Kerkythea
Encyclopedia
Kerkythea is a standalone rendering
system that supports raytracing and Metropolis light transport
, uses physically accurate materials and lighting — and is distributed as freeware. Currently, the program can be integrated with any software that can export files in obj and 3ds
formats — including 3ds Max, Blender
, SketchUp
, Silo
and Wings3D.
but an updated release on October 2005 made it Linux
compatible. It is now also available for Mac OS X. In May 2009 it was announced that the development team started a new commercial renderer, although Kerkythea will be updated and it will stay free.
Blender
:
3D Studio Max
:
GMax
:
SketchUp
:
Supported Image Formats
Supported Materials
Supported Shapes
Supported Lights
Supported Textures
Supported Features
Supported Camera Types
Supported Rendering Techniques
Application Environment
Rendering (computer graphics)
Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model , by means of computer programs. A scene file contains objects in a strictly defined language or data structure; it would contain geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information as a description of the virtual scene...
system that supports raytracing and Metropolis light transport
Metropolis light transport
The Metropolis light transport is a SIGGRAPH 1997 paper by Eric Veach and Leonidas J. Guibas, describing an application of a variant of the Monte Carlo method called the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to the rendering equation for generating images from detailed physical descriptions of three...
, uses physically accurate materials and lighting — and is distributed as freeware. Currently, the program can be integrated with any software that can export files in obj and 3ds
.3ds
3DS is one of the file formats used by the Autodesk 3ds Max 3D modeling, animation and rendering software.It was the native file format of the old Autodesk 3D Studio DOS , which was popular until its successor replaced it in April 1996...
formats — including 3ds Max, Blender
Blender (software)
Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications or video games. The current release version is 2.60, and was released on October 19, 2011...
, SketchUp
SketchUp
SketchUp is a 3D modeling program marketed by Google and designed for architectural, civil, and mechanical engineers as well as filmmakers, game developers,...
, Silo
Silo (software)
Silo is a polygon/subdivision surfaces 3D modeling application created by Nevercenter. It has a focus on quick editing, a customizable interface , and a flexible workflow ....
and Wings3D.
History
Kerkythea started development in 2004 and released its first version on April 2005. Initially it was only compatible with Microsoft WindowsMicrosoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
but an updated release on October 2005 made it Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
compatible. It is now also available for Mac OS X. In May 2009 it was announced that the development team started a new commercial renderer, although Kerkythea will be updated and it will stay free.
Exporters
There are 6 official exporters for Kerkythea.Blender
Blender (software)
Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, interactive 3D applications or video games. The current release version is 2.60, and was released on October 19, 2011...
:
- Blend2KT
- Exporter to XML format
3D Studio Max
3D Studio Max
Autodesk 3ds Max, formerly 3D Studio MAX, is for making 3D animations. It was developed and produced by Autodesk Media and Entertainment. It has modeling capabilities, a flexible plugin architecture and can be used on the Microsoft Windows platform. It's frequently used by video game developers, TV...
:
- 3dsMax2KT 3dsMax Exporter
GMax
Gmax
Gmax is a 3D modeling application based on Autodesk's 3ds Max application used by professional computer graphics artists. Whereas 3ds Max is a comprehensive modeling, animation, and rendering package with some secondary post-production and compositing features, Gmax is much more limited due to its...
:
- GMax2KT GMax Exporter
SketchUp
SketchUp
SketchUp is a 3D modeling program marketed by Google and designed for architectural, civil, and mechanical engineers as well as filmmakers, game developers,...
:
- SU2KT SketchUp Exporter
- SU2KT Light Components
Features
Supported 3D File Formats- 3DS Format
- OBJ Format
- XMLXMLExtensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
(internal) Format - SIA (SiloSilo (software)Silo is a polygon/subdivision surfaces 3D modeling application created by Nevercenter. It has a focus on quick editing, a customizable interface , and a flexible workflow ....
) Format (partially supported)
Supported Image Formats
- All supported by FreeImage library (JPEGJPEGIn computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....
, BMP, PNG, TGATruevision TGATruevision TGA, often referred to as TARGA, is a raster graphics file format created by Truevision Inc. . It was the native format of TARGA and VISTA boards, which were the first graphic cards for IBM-compatible PCs to support Highcolor/truecolor display...
and HDR included)
Supported Materials
- Matte
- Perfect Reflections/Refractions
- Blurry Reflections/Refractions
- Translucency (SSS)
- Dielectric Material
- Thin Glass Material
- Phong shadingPhong shadingPhong shading refers to an interpolation technique for surface shading in 3D computer graphics. It is also called Phong interpolation or normal-vector interpolation shading. Specifically, it interpolates surface normals across rasterized polygons and computes pixel colors based on the interpolated...
Material - Ward Anisotropic Material
- Anisotropic Ashikhmin Material
- Lafortune Material
- Layered Material [Additive Combination of the Above with use of Alpha Maps]
Supported Shapes
- Triangulated Meshes
- SphereSphereA sphere is a perfectly round geometrical object in three-dimensional space, such as the shape of a round ball. Like a circle in two dimensions, a perfect sphere is completely symmetrical around its center, with all points on the surface lying the same distance r from the center point...
- PlanesPlane (mathematics)In mathematics, a plane is a flat, two-dimensional surface. A plane is the two dimensional analogue of a point , a line and a space...
Supported Lights
- Omni Light
- Spot Light
- Projector Light
- Point Diffuse
- Area Diffuse
- Point Light Spherical Soft Shadows
- Ambient Lighting
- Sky Lighting [Physical Sky, SkySphere Bitmap (Normal or HDRIHigh dynamic range imagingIn image processing, computer graphics, and photography, high dynamic range imaging is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital imaging techniques or photographic methods...
)]
Supported Textures
- Constant Colors
- Bitmaps (Normal and HDRI)
- Procedurals [Perlin Noise, Marble, WoodWoodWood is a hard, fibrous tissue found in many trees. It has been used for hundreds of thousands of years for both fuel and as a construction material. It is an organic material, a natural composite of cellulose fibers embedded in a matrix of lignin which resists compression...
, Windy, Checker, Wireframe, Normal Ramp, Fresnel Ramp] - Any Weighted or Multiplicative Combination of the Above
Supported Features
- Bump MappingBump mappingBump mapping is a technique in computer graphics for simulating bumps and wrinkles on the surface of an object. This is achieved by perturbing the surface normals of the object and using the perturbed normal during lighting calculations. The result is an apparently bumpy surface rather than a...
- Normal mappingNormal mappingIn 3D computer graphics, normal mapping, or "Dot3 bump mapping", is a technique used for faking the lighting of bumps and dents. It is used to add details without using more polygons. A common use of this technique is to greatly enhance the appearance and details of a low polygon model by...
- Clip Mapping
- Bevel Mapping (an innovative KT feature!)
- Edge Outlining
- Depth of fieldDepth of fieldIn optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, depth of field is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image...
- FogFogFog is a collection of water droplets or ice crystals suspended in the air at or near the Earth's surface. While fog is a type of stratus cloud, the term "fog" is typically distinguished from the more generic term "cloud" in that fog is low-lying, and the moisture in the fog is often generated...
- Isotropic Volume Scattering
- Faked CausticsCaustic (optics)In optics, a caustic or caustic network is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface. The caustic is a curve or surface to which each of the light rays is tangent, defining a boundary of an...
- Faked Translucency
- DispersionDispersion (optics)In optics, dispersion is the phenomenon in which the phase velocity of a wave depends on its frequency, or alternatively when the group velocity depends on the frequency.Media having such a property are termed dispersive media...
- Anti-aliasingAnti-aliasingIn digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution...
[Texture Filtering, Edge Antialiasing] - Selection Rendering
- Surface and Material Instancing
Supported Camera Types
- Planar ProjectionPlanar projectionPlanar projections are the subset of 3D graphical projections constructed by linearly mapping points in three dimensional space to points on a two-dimensional projection plane. The projected point on the plane is chosen such that it is collinear with the corresponding three dimensional point and...
[ PinholePinhole cameraA pinhole camera is a simple camera without a lens and with a single small aperture – effectively a light-proof box with a small hole in one side. Light from a scene passes through this single point and projects an inverted image on the opposite side of the box...
, Thin lensThin lens[Image:Lens1.svg|thumb|A lens can be considered a thin lens if d [Image:Lens1.svg|thumb|A lens can be considered a thin lens if d [Image:Lens1.svg|thumb|A lens can be considered a thin lens if d...
] - Cylindrical Pinhole
- Spherical Pinhole
Supported Rendering Techniques
- Classic Ray Tracing
- Path TracingPath TracingPath tracing is a computer graphics rendering technique that attempts to simulate the physical behaviour of light as closely as possible. It is a generalisation of conventional ray tracing, tracing rays from the virtual camera through several bounces on or through objects...
(Kajiya) - Bidirectional Path Tracing (Veach & Guibas)
- Metropolis Light TransportMetropolis light transportThe Metropolis light transport is a SIGGRAPH 1997 paper by Eric Veach and Leonidas J. Guibas, describing an application of a variant of the Monte Carlo method called the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to the rendering equation for generating images from detailed physical descriptions of three...
(Kelemen, Kalos et al.) - Photon mappingPhoton mappingIn computer graphics, photon mapping is a two-pass global illumination algorithm developed by Henrik Wann Jensen that solves the rendering equation. Rays from the light source and rays from the camera are traced independently until some termination criterion is met, then they are connected in a...
(Jensen) [mesh maps, photon maps, final gathering, irradiance caching, caustics] - Diffuse Interreflection (Ward)
- Depth Rendering
- Mask Rendering
- Clay Rendering
Application Environment
- OpenGLOpenGLOpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...
Real-Time Viewer [basic staging capabilities] - Integrated Material Editor
- Easy Rendering Customization
- Sun/Sky Customization
- Script System
- Command Line Mode
See also
- YafaRay, a free, open source ray tracing program that uses an XML scene description language.
- POV-RayPOV-RayThe Persistence of Vision Raytracer, or POV-Ray, is a ray tracing program available for a variety of computer platforms. It was originally based on DKBTrace, written by David Kirk Buck and Aaron A. Collins. There are also influences from the earlier Polyray raytracer contributed by its author...
, another popular, free ray tracer. - LuxRenderLuxRenderLuxRender is an open source software rendering system for physically correct image synthesis. The program runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and exporters are available for Blender, SketchUp, Cinema 4D, XSI, DAZ Studio, and Maya.-Overview:...
, an unbiased rendering system