Angel

Angel is my RenderMan compatable(ish) renderer. This is the 0.7 release, which features Global Illumination, as can be seen in the gallery. Though the GI implementation still needs a lot or work, it can alrady produce usefull images. I hope to release a number of 0.7.x releases which contian incremental improvements.

Update:0.7.1 adds ray tracing of NURBS.

Update:0.7.2 Bug fixes to NURBS ray tracing.

Update:0.7.3 EXR support, improved parsing, MacOS X!

Update:0.7.4 Major speedups for ray tracing real scenes.

MacOS BUGFIX:Spotlights have been broken in the Mac build. No one told me! Mac users should update to the current build.

Update:0.7.5 Various fixes and features

Thats right! I've finally got the MacOS X port done!! It currently lacks a display driver, as I've not decided how to integrate it with the Mac UI, but otherwise its working. I'd appreciate as much feedback as possible on the port, so I can gauge the need to any Mac specific work (or fixes).

Features

Support for all geomety types
Procedural Shading (excluding lights)
Hider "stereo" renders left and right eye images in one pass
Shaders of type "geometry" allow parametric surfaces to be written in SL (for example Superquads
Deformation shaders may be used to generate user defined projections.
Area lights are supported for Parametric Surfaces
Ray Traceing and Photon Mapping, as demonstrated in the examples.

Known Limitations

Texture coordinates of Poly's are wrong
Variable Parameters to shaders are largely ignored
Opacity looks bad

The current release can be downloaded for freeBSD, Linux, Windows and MacOS X. You can still download the 0.7.4 release for SGI (email me if you're using this, and I'll do a new build). Let me know which versions you're using, as I constantly review what platforms are supported. I'll consider a port to most systems (that I can get access to), but unless I know they're being used I may drop that support. In addition to the release notes we now have a brief manual which describes most fo Angel's features.

You'll need the standard shaders. Set the environment variable SHADERS to point to the directory you put these in (if you've installed BMRT you've already done this). Shaders can be compiled using either slc or Giles.

Ian Stephenson.
DCT Systems
NCCA,Bournemouth University