Indigo Renderer

Indigo Renderer is an understated, yet enormously powerful, unbiased, physically based (GPU) standalone renderer. It produces photo-realistic renderings of the very highest quality and is far more adept at its role than many higher priced alternatives.

With an advanced physical camera model, a super-realistic materials system and the ability to simulate complex lighting situations through Metropolis Light Transport, Indigo Renderer is capable of producing the highest levels of realism demanded by architectural and product visualization.

"Since Indigo is a unbiased renderer without many abstract settings and options to tweak for hours like other render engines, you end up quickly with great results!  I prefer to work for 1h setting up an Indigo scene and render for 5h, than setting up a scene for 5h and render only in 1h! " - Arthur Staschyk.

Indigo works by importing scenes from several of the most popular CAD packages; exporters for these apps are provided free of charge. Simply load the appropriate plugin for your package and export or render to Indigo. The exporters compile scene data including IGES model information, all textures and materials used, light sources and much more - to enable you to set up and render your scene in Indigo. Because Indigo is dependent on your graphics hardware, you will require a reasonably powerful card, but whilst rendering, the other faculties of your workstation are still available to use - unlike a processor-based renderer.

Indigo Render exporters are available for the following CAD modellers:

Sketchup, Blender, Revit, Cinema 4D, 3DS Max, Maya

Indigo Renderer features a world-class implementation of Metropolis Light Transport (MLT), a sophisticated algorithm capable of meeting the exceptional demands of pure unbiased rendering.

Pushing the limits of unbiased rendering

Rendering with MLT enabled

Rendering without MLT

MLT helps most in scenes with complex illumination, where unbiased rendering traditionally struggles to capture important illumination effects. Instead of spreading computational power evenly, MLT concentrates effort where it gives the greatest contribution to the final image. This powerful approach lets you apply the unparalleled accuracy of unbiased rendering to real-world scenes.

To illustrate the difference MLT can make we have rendered an underwater submarine (model courtesy of Anders Lejczak) using sub-surface scattering, which produces realistic shafts of light that illuminate the scene.

Both images rendered for 2 hours on an Intel Q6600 quadcore CPU; the above image was rendered with MLT enabled, the image below without MLT. The difference is striking, and it would take much longer without MLT to match the result obtained with MLT.

It's not rocket science (to use)

This sophisticated technology is available in Indigo Renderer as a single toggle-able option.

Realtime Scene Editing

Indigo 3.0 introduces realtime scene editing - now you can tweak your materials, and the results will be displayed nearly instantly.

You can tweak materials, camera position, camera f-stop and focal length, all in realtime, with both a ray-traced and OpenGL preview.

GPU Accelerated

Indigo 3.0 is GPU accelerated, resulting in speedups of 2-3x without any loss of the excellent image quality Indigo is famous for.

Both CUDA™ and OpenCL™ are supported, which means GPU acceleration will work on both AMD and NVidia cards, on OS X and Windows.

Animation and Render Queue Support

Indigo now has built-in animation and render queue support, thanks to the introduction of the Indigo Queue (.igq) format.

Render queues integrate smoothly with network rendering, which means you can use all the computers on your network to render an animation or set of images easily and rapidly.

Faster, More Powerful

Many changes resulting in improved rendering performance and image quality have been made in the core. Indigo 3.0 produces better images for the same number of samples per pixel as 2.x.

Indigo 3.0 also introduces optional camera vignetting and faster HDR environment mapping.

These are just a few of the many changes that have been made to the core rendering engine in Indigo 3.0 - with many more still to be introduced!

Seamless Network Rendering

All the new Indigo 3.0 features work seamlessly with network rendering, which means you can harness the full power of your network to accelerate realtime editing and final rendering.

Indigo 3.0 network rendering has been greatly optimised since 2.x. Files are intelligently cached on render nodes, resulting in faster render startup times.

Render queues integrate seamlessly with network rendering, allowing for fast rendering of animations and batch jobs.

Improved Bump Mapping

Bump mapping is now more accurate, especially with strong bump scaling and in regions of high curvature. Even models with relatively few polygons benefit from the visual quality added by bump maps.

Improved Subdivision and Displacement

Subdivision and displacement has been greatly improved, with much better UV mapping behaviour and support for mixed triangle+quad meshes. This dramatically improves the quality of subdivided meshes compared to first triangulating them and then applying triangle-based subdivision.

Integrated Network Rendering

• Render a single image efficiently across multiple machines - Needs only a TCP/IP network, such as a typical Local Area Network. (LAN)
• Included Network Manager load balances slaves among masters across a network

Floating Licences

• Automatically allocate licences across a network on an as-needed basis
• Simplifies maintenance and deployment of new Indigo licences

Participating Media

• Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS)
• Unbiased multiple scattering - for the ultimate in realistic SSS.
• Wavelength dependent scattering and absorption coefficients.
• Henyey-Greenstein, Uniform, Rayleigh phase functions.
• Atmospheric scattering model including Mie and Rayleigh scattering.

Full Spectral Rendering

• All light transport calculations use spectral colour instead of RGB colour.
• Rendering parameters, such as material colours, accept arbitrary spectra instead of RGB triplets.

Support for Complex Geometry

• Support for large meshes. (Tested with 28 million triangle model)
• Instancing support - A mesh can be repeated in a scene thousands of times with only minor additional memory usage.

Physical Camera Model

• Realistic aperture for accurate depth-of-field simulation.
• Focal distance - automatic or manual.
• Shift lens.
• Can set sensor width and exposure time.

Advanced Tone Mapping

• Multiple methods for tone mapping a HDR image to a LDR image.
• Reinhard tone mapping for fully automatic tone mapping.
• Camera tone mapping for accurate simulation of real camera films.

High Performance

• Written in SSE-optimised C++ for optimum performance.
• Multi-threaded to take full advantage of multi-core CPUs.
• Efficiently parallelises over all your computer's cores, and over any other render nodes in the network.

Multiple output image formats

• Including High Dynamic-Range (HDR) Formats
• 32 bit per component EXR output. (HDR)
• 32 bit per component Indigo Image (.igi) output. (HDR)
• PNG, JPEG, TIFF output. (LDR)

Physically-based Sky and Sunlight Model

• Efficient spectral sky and sunlight model.
• Realistic time of day effects - sunrise, sunset etc...

Realistic Physically-based Materials

• Accurate dielectric reflection and transmission, including dispersion, total internal reflection, etc...
• Accurate reflection from rough and smooth metal surfaces, using measured material data.
• Lambertian material.
• Lambertian material with rough or smooth dielectric coating.
• Oren-Nayar material for rough, backscattering materials such as clay.
• Diffuse transmitter material for fast SSS approximation for thin objects.
• Blend material for creating arbitrarily-complicated material trees.
• Rough transparent dielectric material for simulating frosted glass etc...

Online Material Database

• Browse, download and share Indigo materials with other Indigo users.

Metropolis Light Transport

• Allows robust and efficient rendering of extremely complex lighting situations

Shader System

• All material parameters can be controlled by a shader program written in Indigo Shader Language. (ISL)
• Just-in-time (JIT) compiled shaders for maximum performance.

Motion Blur

• Camera and object motion blur.
• Completely accurate, unbiased motion blur.
• Non-linear paths even during a single frame.

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

• Simple and intuitive, yet powerful GUI.
• Pause, resume or save render progress.
• Control network rendering.
• Pack or unpack a scene or material.
• Simple licensing dialogue for licensing the free version, in order to unlock the full version

HDR Environment-Map Lighting

• Load an EXR map for simple and realistic scene lighting.

Camera Aperture Diffraction (Glare)

• Realistic camera aperture diffraction (glare) based on accurate optics simulation.
• Works with arbitrary camera apertures and obstacle maps.

Cross Platform

• Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7 support. (32 and 64 bit)
• Mac OS X support. (32 and 64 bit)
• Linux support. (32 and 64 bit)

Supported 3D Applications

• Google SketchUp
• Autodesk 3ds Max
• Cinema 4D
• Maya
• Blender
• Revit
• XSI
• Documented XML format for integrating with other packages