4 ms·

I just wish they'd put some more effort into letting the renderer be used standalone --- I'm not particularly interested in the modeller, but I would really lik

I just wish they'd put some more effort into letting the renderer be used standalone --- I'm not particularly interested in the modeller, but I would really like a renderer with a C++ API that would allow me to play with procedural volumetric effects. Technically you can use it standalone, but it's not a great experience. There are no binaries, it's painful to build, and the only way to interact with it is via an undocumented XML format; and I haven't found any way to do truly procedural volumes or geometry (i.e. via a density function callback specified by the user). Right now I have an extremely patched version of Povray, but I'd love to switch to something faster.

thomastjeffery 9y ago
Look at LuxRender. It's a very capable, free (open-source), GPU-based, standalone renderer.
- david-given 9y ago
  I did look at it, but the API appears to be completely undocumented, there aren't any precompiled libraries for it (the ordinary binaries don't contain the API), and it's painfully complicated to build. The nicest renderer I've found, API-wise, was OSPRay, which was simple and elegant to use... but doesn't support volumetric rendering in any way. I have in the past got this working, more or less, with Mitsuba with some custom code but I'd rather like to avoid customisations. They're too much work to maintain.
  - glenneroo 9y ago
    I don't know about API access, but there are a couple more external renderers listed here: https://www.blender.org/download/external-renderers/ https://www.blender.org/download/external-renderers/
  - dTal 9y ago
    Not heard of OSPRay, interesting. I personally think Mitsuba is the dark horse of free renderers. Blazing fast, good highly modular design, good docs, super easy Python bindings, GPU preview. The only problem is it's a one-man show, and the one man seems to have been doing other things lately. Nevertheless it's the renderer I think deserves to become the "standard".

thomastjeffery 9y ago

Look at LuxRender. It's a very capable, free (open-source), GPU-based, standalone renderer.

david-given 9y ago
I did look at it, but the API appears to be completely undocumented, there aren't any precompiled libraries for it (the ordinary binaries don't contain the API), and it's painfully complicated to build. The nicest renderer I've found, API-wise, was OSPRay, which was simple and elegant to use... but doesn't support volumetric rendering in any way. I have in the past got this working, more or less, with Mitsuba with some custom code but I'd rather like to avoid customisations. They're too much work to maintain.
- glenneroo 9y ago
  I don't know about API access, but there are a couple more external renderers listed here: https://www.blender.org/download/external-renderers/ https://www.blender.org/download/external-renderers/
- dTal 9y ago
  Not heard of OSPRay, interesting. I personally think Mitsuba is the dark horse of free renderers. Blazing fast, good highly modular design, good docs, super easy Python bindings, GPU preview. The only problem is it's a one-man show, and the one man seems to have been doing other things lately. Nevertheless it's the renderer I think deserves to become the "standard".