Indigo Renderer blogs

Indigo 3.2 Release and Sale

OnoSendai — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 17:19:49 +0000

Glare Technologies is proud to announce the release of Indigo Renderer 3.2, the world's most photorealistic rendering system.

To celebrate the release of Indigo 3.2, we're running a 33% off sale until the 20th of May!

Indigo 3.2 introduces new features such as the groundbreaking new sun & sky system, direct integration into Cinema 4D, and major performance improvements.
All these features, together with new documentation and tutorials, make this the most powerful and easiest-to-use Indigo yet.

For the duration of the sale, Indigo Renderer will be available for €399 (normally €595), Indigo RT for €99 (normally €145) and Indigo 2.x to Indigo 3.x upgrades for €149 (normally €195).

Visit the 3.2 announcement page to find out more.

Simple interior renderings by dcm and Zom-B

fused — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:50:57 +0000

Indigo users dcm and Zom-B posted these "simple" interior renderings in the Simple Renderings Thread (which is notoriously full of not-so-simple renderings).

There is also a new spin-off thread, specifically for simple interiors: Simple Interiors Thread

(Click on the images for full resolution renders)

Arthur Staschyk's (aka Zom-B) interior render:

Scene from the C4D Network Bedroom Render Challange

dcm's interior render:

Woodworked furniture renders by Headroom

OnoSendai — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:03:02 +0000

Indigo user Headroom has been using Indigo to create wonderful renders of woodworked furniture.

The first render is a chair design by David Haig. Read the forum thread here.

(Click on the images for full resolution renders)

The second design is by Headroom himself:
(Read the forum thread here)

Indigo Material Editing Videos

lycium — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:15:16 +0000

Recently we've been revamping our documentation and tutorials for the release of Indigo 3.2 Stable, which will be released in the coming weeks. As part of this effort we've produced 3 videos illustrating the basics of material editing in Indigo, which you can find on YouTube:

Part 1: Diffuse, Phong and Oren-Nayar
Part 2: Specular, Glossy Transparent and Diffuse Transmitter
Part 3: Texture channels

These short videos are hopefully informative and to-the-point, and we expect to release more videos covering the installation of various exporters soon.

Sarah Dorweiler Visualisations

OnoSendai — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:22:05 +0000

Sarah Dorweiler at Sarah Dorweiler Visualisierungen (Visualisations) has been creating some truly amazing architectural and interior visualisations with Indigo Renderer.

Sarah has achieved a remarkable combination of complete photorealism and style in her images, as is evident from her gallery.

Click on the images below for full resolution images.

Plexiglass Palace

lycium — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 12:51:41 +0000

A collaborative work between myself (lycium) and Pasternak on deviantArt, this scene was modelled using Structure Synth and rendered with Indigo Renderer.

Click for full 2560x1600 (16:10 aspect) image:

Gritty black & white render, "Decay" by Enslaver

lycium — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:25:13 +0000

Well-known for his highly enjoyable abstract works, Indigo forum user Enslaver has knocked another one out of the park with his Daz3D modelled + ivy covered composition "Decay." Currently there's a whole page of compliments in the Simple Renders thread just for this one image!

Produced with the new IndigoMax exporter for 3ds Max, with 60 million polygons worth of ivy, it's a great showcase for what can be done with Indigo's camera controls.

Click the thumbnail below for the full 1920x1080 image:

Announcing IndigoMax

lycium — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:05:47 +0000

In case you missed the announcement on our 3ds Max forum, we have a brand new 3ds Max exporter in development: IndigoMax!

Through a partnership with Jakub Jeziorski, a fully native plugin for 3ds Max using the Indigo SDK is being developed to take integration with Indigo to the next level. Early releases are available from our forum here: http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=11368

Welcome on board, Jakub!

A simple and fun render with the new exporter has been made by ENSLAVER (click to enlarge):

Recent progress in the CUDA ecosystem

lycium — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:42:05 +0000

Less than a week after my previous post about how "only OpenCL can expose massively parallel compute capabilities in a vendor-neutral way", NVIDIA open-sourced their CUDA compiler! Obviously they are intently watching this blog, and had to react to my nay-saying.

Jokes aside, this is a big move for CUDA as it allows anyone with the ability to create LLVM ASTs from their scripting language to use the PTX backend. Indigo already features a dynamically-compiled scripting language, Winter, and this technology could be extended to output optimised code for NVIDIA GPUs directly. Of course, this isn't necessarily an approach we'll use, however it illustrates the potential of having a powerful optimising compiler for many platforms behind your domain-specific language.

It will be exciting to see how this develops, as more back- and front-ends are added to the burgeoning LLVM framework.

Recent progress in the OpenCL ecosystem

lycium — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:05:52 +0000

Recently AMD announced an increased focus on its Accelerated Parallel Processing SDK, promising more frequent updates tied to display driver releases on all platforms; AMD Product Manager for Compute Solutions Mark Ireton wrote on their developer blog, "[...] we will also be upgrading our OpenCL solution on a more frequent basis through the regular monthly Catalyst driver updates."

NVIDIA, for their part, are continually improving their OpenCL implementation with each driver update, approaching the performance of its native CUDA language. Much as I love the lean and mean CUDA 4 API, only OpenCL can expose massively parallel compute capabilities in a vendor-neutral way (and it's nice to be able to JIT from source), so in the long term I expect OpenCL to become the de facto standard for parallel computation.

AMD and Intel already have an OpenCL SDK which supports their CPUs, and this is important since they already include (or soon will) considerable GPU-like parallel compute resources. The tight integration of these heterogeneous compute resources is quite unlike the present norm, in which discrete cards with dedicated memory are connected to the CPU by a long PCI Express trip, and this will be an interesting scenario to optimise for in the future. Intel's Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture is another one to watch in the future: with a widened x86 architecture (easy to program) and their manufacturing process leadership, we could see a compelling compute platform.

When we started developing for GPUs, we'd have to manually write out debug info to be returned to the host; unsuccessful runs were often met with a hard reset or blue screen. This is in stark contrast to the fantastic development tools we have now, including the ability to print out debug info from kernels, and do live debugging in Visual Studio - and it almost never hangs the machine. Two thumbs up!

It's clear that a great OpenCL implementation is important for these companies, and we are very pleased with the progress that is being made.