3Delight Features
Follows a summary of 3Delight's features. For a more complete description please refer to 3Delight Technical Specification.
- RenderMan® Compliant
- RenderMan® Shading Language Support
- Rendering Features
- Geometry Support
- Fast and Efficient Rendering
- Extensible Display Drivers
- Multi-platform Support with Specific Code Optimization
RenderMan® Compliant
3Delight's renderdl program can render any RenderMan® Interface Bytestream (RIB) file (binary or text formats) or an application can link with the lib3delight library to produce high quality images directly using the RenderMan® Application Programming Interface (API). Refer to User's Manual section 4. 3Delight and RenderMan® for details.
RenderMan® Shading Language Support
3Delight offers programmable shading and lighting using the standard RenderMan® Shading Language. Surface, displacement, light, volume and imager shaders are fully supported. Matrices, arrays, normals, vectors and all the standard shadeops are supported. Shader interrogation from within other shaders is also supported (message passing) as well as output variables. The language can be extended using DSO shadeops, providing the increased flexibility of C/C++ programming. 3Delight's optimizing compiler can either produce compiled object-code (for better performance) or byte-code (for better portability). In both cases, run-time execution is performed in an SIMD manner for best performance. See User's Manual section 3.2 Using the shader compiler - shaderdl.
Rendering Features
3Delight is an advanced RenderMan®-compliant renderer featuring a wide variety of features such as depth of field, motion blur, surface displacement, level of detail, atmospheric effects, selective ray tracing and global illumination (ambient occlusion and color bleeding). Shadows can be done using standard shadow maps, ray tracing or using high quality antialiased multi-depth shadow maps. Very high quality texturing and image antialiasing is offered with a complete set of selectable filters (including Sinc and Catmull-Rom). Images can be output at up to 96 bits per RGB. Gamma correction and dithering can be applied before quantization for lower bit depth.
Geometry Support
3Delight supports a complete set of RenderMan® geometry: subdivision surfaces, polygons, patches (B-spline, Bezier, Catmull-Rom and others), NURBS (with trim-curves), Curves (for Fur & Hair), quadrics and procedural geometry. Also, user-defined variables, including vertex and facevarying variables, attached to geometry are fully supported.
Fast and Efficient Rendering
3Delight can handle complex scenes, made of millions of primitives. From 3Delight's initial design stage, right up to current developments, rendering speed and efficient memory usage has been a TOP PRIORITY.
Extensible Display Drivers
3Delight can output RGB, RGBA, Z or AZ image (or other combinations) at any resolution. It comes with the following display drivers: framebuffer, TIFF, zfile and multi-depth shadow maps (DSM), Kodak Cineon and Encapsulated Postscript (EPS). Since 3Delight's extensible display drivers use the "standard" RenderMan® display driver interface, third party's display drivers are also supported. New extensions to the display system are also supported, including multiple displays per render and display specific quantize parameters. See User's Manual section 4.1 3Delight specific calls.
Multi-platform Support with Specific Code Optimization
3Delight offers the widest selection of platform support of any RenderMan®-compliant renderer. It is available for Windows (Intel and AMD), Linux (Intel, AMD and PowerPC with AltiVec support), MacOS X and IRIX (MIPS4).