Open Source Renderer Aqsis 1.0 Released 16
cgTobi writes "I am very pleased to announce that the stable 1.0 release of Aqsis - The Open Source Renderman Renderer, has been released. This release will remain stable in terms of publicly visible interface, no new features, only bug fixes. This will allow users who have been concerned in the past about things changing underneath them to use Aqsis in the confidence that it will not change. We have branched the CVS repository to allow 1.0 to be maintained in terms of bug fixes, while work goes ahead on new exciting features, including performance and memory optimisation, ray tracing/global illumination, and deep shadow maps."
Re:This is cool (Score:5, Informative)
If it helps, Aqsis is about at the stage where Pixar's Photorealistic RenderMan was at about the time of Toy Story. So while it is unfortunate (and we know how we're going to do it), don't think of this as a limitation. :-)
Unlike BMRT, it's available. :-)
Re:This is cool (Score:3, Informative)
Blender, as far as I know, is just a design tool, it doesn't actually do any rendering, it just allows you to develop models in a range of formats that you can then throw at a renderer.
BMRT was nice in that it did radiosity as well as ray-tracing, which meant that you could get "soft" diffuse reflections, giving you a far more realistic image. I don't know of any other packages which are anything like as good.
An improvement over ray-tracing is "cone-tracing", as that allows you to handle direct reflections that have some element of diffusion. (Which is most of them.) Cone-tracing programs exist, but I don't know of any really good ones.
The "best" (from a graphics point of view) would be to use wave-tracing, as this allows you to handle not only any type of reflection, but also diffraction. As far as I know, there are no wave-tracers out there except MAYBE in the very high-end market. Wave-tracing is very expensive on CPU cycles, which is why people tend to use approximations.
Re:This is cool (Score:3, Informative)
Cone tracing is a nice idea at first, but it doesn't actually fit well with the demands of a modern high-end renderer:
Not polarisation, though. Well, not yet, anyway.