The new site and new release (zip) are a testament to Nicholas Chapman's work on his free unbiased raytracer Indigo (now version 0.6 test 1). And as usual, Nicholas keeps on top of the Blender export script for each release.
From the Indigo forum post:
This is a stand-alone release, it includes all necessary files. As usual, I may have broken some stuff, so keep an eye out:
- So Indigo is now fully multithreaded.. you can run an arbitrary number of threads per process.
- Scene file changes: Just one minor one, but it will break most scenes: The background element now should only have 1 child, a spectrum element.
- speedup with phong pow()s
- added bump mapping for specular mat
- Added multithreading
- Added -t switch to specify number of threads.
- nice error message on out of mem while building kdtree
- using doubles for pdf and radiance stuff
- added colour correction
- background element now takes a single spectrum child element
- can now have only one of background, skylight, or env_map
- made window size equal to render size
- changed default sky gain to 0.002
- changed bidir RR live prob
- decreased num warmup mutations by half
Arthur Staschyk (Zom-B on the Indigo forums) pointed us to an Indigo thread that discusses a neat tool to use with Indigo (or any render with noise) called Neat Image. If unbiased renderers turn you off because of noise, this just might be the answer for you!
15 Comments
Awesome!
Very nice renderer!
Hmmm Neat Image? Is there an (possible free) alternative that works under Linux (without Wine that is)? I've already tried GREYCstoration [1] for various image-corrections, but it's kinda hard to use :-/
Werner
[1] http://www.haypocalc.com/wiki/Gimp_Plugin_GREYCstoration
http://www.greyc.ensicaen.fr/~dtschump/greycstoration/
After looking at the gallery I'm really motivated to render one of my current projects with Indigo. Some of the works there are just outstanding.
Are there any example .blend files available? The only one I found was 'The IT department' on blenderartists.org.
I set up my scene, used the exporter and it's rendering now... but it looks like it's got a sepia effect - strange.
Maybe I have to join the Indigo forum :-)
indigo is quite cool - hopefully someday, someone will intergrate it as a proper plugin in blender (like yafray is now). It's a shame it's not OSS though :( -epat
hell, what a renderer!!!
That Neat Image software mentioned above is pretty awesome. Take a look at the examples page...
@thoro
The Indigo forums are the place to go definitely :)
Did you take a look at the quick material setting instruction at http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutorials/Indigo_Renderer?
Hoehrer: thanks for posting the GREYCstoration link I was looking for it but forgot it's name. What a great little tool.
@Eugene: Yes, I took a look at it - I will do some more tests and look at the 'IT department' .blend file to get an idea.
Cool, here at work we've got some really fast servers and my colleagues from the IT department are currently preparing a render machine for me. Maybe I can reach this server from home, too :-).
Neat Image is nice, so is Noise Ninja.
http://www.picturecode.com/
Been using it the past year for my photography.
Noisy renders are realistic. Film grain is a normal part of photography and if the goal is making a "photorealistic" image than it should include film grain. Just blur it by maybe .25 - .5 pixels gaussian and it looks perfect.
A possible program to help reduce noise could also be VirtualDub. Tread the image like a single frame of a movie, apply all the denoising filters you want, then render to image sequence.
Just a thought.
To anyone interested in learning the ins and outs of Fast Fourier Transform noise reduction (in a more manual sense) simply because its very interesting... check out this thread -- and accompanying tutorial(s) on RetouchPRO
http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10911&page=1&pp=15
I have tried NeatImage, NoiseNinja, and a third program called Noiseware (http://www.imagenomic.com/) on an Indigo render of mine. In my opinion, Noiseware produced much better results than the other two and is easier to use. There is a free 'Community Edition' of Noiseware which has some limitations compared to the full versions but it's still very usable. It certainly saves some hours of Indigo render time!