Indigo 2.0 Stable

[OnoSendai]

Hi Everyone,
I'm pleased to announce the release of Indigo Renderer 2.0 stable.

The Indigo 2.0 series has been in Beta for the last 3 months, and has recently reached a point of sufficient stability to be released as a 'stable' version.
Indigo 2.0 is the first commercial version of Indigo, and represents the latest results from over 5 years of development.

The Indigo graphical user interface (GUI) has been rewritten to improve power and ease of use.
Interactive tone mapping, layer blending etc.. is now possible with the GUI.
Major new Indigo features include motion blur, easy network rendering with a customised render node GUI, and full Unicode support.
Sub-surface scattering has been sped up, and aperture diffraction (glare) has been improved.

The Indigo exporter plug-ins have also been greatly improved, and now come with easy-to-use installers. Indigo exporter plug-ins can also now read and write Indigo material files, allowing artists to make use of the Indigo material database (http://www.indigorenderer.com/materials/), a free online repository of high-quality Indigo materials.

The Indigo 2.0 stable version sets a solid foundation for further improvements due in the 2.2 series, including large speed-ups and more realistic materials.

You can download it from:

http://www.indigorenderer.com/download

(Note: Indigo version 2.0.12 is considered 2.0 stable, so If you have already downloaded 2.0.12, don't bother downloading it again.)

[benn]

Here's the press release that we'll be sending out.

INDIGO RENDERER 2.0 IS HERE
Ultra-realistic renderer is now faster, more stable and commercially supported.

Glare Technologies (Wellington, New Zealand) has released a major upgrade to Indigo Renderer, their ultra-realistic renderer. This release places Indigo in a strong position to expand its presence as a commercial product.


Indigo 2.0 features a complete rewrite of the user interface for ease of use. A new high-quality material database is available on-line for artists to use for free. The ability to render semi-transparent materials through a function known as sub-surface scattering has been accelerated.


Accuracy improvements have been made to cater for scenes that encompass vast size variations, making Indigo suitable for visualizing micro-machined parts through to giant earthmoving projects. Indigo 2.0 works with SketchUp, Blender and Cinema 4D and features re-written manuals for these packages.


While developing version 2.0, Glare Technologies offered 100 lifetime licences at the discounted price of 295€. A limited number of these licences remain available. This price represents a substantial discount to comparable renderers.


The brainchild of Wellington-based programmer Nick Chapman, Indigo Renderer generates photorealistic images from digital 3D blueprints. Nick has been developing Indigo for five years, and his focus and expertise have produced a renderer which is significantly faster and cheaper than the leading competitors.


In late 2008 Nick teamed up with Ben Nolan and formed Glare Technologies to commercialize Indigo. Glare has offices in Wellington, New Zealand. The company works with partners in Estonia, Germany, Canada and France, who produce Indigo add-ons.

See in PDF format here:
http://indigorenderer.com/dist/release-20-stable.pdf

We'd love for you to forward that pdf around to any blogs / newsgroups that you think would be interested.

[Godzilla]

Who are you guys going to send it to? You're not expecting the community to do all the advertising, are you? =/

[benn]

We've been posting to a few places - but if you guys want to help out it all helps

The 2.2 release is going to be awesome too, Nick has got some mad tricks up his sleeve.

[Godzilla]

Aw that's right too.. you can't tell us what's going to be happening 'cause you're all commercially now. =(

Looking forward to it, ETA?

[benn]

Haha Nick never specifies the future anyway.

[neo0.]

In the press release, it mentioned add-ons.. Any info concerning them?

[Godzilla]

It's referring to the exporters.

[Whaat]

You guys are forgetting about the most significant new feature of Indigo 2.0. Mac support!!

[Zom-B]

The 2.2 release is going to be awesome too, Nick has got some mad tricks up his sleeve.

Some more infos about this would be more then welcome... If somebody is deciding to buy a lifetime license, some infos about the future of the Product are quite interesting for this!!!

[benn]

We're going to make it faster.

2.2 has a potential speed up to convergence we're testing it at the moment to make sure it doesn't bring any bias into the engine.

[Zom-B]

This is something I really like to hear!!

[Phoenix]

Hi Nick,

I have a problem.

Indigo always freezes nearly my entire system so that it mostly costs me minutes just to stop a rendering.
Cause while in the Indigo GUI the thread priority is said to be "Below Normal", in fact it is still "Normal". That is what I get, if I check it in the Windows Task-Manager.

Just for your information:
My OS is Windows XP Pro x64 and my CPU is a Q6600.

Kind regards,
Tom

[benn]

Hi Phoenix,

Do you get the same behaviour with every scene? The indigo thread behaviour only applies to the rendering process, not when building the scene. If you can zip up the scene and email it to us we can take a look at the usage.

Ben

[OnoSendai]

Hi Nick,

I have a problem.

Indigo always freezes nearly my entire system so that it mostly costs me minutes just to stop a rendering.
Cause while in the Indigo GUI the thread priority is said to be "Below Normal", in fact it is still "Normal". That is what I get, if I check it in the Windows Task-Manager.

Just for your information:
My OS is Windows XP Pro x64 and my CPU is a Q6600.

Kind regards,
Tom

hi Tom,
I'll work on this for the next version, so that the Indigo GUI is more responsive.