3Delight

Infobox_Software
name = 3Delight
genre = 3D computer graphics
developer = Digits 'n Art Research
latest_release_version = 8.0.1
latest_release_date = October 2008
operating_system = Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
licence = Proprietary
website = http://www.3delight.com/

3Delight is a proprietary, photorealistic, RenderMan-compliant offline renderer.

It is developed by Montreal-based Digits 'n Art Research, or DNA in short, a subsidiary of Taarna Studios.

Features

3Delight primarily uses the REYES algorithm but is also well capable of doing ray tracing and global illumination. The renderer is fully multi-threaded and also supports distributed rendering. This allows for accelerated rendering on multi-CPU hosts or environments where a large number of computers are joined into a grid.

It implements all required capabilities for a RenderMan-compliant renderer and also the following optional ones:
*Area light sources
*Depth of field
*Displacement mapping
*Environment mapping
*Global illumination
*Level of detail
*Motion blur
*Programmable shading
*Special camera projections (through the "ray trace hider")
*Ray tracing
*Shadow depth mapping
*Solid modeling
*Texture mapping
*Volume shading

3Delight also supports the following capabilities, which are not part of any capabilities list:
*Photon mapping
*Point clouds
*Hierarchical subdivision surfaces
*NURB curves
*Brick maps (3 dimensional, mip-mapped textures)
*(RIB) Conditionals
*Class-based shaders

Modules

3Delight is based on modules. The primary module is the REYES module which implements a REYES scanline-like renderer.

Another noteworthy module is the ray-tracing one, called 'Sabretooth', which also supports global illumination calculations through certain shadeops.

3Delight supports explicit ray tracing of camera rays by selecting a different hider, essentially turning the renderer from a hybrid REYES/ray tracing one into a full ray-tracer.

Other noteworthy features include:

*Extended display subset functionality to allow rendering of geometric primitives writing to the same display variable to different images.
For example, display subsets could be used to render the skin and fur of a creature to two separate images at once "without" the fur matting the skin passes.
*Memory efficient point clouds. Like brick maps, point clouds are organized in a spatial data structure and are loaded lazily, keeping the memory requirements as low as possible.
*The gather() shadeop can be used on point clouds.
*Procedural geometry is instanced lazily even during ray tracing, keeping the memory requirements as low as possible.
*First order ray differentials on any ray fired from within a shader

History

Work on 3Delight started in 1999. The renderer became first publicly available in 2000.ref|announcement3Delight was the first RenderMan-compliant renderer combining the REYES algorithm with on-demand ray-tracing. The only other RenderMan-compliant renderer capable of ray tracing at the time was BMRT. BMRT was not a REYES renderer though.

3Delight was meant to be a commercial product from the beginning. However, DNA decided to make it available free of charge from August 2000 to March 2005 in order to build a user base.

During this time, customers using a large number of licenses on their sites or requiring excessive support were asked to kindly work out an agreement with DNA that specified some form of fiscal compensation for this.

In March 2005, the license was changed. The first license is still free. From the second license onwards, the renderer is 1,000 USD per "two" CPU/thread node resp. 1,500 USD per "four" CPU/thread node.

Version Release History

* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/ab754ad521d41035 3Delight 8.0.0] "Midnight Express": October 2008
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/c389d5e90c943d24 3Delight 7.0.0] "Django": November 2007
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/8f4d252ff97b8aaa 3Delight 6.5.0] "Ennio": February 2007
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/8454e655e24588c8 3Delight 6.0.1] "Argento": November 2006
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/96054503e7fd242a 3Delight 5.0.0] "Moroder": February 2006
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/22cac22ce089a235 3Delight 4.5.0] "Lucio Fulci": August 2005
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/c8c7c6337e998e55 3Delight 4.0.0] "Indiana": March 2005
* 3Delight 3.0.0
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/8b7f2b432aad4e21 3Delight 2.1.0] : June 2004
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/6ed1bad3e15a9c07 3Delight 2.0.0] : January 2004
* 3Delight 1.0.6beta
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/8857c89e2856a1de 3Delight 1.0.0beta] : January 2003
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/e0b9c83a8ef7e433 3Delight 0.9.6] : August 2002
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/c292a7283ae98b0d 3Delight 0.9.4] : June 2002
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/c9a112d87632314c 3Delight 0.9.2] : December 2001
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/0b2cbf41ec7f1c95 3Delight 0.9.0] : August 2001
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/ffd884b847b3f7c 3Delight 0.8.0] : March 2001
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/fb1bf705bb874588 3Delight 0.6.0] : September 2000
* [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/fb13237fd2bf20ad 3Delight 0.5.1] : August 2000

upported platforms

*Apple Computer Mac OS X on PowerPC and x86 architectures
*GNU/Linux on x86, x86-64 and Cell architectures
*Microsoft Windows on x86 and x86-64 architectures

Operating environments

The renderer comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. The latter allowing the processing of very large scene datasets.

Discontinued platforms

Platforms supported in the past included:
*Digital Equipment Corporation Digital UNIX on DEC Alpha architectures
*Silicon Graphics IRIX on MIPS architectures (might still be supported, on request)
*Sun Microsystems Solaris on SPARC architectures

Movie credits

3Delight has been used for visual effects work on many films. Some notable examples are:
* "Assault on Precinct 13"
* "Bailey's Billions"
* "Black Christmas"
* "Blades of Glory"
* "The Blood Diamond"
* "Charlotte's Web"
* ""
* "The Chronicles of Riddick"
* "Cube Zero"
* "Fantastic Four"
* ""
* "Final Destination 3"
* "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince"
* "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix"
* "Hulk
* "The Incredible Hulk
* "The Last Mimzy"
* "The Ruins"
* ""
* "Superman Returns"
* "Where the Wild Things Are"
* "The Woods"
* "X-Men 3It was also used to render the following full CG features:
* "Adventures in Animation" (Imax 3D featurette)
* "Free Jimmy"

References

# [http://groups.google.ca/group/comp.graphics.rendering.renderman/msg/fb13237fd2bf20ad 3Delight public availability announcement in news://comp.graphics,rendering.renderman/]

External links

* [http://www.3delight.com/ 3Delight home page]