NVIDIA Releases Latest Version of Gelato Rendering Software
Posted by: Leigh Stringer at March 23, 2006 7:11:20 PM
NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), a worldwide leader in graphics and digital media processors, today announced the release of NVIDIA Gelato 2.0 rendering software, the latest major release of its high-end, GPU-accelerated rendering software.
Gelato also comes with the Mango™ plug-in for Maya and (coming soon) the Amaretto™ plug-in for 3ds Max. With the plug-ins, users have access to all the features found in Gelato. Amaretto is currently in beta testing with availability planned in coming weeks. Artists can use the plug-ins to render images "right out of the box," or can use Gelato’s API to combine the renderer with other production tools.
Gelato 2.0 brings performance improvements and major new features including:
Sorbetto interactive relighting
Raytracing performance improvements of 30-50% (depending on scene)
Volume shadows for hair and smoke
Dynamic shadows
Simultaneous rendering of stereo images
Shader metadata
Physical units in shaders
Multithreading
Sorbetto lighting technology allows you to add, delete, or move lights (including recomputation of shadows), or modify any light parameter, and see the changes interactively. At all times you are viewing final pixels, including full antialiasing, motion blur, and transparency. This saves artists time and allows them to adjust lighting in a scene to get the exact look they are trying to create. For Maya users, Sorbetto features are exposed directly in our Mango plug-in for Maya. For developers, all relighting features are exposed through extensions to the Gelato APIs.
Amaretto, which was created by Frantic Films of Winnipeg, allows 3ds Max users to select Gelato to render existing scenes, and access Gelato's extensive feature set including fast sub-pixel displacement, analytical sub-division surfaces and shader programming language to enhance the quality of their artistic output. Amaretto is currently in beta testing with commercial availability planned in coming weeks.
NVIDIA digital film products are available direct from NVIDIA and from authorized resellers by region. Gelato, which includes the Sorbetto relighting technology and the first year of maintenance and support, is priced at $1500. Renewal of maintenance and support at the end of the first year is $300/license. An evaluation version of the software is available for download on the web. For more information, please visit http://film.nvidia.com.
Original post by Emmanuel Deloget
NVidia want to fight against pixar's renderman? Can be fun... :)
And they can probably win too. Pixar's Renderman is great, but Pixar doesn't make graphics hardware. I know there is hardware built for Renderman, but its' not built by the people that MAKE Renderman. Could be an interesting commercial battle brewing, especially if NVidia can leverage it's programmable hardware to speed frame rendering up, especially in the movie sectors, where rendering a frame of a movie can still take an eternity.
Emmanuel DelogetGDNet News LeadMember since: 8/27/2003 From: France
Posted - 3/24/2006 4:22:53 PM
Quote:
Original post by Calefaction
Quote:
Original post by Emmanuel Deloget
NVidia want to fight against pixar's renderman? Can be fun... :)
And they can probably win too. Pixar's Renderman is great, but Pixar doesn't make graphics hardware. I know there is hardware built for Renderman, but its' not built by the people that MAKE Renderman. Could be an interesting commercial battle brewing, especially if NVidia can leverage it's programmable hardware to speed frame rendering up, especially in the movie sectors, where rendering a frame of a movie can still take an eternity.
Renderman is widely used in the industry. NVidia may have built a good product, they'll have to fight against 20+ years of Renderman use - it means that the fight will be very heavy :) Anyway, it is a good news - competition is always a good news.
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Kitt3n
Member since: 1/23/2001 From: Netherlands
Posted - 3/24/2006 6:20:26 AM
Posted - 3/24/2006 10:07:46 AM
