Pixie / News: Recent posts

This version includes minor bug fixes...

Okan

The main changes in this version are:
- Optimizations
- Code re-organization
- Pixie now supports "facevarying" container class

Okan

This version includes support for linear as well as cubic curves. It also fixes some minor bugs that have to do with shadow maps and general shading language execution. Notice that Pixie's beta number has been incremented. This means old shaders (compiled with previous versions of Pixie) are now incompatible. Make sure you re-compile your shaders.

Okan

Pixie 1.1.4 is released. The new features / fixes included in this version are:

- Curves:
Pixie now supports RiCurves (cubic only). Linear curves are coming in the next release
- Subdivision Surfaces:
Are now much more robust and correct. Pixie now correctly interprets "interpolateboundary" and "crease" tags and uses much less memory and renders much faster.
- Object instancing
You can now instanciate procedural primitives and also instanciate objects in ObjectBegin / ObjectEnd block.
- The scan-line renderer (hidden / stochastic) is much faster and renderes scenes with lots of transparency layers faster.
- Procedural primitives now work... read more

I fixed the SubdivisionMesh primitive in this release. Subdivision surfaces render much faster and use less memory. Moreover "interpolateboundary" and "crease" tags are now more compatible with PrMan.

sdr library is now C compatible too.

Okan

The new features include:
- RIB output capability
- A library (sdr.lib / libsdr.a) to query compiled shader parameters

Okan

Thanks to Moritz Moeller, Pixie now has a windows installer that deals with the annoying environment variables.

Okan

Finally, Pixie 1.1.1 is out. The new features include:

PrMan 11 global illumination extensions:
- Photon mapping
- Irradiance caching
- Automatic reflections / shadows
Optimized shading
- Complex shaders run much faster

I'm now working on RIB output and a library for extracting shader parameters.

Any help on Pixie is appreciated. If you found any bugs, performance bottlenecks or if you have scenes that you rendered with Pixie, let me know.... read more

This releases the polygon "varying" variable interpolation bug, the parametric coordinate bug around extraordinary vertices in the subdivision and the "NDC" coordinate system.

Okan

The changes in this release include:
1 Subdivision Meshes interpolate varying variables correctly
2. Some global variables that have been erronuously defined as vertex have been re-defined as varying.
3. Bicubic patch parameter space bug has been fixed.

Okan

This version fixes the following bugs:
- OpenGL hider now works
- A minor raytracing bug has been fixed

Okan

This release fixes:
- Holes on subdivision surfaces
- Raytraced instance objects
- Raytraced shadows

Okan

Pixie 1.0.2 has been released. The changes include:

- sdrinfo --- A program that displays shader parameter information --- has been added
- Torus raytracing bug has been fixed
- SubdivionMesh command can now be issued without tags
- "file" now generates uncompressed tif files
- A minor transparent shadow map bug has been fixed, documentation updated

Okan

The first public version of Pixie is released.

The binaries are avaibale on Windows and Linux platforms. The source should be quite platform independent.

The source code is also provided.

Any help on testing/porting/optimizing/implementing new features is very much appreciated.

Okan Arikan
okan@cs.berkeley.edu