Blender Adds Raytracing

rastachops writes "Blender, the Open Source 3D modelling tool has recently added Raytracing to its extensive list of features. 'Believe it or not, but Ton has integrated the raytracer from Blender's predecessor, Traces into Blender. He said "the algorithm has been optimized and is now ten times faster. Combine that with a PC that's forty times faster than in the early 1990's and raytracing is almost usable". For a comparison checkout the before and after screenshots.'"

Comments

Heavy load

[MooCows]

Looks like they're raytracing on their webserver, or could it be something else?

Re:Blender is great.

[UglyMike]

Don't forget.... there is a new 600-page book coming out end of this month. This has the new GUI but not the Raytracing part. There is also a Japanese book currently in print. Details on Blender.org

Copies of the 2.0 Blender book can still be fond or simply downloaded as PDF (of course, this one doesn't cover armatures and has the 'old' interface) There is also a documentation project using the 2.0 guide as base but completely reworking the obsolete content.

Since the move to Open Source, Blender has gotten, amongst others

• internationalisation
• way better meta ball implementation
• knife tool
• raytracer (reflections&shadows)
• completely reworked GUI (and still changing)
• a newer, better Python API and a truckload of great scripts ( Fiber2, MakeHuman,Tesselate,...)

In the coming weeks/months, we'll see

• Beast script (including card-based fur just like IceAge)
• better nurbs based on Nurbana
• integrated bevel tool (script-based bevel already exists.)
• Integrated REAL raytracer (YafRay)
• ???

And the whole thing runs on most of todays's OSes
As you can see, lot's of stuff to go around. It might not be Maya or SFX or Houdini but it sure is a lot more fun!!!