ANN: 3Delight 5.0 (Moroder)

[aghi...@gmail.com]

Hello,

3Delight 5.0 is available. Here is a list of the most important
features and improvements:

3Delight For Maya
The package now comes with a Maya plugin (3Delight For Maya)
that uses 3Delight for rendering. The plugin provides a user
friendly interface to 3Delight as well as a customizable
workflow and a RenderMan MEL binding.

Refer to http://www.3delight.com/ZDoc/3delight_for_maya.pdf

3Delight For Maya is developed in conjunction with soho vfx
(`www.sohovfx.com'). It is based upon their Build A RIB File
tools developed by Berj Bannayan and used in production
since 2003.

Multi-Threading and Multi-Processing
- 3Delight can now render images using threads. This
automatically speeds up renders on multi-cpu, multi-core
and hyperthreaded machines.
- Multi-processing and network rendering now use a
load-balancing algorithm which can dramatically improve
performance.

RenderMan
- Area lights are implemented through the `RiAreaLightSource'
call. Area light sources can be specified using arbitrary
geometry.
- Arbitrary output variable functionality has been extended
for greater flexibility. See RiDisplay's documentation for
details.
- The `gather()' shadeop can now return arbitrary variables
for ray hit positions.
- `RiGeometricApproximation' now accepts a `focusfactor'
parameter to control the shading rate of out of focus
geometry.
- Network cache functionality is available through the Rx
library. This enables users to cache arbitrary network
files using 3Delight's powerful caching system.
- The hider can render scenes without motion blur but with
correct time derivatives. This is useful for performing
motion blur as a post-processing step.

Performance
- Accelerated motion blur and depth of field sampling.
- Trim curves render faster and require less memory thanks to
an improved algorithm.
- Ray tracing of complex scenes is now faster (up to 10%).
- Overall memory consumption has been reduced.
- `i-display' framebuffer is now faster on Windows.

Image Quality
- 3Delight now offers an improved motion blur sampling that
better mimics the shutter of a real camera. This generally
produces smoother motion blur when enabled.
- A new `extrememotiondof' hider option improves sampling in
scenes combining large motion blur and out of focus regions.
- Cubic environment map lookups now support oversampling for
better filtering.
- Shadow map filtering for low resolution shadow maps has
been improved.

Image Based Lighting
- `gather()', `occlusion()' and `indirectdiffuse()' can use
arbitrary ray distributions for more realistic renderings
using HDRI maps. Ray distributions are specified using en
environment map and help produce images with correct
shadows and lighting with respect to the environment.

More at http://www.3delight.com/ZDoc/3delight_37.html#SEC89

- `tdlmake' can create cubic environment maps from
lightprobes or two fisheye lens images.

Shader compiler
- Shaders can contain user defined annotations. This can be
used by shader generators to embed information about
parameter ranges, comments and other meta data. The SLO
library has been augmented to retrieve annotations from
shaders.
- `shaderdl' warns when mixing incompatible coordinate
systems in arithmetic.
- Additional code optimization is now performed at the -O2
optimization level. Shaders need to be recompiled.

Thanks,

The 3Delight Team
(www.3delight.com)

[ajr...@yahoo.co.uk]

This looks very impressive. 3delight is an amazing renderer and I'm
sure I'm not alone in saying that I appreciate being able use it in a
non-commercial way to get to learn Renderman and hopefully someday
contribute something back, possibly by buying a license someday. I feel
that's probably the biggest reason I would one day pick 3delight over
PRMan.

Your commitment to multiple platforms is also highly commendable,
that's sometimes where other Renderman compliant renderers fall short.

The integration with Maya is also very useful. I think that puts a lot
of people off Renderman at first because although the render quality is
great, there is often a lack of integration with modelling/animation
packages.

I'm also glad to see area lights implemented. That's something I've
wanted in 3delight since I first used 3delight at version 2.10.
Excellent work all round guys.

[Moritz]

Is this to honour Giorgio Moroder? I mean after Lucio Fulci in 4.5?

I think the new skymap feature in tdlmake is not listed -- some people
went absolutely bunter when reading about Maxwell's 'physical sky', so
maybe this should be added, hehe. :>

.mm

[aghi...@gmail.com]

Hello Moritz,

I didn't mention the -skymap option to 'tdlmake' since it is sill "in
the works" (but seems to work fine). There is more to come for this
feature in the next release. And yes, "Moroder" is to honour Giorgio
Moroder ;->

- Aghiles.
www.3delight.com

[Felipe Esquivel]

Congratulations. I think this (the traslator) is a step that was
needed.

Felipe Esquivel

[Jean-Michel LEON-FOUN-LIN]

<aghi...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> 3Delight 5.0 is available. Here is a list of the most important
> features and improvements:
>
> 3Delight For Maya
> The package now comes with a Maya plugin (3Delight For Maya)
> that uses 3Delight for rendering. The plugin provides a user
> friendly interface to 3Delight as well as a customizable
> workflow and a RenderMan MEL binding.
>
> Refer to http://www.3delight.com/ZDoc/3delight_for_maya.pdf
>
> 3Delight For Maya is developed in conjunction with soho vfx
> (`www.sohovfx.com'). It is based upon their Build A RIB File
> tools developed by Berj Bannayan and used in production
> since 2003.

Hi,

first thanks a lot for making this available for everybody and in
particular for Mac OS X and it's free, which is great to learn
Renderman. I've used it a lot to render tutorial files in Ian
Stephenson's book.

I am posting this message to have some help with the Maya plugin.

I've got Maya PLE 7.0.1 installed on Tiger 10.4.5 and 3Delight 5.0 in
its default location (/Applications/Grapjics/). I followed the procedure
in the PDF to load the pugin for Maya version 7.0. As Maya didn't list
the plugin I had to browse through to 3Delight's maya plugin folder.

The plugin won't load. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Jean-Michel LEON-FOUN-LIN

[Przemyslaw Koprowski]

Jean-Michel LEON-FOUN-LIN wrote:
> I've got Maya PLE 7.0.1 installed on Tiger 10.4.5 and 3Delight 5.0 in
> its default location (/Applications/Grapjics/). I followed the procedure
> in the PDF to load the pugin for Maya version 7.0. As Maya didn't list
> the plugin I had to browse through to 3Delight's maya plugin folder.
> The plugin won't load. What am I doing wrong?
>

As far as I know, Maya PLE will not load *any* third-party plug-ins.
This is one of the restrictions of PLE (otherwise it woukld be
too easy to convert in in a fully functional version).

Przemek

--
"Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place
in the world for ugly mathematics." G.H. Hardy

[Jean-Michel LEON-FOUN-LIN]

Przemyslaw Koprowski <o...@siggraph.pkoprowski> wrote:

> Jean-Michel LEON-FOUN-LIN wrote:
> > I've got Maya PLE 7.0.1 installed on Tiger 10.4.5 and 3Delight 5.0 in
> > its default location (/Applications/Grapjics/). I followed the procedure
> > in the PDF to load the pugin for Maya version 7.0. As Maya didn't list
> > the plugin I had to browse through to 3Delight's maya plugin folder.
> > The plugin won't load. What am I doing wrong?
> >
> As far as I know, Maya PLE will not load *any* third-party plug-ins.
> This is one of the restrictions of PLE (otherwise it woukld be
> too easy to convert in in a fully functional version).
>
> Przemek

Thanks for the answer. Too bad the plugin doesn't work with PLE! But I
can live with that and at least I know there is probably nothing wrong
with my configuration. And there are other nice things to play with in
version 5 of 3Delight anyway.

Jean-Michel LEON-FOUN-LIN

[jlm...@gmail.com]

Hi,

I've got the same problem - plug-in not loading - in Maya 7.0 with
3delight 5.0.1, OSX 10.4.5. I'm not using PLE, though. Everything is in
the default locations. Any ideas?

thanks

[kenmc...@gmail.com]

I had the same problem. My workaround was to start maya from the
command line. To do this, launch the "Maya Terminal" app instead of
maya itself. Once the terminal comes up, type "maya" and hit return.

Now you should be able to load the plugin.

--Ken

[Olivi...@hotmail.com]

This is a known issue with the setup on OS X. You need to log out and
back in before you can use the plugin when you launch maya directly.
There's no other way (that I know of) to get the environment variables
setup properly for applications which are not launched from a shell.

Olivier

[jlm...@gmail.com]

Now I'm able to load the plugin but I get this error:

loadPluginCallback
"/Applications/Graphics/3Delight-5.0.1/maya/plugins/3delight_for_maya7.0.lib"
"plug-in";
// Result: 1 //
// Error: Cannot find procedure "DL_startup". //

[Jean-Michel LEON-FOUN-LIN]

<kenmc...@gmail.com> wrote:

I've found a small freeware Preference Pane called RCEnvironment by
RubiCode at

http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCEnvironment/

It makes it possible to set up environment variables that are supposed
to be visible by the GUI. I can't check it out for Maya and 3Delight as
I only have PLE. But for those who have the full version you may tty
this to check out if you can use the 3Delight plugin without launching
Maya from Terminal. However once environment variables are set up you do
have to log out, the author of the software acknowledge.

You can also use Apple's PropertyListEditor to edit the configuration
file generated by the Preference Pane.

Hope it helps.