Pixie / News: Recent posts

Hi everybody,

Pixie 2.2.5 is out. This release incorporates many bug reports and improvements in the SVN trunk.

Okan

Hi Everybody,

Pixie 2.2.3 is out. This version has significant improvements over the previous version in terms of accuracy, performance and stability.

It also has support for __nonspecular / __nondiffuse shader parameters.

As usual, a significant number of the bugs raised in the discussion forum are also addressed. Thank you Pixie user community.

Okan

Hey Everybody,

Pixie 2.1.1 is out !!!

The new stuff includes:

Added support for:
- Inline RIB archives using ArchiveBegin/ArchiveEnd
* You can go crazy here. Pixie simply dumps the inline archive
into a RIB archive on disk, so there are no limits on the size
or complexity of your inline archives. The conditional execution
also works in these inline archives.

- Conditional execution using IfBegin/ElseIf/Else/EndIf
* We need your help here. Pixie now supports querying
user defined options/attributes as well as options/attributes
defined thru Attribute/Option. Unfortunately,
RenderMan documentation is not exactly clear on the names for
the standard option/attribute names. If you know the names of
standard options/attributes (the x resolution for example), let
us know.... read more

Pixie 2.0.2 has been release. The changes are:

* 64Bit clean codebase. The Pixie source should
compile cleanly on 64Bit platforms. Please let
us know if you have any issues with this. Note:
you'll need libtiff (and X11 on linux / OSX) to be
compiled in 64Bit mode too.

* Fixed issues with dissapearing subdiv geometry when raytracing
* Fixed issues with speckled irradiance / occlusion data when using
the "R" mode... read more

Hi Everyone,

If you've been following our progress, you will notice that we didn't make a release since October. But this has not been a vacation for us...

George and I present Pixie 2. The changes from 1.7.6 are so many that I will not even try to enumerate them all.

Here're the important ones:

- Multithreading
Pixie has a new, multi-threaded core. Our implementation is very efficient and scalable.... read more

Hi Everybody,

Pixie 1.7.3 is out and it has some cool features. We implemented the "bake3d" and "texture3d" support. So your expensive shaders can cache computation and access it at arbitrary resolutions.

According to PrMan app-notes, these functions may replace "indirectdiffuse" and "irradiancecache" functions in the future releases.

Okan

Pixie 1.5.7 is out.

It includes the following imrpovements / fixes

GI/irradiancecache improvements:

maxError is 0.5 by default, turning it higher gives faster / smoother results (but less accurate). Lower, say 0.1 is suitable for high quality. Memory consumption and speed during GI baking are much improved. Note that the difference between 1.5.7 and 1.5.6 is improved compatibility of the way the maxError parameter works for tweaking the quality of the irradiance bakes.... read more

Pixie 1.4.4 contains a .NET port of Pixie. The windows version of the renderer should now work faster.

PS: You can still compile Pixie with Visual Studio 6. There are two different set of project files (under "windows" directory) for .NET and VC6.

Okan

This version fixes most of the bugs submitted in the last 2-3 weeks.

Okan

This version has significant improvements on the scan-line portion of the renderer. More specifically, the occlusion culling works much better now.

This version also fixes some scan-line rendering bugs that used to happen around transparent surfaces.

Okan

This version has a fixed and optimized ray-tracing pipeline.

Okan

This version fixes some minor bugs and features some extra command line switched for "rndr"

Okan

This version fixes several bugs and incorporates some optimizations.

Okan

This version has fixes for several issues that turned up after I uploaded 1.3.12.

Okan

This version fixes some of the bugs associated with weird texture names, shadow maps and depth of field.

This version of Pixie has an experimental occlusion culling system as well. So scenes with complicated shaders should render much faster.

PS: Because this release is experimental, I'm leaving 1.3.11 up.

Okan

This version has additional bug fixes.

Okan

I spent a lot of time on this release. It has lots of bug fixes. Mainly:

The global illumination pipeline has been re-worked. The quality and speed should be much better.
The quadric surfaces now accept negative parameters etc.
The rib exporter should be more robust. Although I need to get Liquid working with Pixie so I can test this feature more extensively.

Okan

This version fixes the sdrc.exe crash problem that the windows version had in 1.3.6.

Okan

This version fixes variety of minor bugs.

Okan

This release fixes some problems with the gather statement.

Okan

This version fixes some minor bugs. I also tried to fix some compatibility issues with OSX. Since I don't have a MAC to compile Pixie on, I trust MAC users to provide feedback about the compilation problems if any.

Okan

The new version fixes a variety of bugs and is more stable than 1.3.1.

The optimization flags have been removed from configure.in to allow user specified CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS.

Okan

Pixie users,

The new version of Pixie is up. This version fixes many bugs in the old version and features significant speedups. The renderer organization has been changed substantially to make Pixie more scaleable. If you notice, I did not make any uploads for the last 3-4 monts and I have been working on Pixie almost non-stop. This may give you an idea about the extend of the changes.

This also means that the new version has not been tested very well. That's why I'm keeping the old version still up.... read more

This version includes some critical bug fixes especially for linux users.

Okan

This release fixes the depth of field bug. Dso shaders with underscores in their names also work now. This release adds "display" searchpath option for the display drivers (this means "procedural" searchpath will no longer be searched for display drivers).

I also tried to fix the "alloca" problem on SGI's. However, since I don't have access to an SGI, I can not test whether it compiles now. Some help from the SGI users ?... read more