A new version of the open source rendering system Sunflow has been released. And if you haven't been to the Sunflow website lately (in the past month), Kris Berg from MUX Medialab built a new website for the project.
Sunflow in general has some great features like lightmap baking, camera motion blur, multi-threading and depth of field.
The new version boasts a collection of new features including:
- Instancing
- Acceleration structures are created on demand
- Textures are loaded on demand
- Polygonal lenses for bokeh in depth of field
- Absorbtion model in the glass shader
- Physically based sun/sky system (paper)
- Lightmap baking
- Fisheye lens
- Wireframe shader (works even with depth of field and distorting lenses)
- Bump/normal mapping via surface modifiers
- Much improved sampling of area lights (paper)
- Animation support
- Many new geometric primitives
- Improved Blender exporter
- New Autodesk Maya exporter
A big complaint about Sunflow is the lack of learning materials. But according to the author:
I know documentation/tutorials are still lacking. Please be patient as this will be one of the main focuses of the next release. If you are willing to contribute anything in this area, your help will be most welcome. In the meantime, enjoy the new release and please share your renders with us on the forum!
So head on over to the Sunflow website and download the Blender exporter and Sunflow.
14 Comments
hmm I will give it a try
cool the blender exporter has an option to export as an animation :)
When you look at their website and papers... now that's some nice things.
I really dig this link... about the sky...
http://www.cs.utah.edu/vissim/papers/sunsky/
Should helps people who want to go good looking vistas...
Good news. Does exporter work with Blener 2.43 version (RC)?
Great, looking forward to the blender exporter getting upto speed with the feature list rather than having to edit the .sc files.
It's not a complaint, it's ignorance; there are shader examples included on the website. The modifiability of this renderer is so genius user-friendliness is nearly moot.
I wonder if anyone's tried compiling this with gcj to get native speed.
sunflow has a nice website...
looks nice but how dose the program work
anyone care to explain.
@sct
You export your scene with the export-script and then open the file with sunflow and press 'render'. Or what do you mean?
i am gussing it need java install.
the export part i know.
cool render
first test
http://img02.picoodle.com/img/img02/7/1/26/f_fri_f767m_0f1b969.png
@scr
looks like you did an IPR, not a real RE_NDER. Am I wrong?
Actually its a render.
by default setting through exporting from blender.
better setting better result.