Kray is a state of the art Global Illumination renderer that allows very fast and accurate rendering of scenes where indirect light plays important role. It includes most advanced modern algorithms and optimizations that allow it to render full global illumination, reflections, refractions and caustics very fast on standard computers.

It is currently available as a Lightwave plugin and a standalone application. It integrates tightly into LightWave and supports most of LightWave features and it's being constantly updated with new ones. Kray is not limited to LightWave architecture and provides you powerful features which are not available in LightWave like powerful tonemapping, instancing and linear workflow.
It is easy to port Kray render engine to any software via Kray SDK and KrayScript.

Kray is one of the fastest global illumination render engines around. It features photon mapping and final gathering to provide blistering fast global illumination computation. It also offers uncached final gathering and path tracing for high quality and easy to use rendering.

You no longer need to worry about long render times when using reflection blurring. Kray offers extremely fast rendering of blurry rays so you can use them everywhere without the fear of long render times. To speed rendering up even more it is even possible to adjust blurring rays per surface!

With Quick Linear Workflow plugin you can easily convert all your incoming textures and images into linear space and therefore utilize the power of true linear work flow. It's all done with just a few simple clicks.

Kray instancing enables you to render millions of instanced objects so you can effectively render many billions of polygons without using much memory. You can also use powerful instancing plugin to help you position instances randomly in space with just a few mouse clicks.

Physical sky is a powerful feature that allows close approximation to real life sky and sun lighting. With Kray physical sky you can quickly get correct sun and sky look of any place on earth at a chosen time and date.

Several tone mapping modes inside Kray offers you wide range of tone mapping possibilities. You can use one of the default tone mappers (linear, gamma or exponential) or use a Tonemap blending plugin which allows you to mix tonemapers between each other. This gives you wide variety of possibilities to adjust the look of your rendering.

Powerful optimizations

Even though Kray is easy to use with default presets and settings you are able to optimize almost every part of the engine by tweaking the individual settings. More advanced users can also customize Kray user interface to their liking and explore advanced features of Kray Script which offers many powerful possibilities.

Complete feature list

Global illumination

• full global illumination, includes many ways of light transport
• photon mapping: a number of ray bounces has small influence on rendering speed (good for scenes with many ray bounces)
• light mapping: similar to photon mapping, but with many advantages
• irradiance caching
• irradiance gradients: interpolates irradiance to save rendering time, works correctly with reflection and refraction (where shading noise reduction fails)
• path tracing: fast when the number of ray bounces is small
• reusable GI data to speed up rendering animations
• Importance sampling: gives a huge speed up when rendering scenes with a large number of rays recursion
• Light Portals: gives the ability to guide photons to where the camera is, resulting in better quality and faster rendering.

Image sampling

• Several anti aliasing modes and pixel filters

Effects

• Caustics: fast caustics using photon maps
• Fast blurry reflections
• luminous polygons: any object can be a light source that illuminates other objects even if GI is disabled
• Motion blur
• DOF
• Several tone mapping modes (gamma, linear, exponential, HSV)

Misc

• instancing: ability to use models multiple times in a scene without additional memory usage
• progressive preview display
• multi threading, takes advantage of multi core, multi CPU, hyper threading systems (up to 128 threads)
• GUI with predefined presets
• dual platform license (Mac, PC)
• Buffers output
• Tone mapping

Supported platforms:

• Macintosh, Tiger 10.4.10 or later, PowerPC G4 or faster,any Intel-based Mac, LightWave 3D 9 and above
• Windows 32/64bit, LightWave 3D 7.5 and above, LightWave 3D 9 and above recommended