Artists looking for ways to create high-quality images in a shorter period of time have a new rendering softwar to turn to. Santa Clara, Calif.-based NVIDA has announced the release of its new Gelato 2.0 which features Sorbetto Lighting Technology.
Gelato also comes with the Mango’ plug-in for Maya and (coming soon) the Amaretto’ plug-in for 3ds Max. With the plug-ins, users have access to all the features found in Gelato. Amaretto is currently in beta testing with availability planned in coming weeks. Artists can use the plug-ins to render images ‘right out of the box,’ or can use Gelato’s API to combine the renderer with other production tools.
Among the cool bells and whistles included in the new Gelato 2.0 is Sorbetto interactive relighting, raytracing performance improvements of 30-50%, volume shadows for hair and smoke, simultaneous rendering of stereo images, shader metadata, physical units in shaders and multithreading.
Sorbetto lighting technology allows users to add, delete, or move lights (including recomputation of shadows), or modify any light parameter, and see the changes interactively. Users can observe final pixels, including full antialiasing, motion blur, and transparency. This saves artists time and allows them to adjust lighting in a scene to get the exact look desired. For Maya users, Sorbetto features are exposed directly in the Mango plug-in for Maya. For developers, all relighting features are exposed through extensions to the Gelato APIs.
Amaretto, which was created by Frantic Films of Winnipeg, allows 3ds Max users to select Gelato to render existing scenes, and access Gelato’s extensive feature set including fast sub-pixel displacement, analytical sub-division surfaces and shader programming language to enhance the quality of their artistic output. (Amaretto is currently in beta testing with commercial availability planned in coming weeks.)
Gelato, which includes the Sorbetto relighting technology and the first year of maintenance and support, is priced at $1500. Renewal of maintenance and support at the end of the first year is $300/license. An evaluation version of the software is available for download on the web at http://film.nvidia.com.
