Pixie

Pixie 2.2.4
Maintainer	Okan Arikan
Latest Version	23 Jun 2008
Website	{{{urlname}}}
Forum Link	CGTalk Forum

Pixie is a RenderMan-compliant renderer based on the REYES algorithm. Pixie has been in steady development since 2002 (when it was registered on SourceForge). Pixie is an open source project licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License ([1]).

Updates are released regularly to fix bugs, and major version changes that usually fix serious bugs or add new features about 1 or 2 times a year.

1 Open Source
2 Supported platforms
3 Supported Features
4 Newer features in the 2.x releases
5 External links
6 Film Credits

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Open Source

Pixie is an Open Source project. The development is hosted on SourceForge, and is very active in regards to bug fixes and updates. Because it is open source there is also the ability to compile the source for an operating system other than Windows, Linux or OSX.

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Supported platforms

Windows
OSX
Linux

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Supported Features

All RenderMan 3.2 primitives
- Quadrics: Sphere, Disk, Cone, Paraboloid, Hyperboloid, Cylinder, Toroid
- Parametrics: Bilinear/Bicubic patches, NURBS
- Subdivision Surfaces including crease/hole/interpolateboundary tags
- Points
- Curves
- Convex / Concave polygons with or without holes and their meshes
Object instancing / delayed primitives
Displacements
Programmable shading (RenderMan Shading Language)
High quality texture/shadow/environment mapping
High dynamic range input/output
Raytracing
Motion blur
Depth of field
Reyes style rendering (very fast)
Occlusion culling
Network parallel rendering
DSO shaders
Global illumination
- Photon mapping
- Irradiance caching
Automatically raytraced smooth reflections / shadows

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Newer features in the 2.x releases

Scalable, multi-threaded rendering
Caching/baking computation with LOD (bake3d / texture3d)
Scalable, multi-resolution raytracing using ray differentials
- Pixie now has a new raytracing engine that automatically tesselates surfaces on the fly to a desired accuracy determined using the ray differentials. This means rays tracing blurry reflections or computing global illumination are faster to trace and sharp reflections and shadows are more accurate. Pixie also contains a memory manager that keeps the memory that is used to keep these tesselations around under control. Similar to texture caching, Pixie will maintain a set of active surfaces and only those surfaces will consume raytracing memory.
Arbirtaty output values
64 bit compatibility
Inline archives
Conditional RIB
Named resources

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