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Indigo 0.6 Final Released

24

scrabble_gloss_1.jpgA few months after the test release of Indigo 0.6, the free unbiased render engine is now final and available for download.

Indigo is no stranger to catering to Blender users with the Blender to Indigo tutorial.  And with the site redesign it's even easier to navigate your way to Indigo mastery.

0.6 is the latest and greatest, boasting some very impressive features:

  • Monte-Carlo path tracing or Monte-Carlo Metropolis Light Transfer for unbiased light transfer.
  • Experimental support for Bidirectional path tracing and MLT on top of bidirectional path tracing
  • Scene is specified in an XML file.
  • Spectral rendering: light is modelled at the wavelength level, allowing for more accurate reflection and transmission models.
  • Can specify lens/aperture radius and focal length for depth of field.
  • White balance setting for virtual camera.
  • Reinhard tone mapping or linear tone mapping.
  • Outputs to PNG and optionally tonemapped and untonemapped EXR.
  • Progressive rendering... watch as the image becomes less and less noisy.
  • Per-object and scene-wide kd-tree spatial partitioning for fast ray tracing.
  • Distributed network rendering using slaves/master design.

Materials:

  • Lambertian diffuse. Can be textured.
  • Specular - perfect specular reflection and transmission. Obeys Fresnel law for dielectrics. Total internal reflection and refraction is handled accurately. Dispersion and absorption are supported.
  • Phong - Physically based glossy reflection using phong lobe. Can use a diffuse substrate as well. Can use diffuse texture for substrate and specular texture to modulate specular reflection.
  • Bump mapping

Geometry:

  • Sphere and plane primitives.
  • Meshes can be loaded from .3ds (3D Studio Max) models or from xml scene.

Emitters:

  • Rectangle Area light emitter
  • Physically based spectral and sunlight model.
  • Uniform environment light.
  • Mesh emitters.
  • Emission spectra can be piecewise constant, RGB curves, or blackbody spectra.
  • HDR environment maps using OpenEXR image format or .float floating point images.

So now is the time to take a look at the one and only.... Indigo 0.6.

About the Author

Eugene

Just a guy really into 3D, especially where Blender is concerned.

24 Comments

  1. I love indigo ! its so... like the best. And especially how it solves internal ray tracing problems.
    one of the best days in my life will be when it comes integrated in blender and it will use the same material settings as blender. Then you could take a conventional blender scene and render it in indigo without having to change the values.

  2. @bataraza

    Yer, it will take a lot longer than Yafray. Dont make me explain it lol, cause I'll just start pulling stuff out of my uneducated ass.

    regards,
    greenlig

  3. @bataraza,

    Did you actually read the release notes?

    Perhaps you didn't understand all the techwords, I know I didn't at first.
    Well anyway, just let me translate for you, what Indigo does that takes so much time:

    Indigo does pure voodoo on your scene objects and makes you look sexy for pretty girls.

  4. @bataraza

    Either Indigo's site or Wikipedia should give a good explanation of what it means to be an unbiased renderer. To make a long story short, other raytracers are faster because they use approximations that look good but are physically inaccurate. An unbiased renderer will always be able to converge to the correct result as long as you give it the amount of time necessary. More accurate calculation (i.e. increasing accuracy over many iterations and less faking) means much longer render times.

  5. Ari Häyrinen on

    Indigo is great for architectural visualisations. I just hope that there will be native Linux version some day, although Indigo runs fine with wine.
    One correction: .3ds is not 3D Studio Max format (it has it's own). Max can export to .3ds and so can Blender.

  6. Close enough - I believe .3ds was the format in 3d studio for dos:-)

    Indigo is a great renderer, and I can't wait to try out the final release, although I don't think there's much different from beta 6(?)

  7. Just one correction. It isn't free! It's freeware. We have no sorce code available.

    Hoj :) Do you know any really free (under GPL for example) unbiased render engine?

  8. Why post proprietary software here?.

    Maybe some of you have interest in such software, but I don't think it's suitable here.

  9. I disagree. Any real world light simulation add-ons onto blender are indeed relevant.

    Don't get me wrong. You won't see Autodesk posting news about Maxwell render or Renderman on their site but after having tested out Indigo in all it's latest glory and scripts I'm glad I heard about it from here.

    You can set Indigo to go HT by use of a master and slave system which also supports network bucket rendering buy the looks of it. I've yet to test this feature out though.

    TXRX

  10. @roofoo
    No SSS yet... check out this thread with some good dicussion on the request for it in Indigo: http://www.indigorenderer.com/joomla/forum/viewtopic.php?t=720&highlight=sss

    @madman
    SMPs can be used: http://www.indigorenderer.com/blender_tut/#10

    @Deathblood
    Which version of the exporter are you using from http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/Indigo_exporter ? If you are having a problem with it and 0.6 final, you should search/post to the Indigo forums. I've seen some issues resolved there invloving the exporter.

  11. They way it solves ray termination problems in glass objects just is like...an erotic experience for me... and i know i have no life

  12. I gueuss using arrow brackets for quotes really screws up this web server, as this is the second time one of my post has been cut short after such a quote.

    Anyway, to continue from my quote above, before there was 3D Studio Max, there was just plain 'ol 3D Studio. That's where the .3ds file extension comes from. The .max format simply succeeded it, and is based on it.

  13. Well, Indigo seems very interesting. The example that I have seen are amazing, but I can't achieve to render anything of my work.

    I think that this is rather to be posted somewhere in an Indigo forum (I have not yet searched), but until now, I have only been able to check the xml files provided with indigo 0.5 and 0.6...

    Each time I lauch a rendering from one of my own Blender files (using the 0.5 exporter script provided in Blender V.242a), I get soon this sad message :

    Fatal Error :
    SceneLoader Except : No "Spectrum" element Found in background element.

    What does it mean ? Please can you tell me what is a Spectrum element ? it is a complete mystery for me. Something to do with lighting ?

    Philippe.

  14. I just downloaded it and tried it out on a simple model I made. With just a few trials and errors (very simply overcome) I've gotten an excellent render (I'll post it later if you like). Granted, it is just a simple object, but I must say I am impressed. I've never been big on using renderers other than blender internal or Yafray, but this was pretty much painless. If you have the time to wait for the renders, this can't be beat.

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