(Cross-posted on toxicengine.org)

Seven years ago I was stepping down as the head and founder of toxic, an early open source global illumination renderer, and my good friend Jonathan Perret was taking the lead of the project. I outlined the reasons for this in an October 2004 post on toxic's website. To summarize, I had decided to join mental images' core R&D team and my employment contract didn't allow me to continue working on toxic. Read more...

The upcoming release of appleseed (1.1.0 alpha-5) will feature a new surface shader for fast approximate subsurface scattering. It is based on the paper Approximating Translucency for a Fast, Cheap and Convincing Subsurface Scattering Look by Colin Barré-Brisebois of DICE. The technique was originally targeted at real time rendering in games but it works equally well in the setting of an interactive or final frame path tracer. Read more...

We just added a page to host the release notes for the next build of appleseed, check it out here!

A quick note to let you know that Mikael just released Structure Synth 1.5.0 (codenamed "Hinxton"). This is the first release of Structure Synth that supports exporting scenes to appleseed. Check the full announcement here. Read more...