Aqsis, the 'Open source 3D rendering solution adhering to the RenderMan standard', have just released version 1.6.0.
From the announcement:
After many months of effort from the whole team, the latest stable release of Aqsis is now available for download.
While on the surface this version might not look like a huge update, it has involved a mammoth effort from everyone involved, not just developers, without input from all areas, identifying problems, suggesting usability enhancements etc., the updates would never happen. The result is a much faster, (even) more stable, and more usable product.
Apart from the main changes, involving major architectural overhauls to gain significant speed improvements, some important new features have been added. These have been in direct response to requests from people using Aqsis, and so represent valuable updates that should improve Aqsis' usability in a production environment.
General optimisation and performance has been the primary focus for this release, with improvements including:
- Avoiding sample recomputation at overlapping bucket boundaries.
- Refactored sampling and occlusion culling code.
- Enabled "focusfactor" and "motionfactor" approximation by default, for depth-of-field and motion blur effects respectively.
- Improved shadow map rendering speed.
- Faster splitting code for large point clouds.
In addition, key feature enhancements have been made with improvements including:
- Multi-layer support added to OpenEXR display driver.
- Side Effects "Houdini" plugin.
- New RIB parser, supporting inline comments and better error reporting.
- Matte "alpha" support, for directly rendering shadows on otherwise transparent surfaces.
- Refactored advanced framebuffer (Piqsl).
- Texturing improvements.
- Enabled "smooth" shading interpolation by default.
Links
10 Comments
wwwwooooooowww! gonna try it now!
Congratulations on the release guys, you's all deserve a pat on the back :)
ive never heard of Aqsis. is it any good?
It is always good to have more options for rendering, so good news !
Thank you to the Aqsis Team !
Congratulations guys, I know first hand this has been a lot of work for everyone. For anyone who hasn't tried Aqsis in a long time I strongly suggest giving this one a go, they've worked miracles improving speed and stability (with a few cool new features to boot) :)
where do I find the blender plugin? I can only find a dead link here: http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/aqsis/trunk/aqsis/tools/BtoR/
@tidbit - I think the MOSAIC plugin is the correct one to use for this one, as this is a renderman compliant renderer. http://sourceforge.net/projects/ribmosaic/
Someone please correct me if i am wrong.
@kotakotakota you are absolutely right.
I want to thank aqsis developers and author of Mosaic plugin WHiTeRaBBiT for their hard work and dedication.
With the power of renderman its now possible to build really powerful pipeline.
And guys from http://projectwidow.wikidot.com should proove it soon. ;-)
Heard of it, but never tried it before. Maybe its time to take a look. Maybe it proves to be a new favorite.
I just had to thank the Aqsis Team, and Eric (whiteRabbit) for such a wonderful set of tools... Did my first Pixarian render earlier- just a default cube for test- and I am now liberated with RenderMan tools for the pipeilne!
Awesome!