Features
It's not rocket science
Image by bbb
Indigo is packed with powerful rendering features accessible to Architects, Product Designers, 3D Modelers or artists. Even if you've only been using 3D software for a few days, you can use Indigo to generate realistic renders of your own. It's out-of-the-box materials and lights allow you to be free of worry about the science, and just get on with your designs and photography.
Accurate light simulation
Image by SmartDen
There is no faking real glass in Indigo. Objects have a real medium inside their mesh, and light photons are scattered and absorbed accurately creating phenomena that we expect from our everyday environment. Caustics, rainbows and colour absorption are all rendered correctly giving the sense of a real place. Whether it is subtle or not, these are the things that make it real.
Freedom to create your own materials
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Indigo comes with a stand-alone material editor that allows you to create any kind of material - from sand, leather and wood, to car-paint, water and even candy. It has a detailed GUI to let you craft your materials in seconds, with many functions to control the play of light on, or within the surface. The online material database is updated often, allowing for free, easy access to popular and complex materials. Indigo also has its own scripting language for full, unrestrained, control of the materials for those that want to delve deeper.
Real camera capture
Image by bnolan
Not only does Indigo simulate real light, it also captures it accurately. The Indigo camera has real physical properties that make rendering less like computer science, and more like real photography. By changing the camera aperture and focus distance, you control the depth of field and focus. You can also set the sensor width and exposure time for those more experienced photographers.
What you see is what you get
Image by Arne Gombos
Many renderers use tricks to simulate lighting effects that change the image with each quality pass. Indigo has just one rendering method meaning within the first 30 seconds of a render you can see what to expect for the final result. Once you are happy with the direction of the render, you can safely leave it to polish the image.
Physically-based materials
Image by jay_p
Realistic light needs to interact with realistic materials, which is why Indigo has a strong material system. There is a range of material types to simulate anything from clay, marble, and wood, to skin, fabric, and food. Each surface has attributes that let the light act naturally; reflecting or refracting accurately.
Realistic lights
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There are no 'point lights' in real life, and neither in Indigo. Emitters are handled as a mesh, meaning they take the real shape of a real light source: whether it a filament in a light bulb, or a small flame on a candle. A point light creates harsh shadows because of its single-point nature - a light mesh has the advantage that it emits light from over the surface, allowing for softer tones and more realistic shadows.
Render several lighting set-ups at once
Image by Zed
The light layer feature allows you to render several light set-ups at once without any extra wait. There's now no hesitation to create several styles of lighting for your scene.
Works for all types of lighting
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Daylight, night time, interiors, exteriors, indirect or direct lighting - Indigo works effectively with all these lighting types using one rendering technique. Indigo supports professional IES profiles that are often provided by manufacturers for accurately simulating their lights.
Any time of day
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Indigo comes with a sun and sky model right out of the box that is great for both indoor and outdoor scenes. Pick an angle or time of day, and it will cast the correct shadows with the right colour of light as the sun changes from dawn to dusk. The sun follows the times of day allowing for those moody sunsets or beautiful sunrises.
Accurately measured metals
Image by juan_irender
Indigo comes with a library of various metals, glasses and other materials as measured in a lab. Used as a simple preset, this data creates realistic and accurate materials. Metals such as gold, aluminium and copper are all correctly rendered with reflections and colour absorptions in their place.
Motion blur
Image by Zed
While Indigo is optimized for still images, motion blur is an effect that allows for the feeling of movement in a single frame. Indigo's motion blur is a completely accurate, unbiased and non-linear motion blur for both camera and objects.
Set the tone with film control
Image by Rogerio Figueiredo
There is a range of ways to change tones in Indigo, and because it is an HDR renderer, all these can be done on-the-fly without re-rendering. Indigo comes with a library of film types such as agfacolor, kodachrome, and advantix, with which you are able to simulate your favourite film quickly and easily. The camera ISO and EV can also be changed simultaneously for the perfect contrast and brightness levels that you desire.
Multi-platform support
Because no one system is best, Indigo runs across Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. With several 3D packages supported and more to come, you won't have to change from your favourite 3D software to achieve quality results. Blender, Cinema 4D, SketchUp and 3ds Max are all officially supported, with Maya, XSI, and Houdini in open beta.
Unlimited potential
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Large meshes are supported, with 28 million triangles tested, allowing for rendering of highly complex scenes. Instances are also supported to allow for thousands or even millions of duplicate objects to render without significant memory increase.
Efficient high performance
Image by Doug Armand
Indigo offers full support for network rendering and multi-core CPUs. Dual and quad core CPUs have become very mainstream and Indigo efficiently divides computation across all available CPU cores for maximum performance. With network rendering you are able to render a single image efficiently across multiple machines - Needs only a TCP/IP network, such as a typical Local Area Network. (LAN)
Never get lost
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Glare Technologies has staff all around the world that are readily available to help you with any problems you may have. But there is also a greater resource that no amount of money can buy, and that is the community. Through the 5 years of Indigo's development a dedicated user-base has built up, not only showing off some world-class renders, but also sharing, collaborating, and helping each other.
Image by zeitmeister
Download and try Indigo Renderer now, for free. The free version has all the functionality of Indigo Pro, with the limitation of rendering at a maximum resolution of 0.7 megapixels and the Indigo watermark embedded. Indigo Pro has unlimited functionality, with the options for bulk discounts and node licenses.