3Delight, is 3D computer graphics software that runs on Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux. It is developed by DNA Research, commonly shortened to DNA, a subsidiary of Taarna Studios. It is a photorealistic, RenderMan-compliant offline renderer that has been used to render VFX for numerous feature films, including Chappie.
Work on 3Delight started in 1999. The renderer became first publicly available in 2000. 3Delight was the first RenderMan-compliant renderer combining the REYES algorithm with on-demand ray tracing. The only other RenderMan-compliant renderer capable of ray tracing at the time was BMRT. BMRT was not a REYES renderer though.
3Delight was meant to be a commercial product from the beginning. However, DNA decided to make it available free of charge from August 2000 to March 2005 in order to build a user base.
During this time, customers using a large number of licenses on their sites or requiring extensive support were asked to kindly work out an agreement with DNA that specified some form of fiscal compensation for this.
In March 2005, the license was changed. The first license was still free. From the second license onwards, the renderer used to be 1,000 USD per two thread node resp. 1,500 USD per four thread node. The first company that licenses 3Delight commercially, in early 2005, was Rising Sun Pictures.
The current licensing scheme is based on number of threads or cores. The first license is free; initially limited to four cores and then later increased to eight (so currently allowing 16 threads).
Until version 10 (2013), 3Delight primarily used the REYES algorithm but was also well capable of doing ray tracing and global illumination. As of version 11 (2014) 3Delight primarily uses Path Tracing, with the option to use the REYES + RayTracing when needed. The renderer is fully multi-threaded, supports RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) 1.0/2.0 with optimising compiler and last stage JIT compilation. 3Delight also supports distributed rendering. This allows for accelerated rendering on multi-CPU hosts or environments where a large number of computers are joined into a grid / cloud.
It implements all required capabilities for a RenderMan-compliant renderer and also the following optional ones:
Area light sources
Depth of field
Displacement mapping
Environment mapping
Global illumination
Level of detail
Motion blur
Programmable shading
Special camera projections (through the "ray trace hider")
Ray tracing
Shadow depth mapping
Solid modeling
Texture mapping
Volume shading
3Delight also supports the following capabilities, which are not part of any capabilities list:
Photon mapping
Point clouds
Hierarchical subdivision surfaces
NURB curves
Brick maps (three-dimensional, mip-mapped textures)
(RIB) Conditionals
Class-based shaders
Co-shaders
Other features include:
Extended display subset functionality to allow rendering of geometric primitives, writing to the same display variable, to different images.
For example, display subsets could be used to render the skin and fur of a creature to two separate images at once without the fur matting the skin passes.
Memory efficient point clouds. Like brick maps, point clouds are organized in a spatial data structure and are loaded lazily, keeping the memory requirements as low as possible.
Procedural geometry is instanced lazily even during ray tracing, keeping the memory requirements as low as possible.
Displacement shaders can be stacked.
Displacement shaders can (additionally) be run on the vertices of a geometric primitive, before that primitive is even shaded.
The gather() shadeop can be used on point clouds and to generate sample distributions from (high dynamic range) images, e.g. for easily combining photon mapping with image based lighting.
First order ray differentials on any ray fired from within a shader.
A read/write disk cache that allows the renderer to take strain off the network, when heavy scene data needs to be repeatedly distributed to clients on a render farm or image data sent back from such clients to a central storage server.
A C API that allows running RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) code on arbitrary data, e.g. inside a modelling application.
3Delight Studio Pro 12: June 2015
3Delight Studio Pro 11: October 2013
3Delight Studio Pro 10 "Blade Runner": October 2011
3Delight 9.0.0 "Antonioni": December 2009
3Delight 8.5.0 "Bronson": May 2009
3Delight 8.0.0 "Midnight Express": October 2008
3Delight 7.0.0 "Django": November 2007
3Delight 6.5.0 "Ennio": February 2007
3Delight 6.0.1 "Argento": November 2006
3Delight 5.0.0 "Moroder": February 2006
3Delight 4.5.0 "Lucio Fulci": August 2005
3Delight 4.0.0 "Indiana": March 2005
3Delight 3.0.0
3Delight 2.1.0: June 2004
3Delight 2.0.0: January 2004
3Delight 1.0.6beta
3Delight 1.0.0beta: January 2003
3Delight 0.9.6: August 2002
3Delight 0.9.4: June 2002
3Delight 0.9.2: December 2001
3Delight 0.9.0: August 2001
3Delight 0.8.0: March 2001
3Delight 0.6.0: September 2000
3Delight 0.5.1: August 2000
Apple Mac OS X on the PowerPC and x86 architectures (The last version to support PPC architecture was version 9. All versions from 10 up are Intel x86 only and will not run on PowerPC Macs.)
GNU/Linux on the x86, x86-64 and Cell architectures
Microsoft Windows on the x86 and x86-64 architectures
The renderer comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The latter allowing the processing of very large scene datasets.
Platforms supported in the past included:
Digital Equipment Corporation Digital UNIX on the Alpha architecture
Silicon Graphics IRIX on the MIPS architecture (might still be supported, on request)
Sun Microsystems Solaris on the SPARC architecture
3Delight has been used for visual effects work on many films. Some notable examples are:
Assault on Precinct 13
Bailey's Billions
Black Christmas
Blades of Glory
The Blood Diamond
Charlotte's Web
CJ7 / Cheung Gong 7 hou
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The Chronicles of Riddick
Cube Zero
District 9
Fantastic Four
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
Final Destination 3
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Hulk
The Incredible Hulk
The Last Mimzy
The Ruins
The Seeker: The Dark is Rising
Terminator Salvation
Superman Returns
The Woods
X-Men: The Last Stand
X-Men Origins: Wolverine
It was also used to render the following full CG features:
Adventures in Animation (Imax 3D featurette)
Happy Feet Two
Free Jimmy
