calculating all shading normals internally: If this proves too restrictive, I'll add the option back in to be able to specify vertex shading normals. Right now all shading normals in .igs files, .obj files etc.. are ignored. Save the normals! Auto-normals are often not as good as real normals. For ...

@Ono: it's just some PRT with a healthy gloss of marketing :D For simple SH based PRT the shadows are to sharp. There is also no noticable precomputation time. I think, it's just fast IBL via raytracing. Something like in the Keller-Kollig IBL paper: http://graphics.uni-ulm.de/EIbHDRI.pdf The state...

If you also want to make interactive presentations, take a look at Autodesk Showcase (they bought off Opticore, so real-time raytracing and GI will be integrated in some next release). An alternative with real-time raytracing already available (but no GI) is RTT DeltaGen + RealTrace-Module. This sof...

The point I am very interested is how real/accurate are the renderings with Hypershot. For example also VRay seems to produce quite excellent results. The newer Final Render is also fast and doesn't show to much (biased) low frequency noice. AFAIK this newer biased renderers all use some randomized...

gelato has already been mentioned, it predates them by several years. i've heard, however, that it's performance/cost characteristics are worse than other industry players, since you have to buy an expensive license and then expensive quadro cards too (cf. one license on a monster multicore machine...

ops jesus how do they make it so fast ... Are you sure, that it's much faster than other fast renderers. I seen a demo of hypershot and it didn't look to fast, compared to the interactive preview in Modo 301 or FPrime... About the "how": I think it's heavy optimizing the code. Cache coherent memory...

Hypershot does NOT use the GPU. It's a pure CPU renderer. See at: http://www.bunkspeed.com/hypershot/products.html At the right column: FEATURES AT-A-GLANCE: [...] - Multi-threaded architecture takes full advantage of dual and quad core CPU's - CPU not GPU based The same in the tech_spec.pdf: - CPU ...

Yes. Not quite the rosy colour picture painted on the website, is it? Lest we forget! lol You have to compare it to the other systems available at this time. The x86/DOS PC was a crude hardware with no innovation but lot of shortcomings. The bad hardware design was to be seconded only byit's crappy...

Speed isn't this much important, but the lack of double precision support is... Double precision will be in the next Gxx/CUDA generation. But it will only be supported in the Quadro and Tesla line, not for GeForce. So not for mass market and consumers. The Quadros are much to expensive, you better ...

When Nvidia cards can do 3 terraflops :shock: http://redline-oc.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D222D0891B3BE9FC!287.entry Hi, I can't believe in the linked statement. More likely it will be 65nm, a power saver and PCIe 2.0 version of the G80. I think G100 will be the next big step. But 3 TFLOPS - no way!...

Knaxknarke, you made a good argumented post, we would like to use it in Lux's FAQ : are you ok with that ? Thanks, got a bit rambling about everything - but well monitoring technical development of 3d rendering is part of my job (also it's more focused on real-time stuff). Surely you can use commen...

Prolog wont be helpful for that, the other two, I don't know, but I think, they should be a good starting point for Java :D (don't take me by word, though: I learned neither Pascal, nor Delphi, not Java^^) Delphi is an IDE and a class library and the language is Object Pascal, an OOP extension to T...

Hi, just some of my thoughts about this: I think it's very wise (or just clever?) to base this OSS project on the solid base of PBRT. Because: - they don't reinvent the wheel - there is good documentation for this (the book) - it is used in academia, so a lot of students know it - a lot of students ...

This is from the same guy as the GPL OpenRT realtime raytracer yaCORT: http://liris.cnrs.fr/~bsegovia/yacort/ . The pix from the paper are also on the yaCORT gallery, so it seems it was made with this rtrt framework. Would be interesting if the coherent MLT code is in the GPL version or if it's made...

BTW: supersampling the eye ray to do antialiasing should be no problem, but selection sampling directions for further bounces along the light path could be a problem. Having some rule when to "cheat" is like using a loaded dice. It changes your pdf, so the experiment is distorted.