes style rendering (very fast)
Occlusion culling
Network parallel rendering
DSO shaders
Global illumination
Photon mapping
Irradiance caching
Automatically raytraced smooth reflections / shadows
What's New in This Release:
Speedups:
This version of Pixie has a lot of speed improvements and leaner/meaner code.
In particular, Depth Of Field and Motion Blur are improved.
Parts of the image with no objects will be processed faster.
New Features:
Updated 'show' interface - supports previewing brickmaps, pointclouds, as well as irradiance caches and photonmaps
Improved 'mid' dist shadow maps - mid dist shadow maps are improved, allowing shadow maps to use much smaller biases
Greatly reduced memory consumption when using many shaders Scenes with lots of shaders should experience a reduced memory consumption, and may also render faster
bake3d() can bake to an arbitrary coordinate system, and texture3d() can lookup in that coordinate system. Thus moving geometry can be baked
Baking to textures is supported via the bake3d() shadeop. See the
documentation for more details on that technique.
Fixes:
texture environment lookups previously were in a rotated coordinate
system which didn't match the specification. This is fixed.
Compilation - Pixie now compiles happily with -fstrict-aliasing on under gcc
Issues with OpenEXR crashing under OSX are resolved
Point cloud lookups can distinguish reverse-facing points previously the lookup may have interpolated from points which face away from the lookup direction
The radiusscale option to bake3d() and texture3d() works correctly
baking on objects with negative scale (or who'se transformation had a determinant which was < 0) now works
Network / netrender renders and parallell multiproc renders work when the number of procs / servers is not an even number
Photon mapping - issues with photonmaps crashing have been resolved
RI interface - the definition of RtPointer has been changed to void * to match the standard
Fixed indirectdiffuse when combined with an environment map - previously the environment map irradiance was counted twice
Output of RiCurves in the rib works now when all curves do not have the same number of points, or when the basis-step is not 3
Updated docs - tutorials on how to bake to texture
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