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Free Renderers You'd Like To Use


Jason

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Hi all,

In the same vein as the recent SunFlow Renderer thread, what are some other freeware/open source renderers that you find intriguing?

The ante is that they they should be open source standalone renderers which can take an ASCII scene description.

They can be anything from raytracers, scanline renderers, particle or volumetric renderers.

Cheers,

Jason

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I have nothing to add to this... except:

Ha! Povray, sweet! I wish I still had my three chrome spheres over a watery surface image around. Took me 3 days to render that one.

Aside from that though, those renderers look amazing. I demand that someone with more time do something so that I can render out of Houdini with them...

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and :

"Indigo does not need any render parameters like GI samples, AO samples, AA samples, Soft shadows,

etc, and complicated lighting setups to achieve realistic results.

Indigo is free for non- and commercial use, but as of writing is not open-source."

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Ha, ha! Pretty images, but you gotta be worried about their buy-off line: The renderer that keeps on rendering!

Yeah, that sounds funny. That was voted for the best frase on a users contest.

I guess they liked it because of the way the software works, your rendering never finishes. You just stop it once you're satisfied with the way it looks.

I like the renderer because of it physical nature, and it really is pretty simple to do natural looking lighting conditions.

These where done with 3dsmax and indigo.

post-847-1171246623_thumb.jpg

post-847-1171246636_thumb.jpg

post-847-1171246650_thumb.jpg

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Any idea how it handles large scene files?

Does the whole scene description have to be in ascii? That's gonna get pretty tricky to handle with lots of geometry. I like the way binary ifds mix ascii and binary data, makes the scene file readable but compact.

I'm really hoping H9 brings some improvements to GI, I'd love to use it more.. (in fact I love to use it period)

Edited by sibarrick
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Any idea how it handles large scene files?

Does the whole scene description have to be in ascii? That's gonna get pretty tricky to handle with lots of geometry. I like the way binary ifds mix ascii and binary data, makes the scene file readable but compact.

Sibarrick - scene descriptions in indigo are in XML.

I haven't done any complex scene because I have a slow computer at home. But HERE you can see a good example of instancing, and that famous scanned DRAGON that is suposed to be a few million poligons.

But what indigo really excels is in the rendering complexity such as DIFFUSE REFLECTIONS, etc...

Maybe you guys could ask more questions to OnoSendai, he is the developer of Indigo, and is pretty active in the forums.

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Has anyone managed to get SunFlow to run on Linux? I'm on FedoraCore 4.

If I try to run it, I get:

% > java -Xmx1G -server -jar sunflow.jar 
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: SunflowGUI (Unsupported major.minor version 49.0)
		at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass0(Native Method)
		at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:539)
		at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:123)
		at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:251)
		at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:55)
		at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:194)
		at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
		at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:187)
		at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:289)
		at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:274)
		at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:235)
		at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:302)

EDIT:

This is due to me not having JDK6 installed here. Works on my laptop only.

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Ha! Povray, sweet! I wish I still had my three chrome spheres over a watery surface image around. Took me 3 days to render that one.

I'm with you man, I used Povray on my 486 in the early nineties - there's nothing quite like modelling with a text editor. :)

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