Kerkythea Rendering System 2008 Echo Edition has now been released!
It has been a long year of waiting, but Kerkythea, the latest version of the incredibly simple, powerful, and amazingly flexible render system, powered by Thea Render Engine v2.0, is now available at the Kerkythea website.
Kerkythea 2008 Echo is a full staging application for rendering your models. And now it’s available for ALL MAJOR PLATFORMS… PC, Linux, and MacOSx! It accepts .3ds or .obj models, as well as having powerfully developed free exporters for SketchUp, Blender, and 3dsMax/GMax.
The power of Kerkythea lies in it’s simplicity… you may set up your lights and materials once, but you may experiment with more than 6 different rendering ‘methods’ including Photon Map and Final Gathering (biased method similar to “Radiosity”) or ranging up to Metropolis Light Transport (unbiased). With even more render modes easily accessible from the one-click preset list. You may setup your materials, lights, environment once but experiment with various different render modes.
Introducing the Kerkythea Instancing Brush, Adding the "Echo" to Kerkythea.
It features instancing by loading the “Brush” with any model or group of models and painting (scattering) instances of that onto any model “canvas” object you choose. Or, you can choose auto-population of the canvas determined by grid, or driven by image mask!
Additional Unbiased Render Method
Now featuring MLT(BiPT) Metropolis Light Transport on top of Bidirectional Path Tracing to handle the most demanding indirect lighting scenes.
Robust and Completely Re-Vamped Material Editor
Now featuring nk/ior measured data support, synthesis layer, procedural ramps, improved materials and the new plugin SDK for user developed customized objects.
Also featuring:
-15-25% render speed increase
-Multithreadingsupport for all render methods
-Network rendering to unlimited machines/threads/cross-platform
-Instancing and grouping of Lights or Models
-Sun/Sky Portals,
-Supersampling
-Physical Camera definition enhancements
-Parallel View Rendering for plans/elevations, etc.
-IES Light implementation
-Render Passes: Specular, Light, Diffuse, and Diffuse Texture
-Improved depth map rendering
-Alpha channel auto-recognitionfor .png and .tif files
-Drop and align commands
-and muchmore…
Kerkythea now supports a zipped xml version (kzx extension) for saving files which, combined with instancing, can result in file sizes 5% to 10% the size of previous versions’ saved .xml scenes.
The new multi-platform plugin SDK implementation allows users to write their own plugins including new procedural textures, materials, and lights.
These are available for download from Kerkythea.net.
images courtesy of Frolfer12 at Kerkythea forum