3Delight and Blender

That AtomKraft thing for AE didn't really cut it afterall. Maybe I need some more time to figure out how all things work in this horrible mess that AE is for such work.

But 3Delight exporter for Blender, coded by Matt Ebb, is still great! Fiddled with it some more and compiled a new glass shader because the example shaders for glass are.. not very glass-looking. For some reason Blender now can't load shader names in existing scenes, displays text "loading shaders...". When I start Blender up and add material in new scene, everything is fine. Must investigate what is wrong.

Overall, 3Delight is a whole new world. Displacement is great and it should support pTex also. Should download Mari trial or some pTex sample files and try to get pTextures working. Shader writing is interesting, tried to figure out what I must do to compile C++ DSO functions. It seems that it isn't very difficult with cmake. Rendertime Python code evaluation is also something that can be very useful, for example for creating new geometry.

pTex seems to have catched wind very well with prMan, 3Delight, Arnold, vRay, Mari, 3D-Coat, Mudbox, 3DS Max, Maya, Modo, Nuke already supporting it and the list goes longer every day. Hope that Blender also adds pTex support to Cycles renderer and it's painting tools.

3Delight render engine in AE and Nuke

Just found out that company Jupiter Jazz has released their AtomKraft toolkit for both After Effects and Nuke. I read about AtomKraft sometime last year but as it was still in beta or whatever phase I forgot about it. Now I rediscovered it and guess what! It offers 3Delight engine in AE for only 99$ and in Nuke for 399$. They also have a free watermarked version for AE and free 2-thread version for Nuke. Kind of cheap really considering what it can do.

So what can it do?

Basically it can:

• read obj, Alembic and RIB files
• read Renderman Shading Language shaders and compile them render-time
• provide almost all features of 3Delight including GI, SSS, primitives, micropolygon displacement, motion blur, dof, HDRI lighting, image based shadows,  and so on
• use Cortex tools
• do camera projections (in After Effects!)
• texture baking
• render passes
• proxy geometry

A whole bunch of stuff and I missed a lot of features. These are the primary ones that I noticed while reading their docs.

This whole thing made me think that maybe it is time to try to render our next animation project in 3Delight through Aftereffects. Sounds a bit odd but it's probably worth a try. Only thing to do now is get Blender Alembic exporter working and simply stuff things together in AE...