Pixie Renderer 2.02

Pixie is a photorealistic renderer which communicates with modelers or your application through a RenderMan - like interface. Pixie is not a modeler or an animator system thus it does not have any graphical user interface at all.
The scenes you want to render are described in a text file in a language very similar to Pixars RenderMan. Pixie also comes as a C/C++ library which you can link against your application.
Main features:
- Object instancing / delayed primitives
- Displacements
- Programmable shading (using RenderMan Shading Language)
- High quality texture/shadow/environment mapping
- High dynamic range input/output
Scalable, multi-resolution raytracing using ray differentials
- Pixie now has a new raytracing engine that automatically tesselates surfaces on the fly to a desired accuracy determined using the ray differentials. This means rays tracing blurry reflections or computing global illumination are faster to trace and sharp reflections and shadows are more accurate. Pixie also contains a memory manager that keeps the memory that is used to keep these tesselations around under control. Similar to texture caching, Pixie will maintain a set of active surfaces and only those surfaces will consume raytracing memory.
- Motion blur
- Depth of field
- Level of detail (LOD)
- Reyes style rendering (very fast)
- Occlusion culling
- Network parallel rendering
- DSO shaders
Global illumination
- Pixie supports global illumination thru photon mapping and irradiance caching -- The same machinery described in the latest RenderMan interface.
- Automatically raytraced smooth reflections / shadows
Caching/baking computation with LOD (bake3d / texture3d)
- Using this functionality, you can save any value you compute in a shader to a file that you can later re-use. This allows you to perform expensive shading computations at a lower resolution and re-use these computations in the beauty passes. This functionality will also enable exporting shading data from Pixie into your own applications.
Scalable, multi-threaded rendering
- Pixie rendering core has been first completely reorganized/optimized and then multi-threaded. We are very proud of this change. You will see significant speed improvements.
Arbirtaty output values
- Pixie can save arbitrary variables (built in ones such as N, P as well as arbitrary, user defined variables) just like rgb values into images. Using this machinery, you can generate multiple outputs from a single pass and combine them as a post process.
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