Indigo 4 public beta release

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Glare Technologies announces the first public Indigo Renderer 4 beta release.

Following 29 private beta releases, Indigo 4 is ready for a public beta. The main new feature in this beta is pure (multi-)GPU rendering.
Indigo is using OpenCL to deliver 100% pure GPU rendering, which means very fast rendering on all OpenCL compliant GPUs, including AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPUs.

In addition to the new pure GPU rendering, there are some other new features:

• General optimisations and rendering speedups:
• Most scenes should render faster on the CPU.
• MLT should be a lot faster for simple scenes now.
• OpenGL viewport is a lot faster
• Sped up rendering double-sided thin material a lot.
• Optimised object tree building - see viewtopic.php?f=7&t=13695
• Rewrote much of Indigo's subdivision and displacement - see viewtopic.php?f=7&t=13686
• New image saving options. (check out the 'Image Saving' tab in the options dialog)
• Added pixel info picker to toolbar
• Added a detachable material preview widget
• Oren-Nayar: Added new implementation of the more accurate model, replacing the 'qualitative' model that was being used before.
• Added measured BRDF support
• Added Fast-SSS material

Other new features still planned for the 4.0 series are hybrid photon mapping and configurable firefly filtering. Updating the user interface and adding support for these new features to the exporters is a top priority in upcoming releases.

More information about the new GPU rendering mode

Features not currently supported in GPU rendering mode (they will be supported as soon as possible)

• Architectural glass
• Double-sided thin material
• Glossy transparent material
• Normal maps
• Light layers

Features not currently supported in GPU rendering mode, that probably won't be available in the initial 4.0 release but later in the 4.x series:

• Sub-surface scattering / participating media
• Bidirectional path tracing
• Other render modes / channels: material ID, foreground alpha, depth and shadows
• Sphere primitives

Known issues with GPU rendering:

• Some realtime changes in GPU rendering mode may crash Indigo
• Max path depth is limited to around 8 bounces currently
• Sphere primitives not supported currently
• Sky colour is slightly different on GPU

Download Indigo for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X from Indigo site.

Top image by Arthur Liebnau, PolygonManufaktur.de