overview1Kray 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 the most advanced modern algorithms and optimizations to allow it to render full global illumination, reflections, refractions and caustics quickly on standard computers.

Feature list:

  • Fast global illumination
    • light/photon mapping – biased, but very fast and not much dependent on number of ray recursions
    • path tracing – unbiased with serval sampling optimizations
    • irradiance caching – for fast, view independent, reusable GI solution storage
    • caustics
  • Raycache
    • optimizes raytracing
    • build on the fly, during render only for visible surfaces
    • allows partial rebuild
    • 4 dimensional (with object motion support for motion blur)
    • allows any geometry primitives (not only polygon meshes)
  • Light models
    • point/directional
    • line lights
    • area lights
      • optimized sampling for sphere, triangle and rectangle
      • general sampling for any shaped light (light emitting materials)
    • background light
    • HDR image based lighting
    • lights presampling
      • focuses computing power on areas of high luminosity
  • Instancing
    • allows repeated re-use of hte same geometry in multiply loctions in the rendered scene with very low memory consumption
    • instanced geometry can be also instances, even self cloning is possible with user defined number of recursions (an example of 6 spheres self cloned into IFS fractal made of milions of them)
  • Material system
    • node based
    • allows to build custom shaders by connecting existing shading primitives
    • importance sampling – guides computing power to areas that needs more attention
  • Linear workflow
    • Adds realism by processing colors in linear space and high dynamic range
    • Tone mapping allows to fit dynamic range into standard dynamic range image formats
  • Multi buffer output (rendering in passes)
    • for postprocessing and composing
  • Multiprocessing
    • Utilizes computing power multithreaded, multi core, and multi CPU systems
    • Z buffer raytracing on GPU via OpenCL (no full rendering pipeline yet, work in progress…)
  • Real time scene preview
    • What You See Is What You Get