Aqsis Renderer / News: Recent posts

Tim Shead has submitted a new image to the gallery. Generated with K3D (http://k3d.sf.net), it shows subdivision, environment mapping and soft shadows.

I have uploaded version 0.7.15 to the unstable project.

It mostly has small fixes, but has some work that Tristan and I have done to try to make using libaqsis to build and run simple examples out of the Renderman Companion easier.

Also included is Anteru's soft shadow support, (still not right, as there are some bugs in the shadow sampling in general), and Tim's framebuffer save work.

Have fun.

I have just put up the latest unstable build for people to get hold of. A few small new features, and some bugs and optimisations. See the changelog for details.

The Win32 version of 0.7.13, including the new Ambient Occlusion Mapping support is now available for download.

On all platforms, this is a "latest unstable build" so doesn't get entered into the SF downloads area. They are available from...

http://aqsis.sf.net/builds/latest/aqsis-setup-0.7.11.exe
http://aqsis.sf.net/builds/latest/aqsis-0.7.11.tar.gz
http://aqsis.sf.net/builds/latest/MacAqsis-0.7.11.pkg.tar

The source archive for 0.7.6 is also now available for download. Again see the release notes for details of changes.

Changes include cubic curves support, delayed read archive, RiProcedurals, and lots of internal optimisations and refactoring. See the release notes for more.

I have just put the finishing touches to Jonathan Merritt's excellent work to gice us RiCurves support. For some examples of what it can produce see http://aqsis.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=280

This release has more changes in than I thought, until I cam to write the changes note. New SDS, texture baking, HDRI support. And lots of others, see the release notes on the file page for more.

Thanks to Michel Joron, there is a new release of the MacOSX binary, at version 0.7.2.

There is a new version of both the Win32 installer and the source archive available for download, see the change notes for details. Aqsis is a Renderman(tm) compliant photorealistic 3D rendering toolkit. It is based on the Reyes rendering approach. Features include - programmable shading, true displacements, NURBS, CSG.

The main aqsis site (http://www.aqsis.com) now has a fourm section based on phpBB2.

Please visit and add your input to help drive the development of Aqsis.

The source archive for 0.7.1 is now available for download. See changelog for details, lots for enhancements and fixes.

Aqsis is a photorealistic 3D rendering toolkit. It is based on the Reyes rendering approach. Features include - programmable shading, true displacements, NURBS, CSG. This release includes such things as linear curves support, floating point images, matte support and a lot of fixes and enhancements. See the Changelog for more details.

Main change in this release is a major rewrite of the primitive variable handling mechnism to support user defined primitive variables of type 'constant', 'uniform', 'varying' and 'vertex' ('facevarying' coming soon). Lots of other changes and improvements, see ChangeLog for details.

See http://www.aqsis.com for details.

This is a first test Debian binary install thanks to Will Newton. Based on the 0.6.4 sourcebase, if all goes well the changes will be merged into the current CVS and this package will from then be kept up to date with the main releases.

See source notes and changes for update. Now includes all required dlls and a test suite for compatibility testing.

Main change is optimisation in the ShaderVM, lots of little code changes (nothing yet on the dramatic reqrite being discussed in the dev list). The test file I was using showed >50% speed increase, but this was a shader intensive test. See the file changes section for more detail. Win32 installer coming soon.

I have submitted a new image to the gallery. It is still a bit WIP, but illustrates the use of subdivision surfaces with sharp edges from Wings.

Source archive is now released to 0.6.5 level, delayed from the Win32 installer due to lack of access to Linux machine.

There are a couple of known problems with this, but I wanted the archives to be up to date. 0.6.6 will follow shortly with more fixes.

Angelo Pesce noticed the omission of libjpeg.dll from the new package, in there now, not worth a new version number.

Added a new release ahead of schedult to fix the problems with missing DLLs. Source and others will follow shortly.

Major changes, unfortunately mostly internal and hidden. The whole shader framework, and alot of the core as a result, has been refactored. Code is quite a bit cleaner and more importantly access to the majority of core functionality is now via interfaces (letter/envelope classes).

Addition of aqsltell tool, whose output matches sloinfo and slctell.

Compress output files.

See changes for complete list of upates.

There is a first draft of a basic user manual in the Documentation section. It is in PDF format, written using LaTeX, so can, and will, be converted to HTML.