3Delight

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3Delight
Developed by	Digits 'n Art Research
Latest release	7.0.0 / November 2007
OS	Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
Genre	3D computer graphics
Licence	Proprietary
Website	http://www.3delight.com/

3Delight is a proprietary photorealistic RenderMan-compliant renderer.

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

1 Features
- 1.1 Modules
2 History
3 Version Release History
4 Supported platforms
- 4.1 Operating environments
- 4.2 Discontinued platforms
5 Movie credits
6 References
7 External links

[edit] 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 raytrace 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

[edit] 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

[edit] History

Work on 3Delight started in 1999. The renderer became first publicly available in 2000^[1]. 3Delight 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.