Aqsis 1.8.2

Aqsis is a high quality, photorealistic, 3D rendering solution. Aqsis complies with the RenderMan interface standard defined by Pixar.

The RenderMan standard has been used in film and television visual effects since it's introduction in 1989. Pixar has used their own implementation for all of their award winning CG features, and provided their implementation for use in the visual effects of most major blockbuster films over the last 2 decades.

The Aqsis project offers a way for individuals and organistaions alike to gain experience with the RenderMan interface without the cost of commercial software licenses.

Aqsis comprises a tool for compiling shaders in the RSL language, a command line rendering tool, a tool for preparing textures for optimal use, and various developer libraries to enable integration with third party tools.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

Optimizations:
· Avoid recomputing samples at overlapping bucket boundaries
· CqMatrix Optimisations
· Removal of IqBound
· Substantially refactored sampling and occlusion culling code
· Tight bounding boxes for sampling
· Revive old rasterizer code rather than using a sampling tree
· New cache-friendly occlusion tree
· Occlusion culling prior to micropolygon sampling
· Improved sampling speed for RiPoints
· Enable the "focusfactor" approximation for depth of field by default
· Implement the "motionfactor" approximation for motion blur
· Improved shadow map rendering speed
· Faster splitting code for large point clouds

Other changes:
· Piqsl interface refactor
· Single window interface
· Improved keyboard shortcuts
· Improved zooming
· Z-buffer support
· Texturing improvements
· Rewritten environment filtering as part of aqsis_tex
· Finer control over texture filtering with "minwidth" and "trunc" parameters.
· Smooth shading interpolation for depth of field and motion blur
· Matte alpha support for directly rendering shadows on...