Renderer Warm-Up Exercise

 

Kihwan Kim

CS 7490, Fall 2007

 

Indigo Renderer

 

 

 

1. What is Indigo Renderer?

 

: Indigo is a physically-based render engine available at http://www.indigorenderer.com/joomla/

  It does not need any render parameters like GI samples and AA samples, Soft shadow etc.

  Indigo can process the rendering with their own realistic add-on's includes spectral light calculus, phisical sky,

  day light etc by only using xml-like scene script file.

 

  More information about the features can be found at Here 

  You can download in Here 

  Manual is also available in pdf form in Here

  There is a forum about this indigo renderer. Link is Here

 

 

2. Importing Models and data

 

 : We can import the objects and models from 3DS-Max , Blender  and Maya by using some exporters.

   But there are some errors when you use 3DS Max exporter(which I used), the materials are not perfectly exported

   from the exporter. Thus, you can only import the objects/models from 3D max and you should define materials and

   other effects in the indigo scene files.

 

 3. Scene file

 

   The indigo scene file is very easy to handle(it is just a xml file). But tuning parameter is not easy work.

   Here is an example of simple indigo scene file.

  

 

The rendered image using the scene file above is :

It took two hours to render this simple scenes. When we use other samples, included in the package, most

of them are very very slow. (My Desktop is Pentium D 3.00GHz with 2.0GB RAM)

 

 

4. Rendered examples

 

Here is more examples from the package.

I rendered this scene in my desktop, it took 3 hours to get reasonable quality of the output.

 

Here are some examples which other people rendered by Indigo Render.

 

This example is rendered by BbB in Indigo forum, he said that he rendered over 10 hours.

 

One guy(CoolColj) in the forum tested the quality with low samples.

The image below is under 100 samples with 18 min rendering time.

 

 

Even though he changed objects little bit, it took over 2 hours with 1000+ samples. The result are shown below.

 

 

 

 

5. My Rendered scenes

 

Now, I rendered some scenes. Models are imported from 3DS-Max.

(I don't remember who modeled the venus..I downloaded them long time ago in some forums..anyway))

and I editted the scene file after the model is imported.

 

First example.

I rendered 7 hours to get this result.

The scene files for this image is Here(zip-file) (: image size was set to 320*240, you can change it in the main scene.igs file)

 (When you try to render this, please check out some paths embeded in Angel_edit.max.bat, Angel_edit.max-materials.igs for your

  environment)

 

Second example

It took over 7 hours but the result does not seems good(probably due to the reflection on glass material)

 The scene files for this image is Here(zip-file)(: image size was set to 320*240, you can change it in the main scene.igs file)

 

 

 

6. Conclusion

 

As for me, Indigo was very nice to use. First, it is easy when you are familiar to some modeling tools. The way to import models from

modeling tool is also easy (even though there are some bugs in importing materials.)

Editing scene file (xml) is also easy for me. There are many special effects for making scenes more realistic.

But the setting and tuning is not that easy. Even in the gallery at indigo forum, the quality of outputs seems to be largely depending

on the ability of tuning and setting.

However, the rendering time is too long. (Even though I rendered high-polygon model, rendering time is also too long even when we render with simple

models such as only sphere with glass material).

I didn't compare same rendering scenes and models with other physically-based renderer, even though they directly use general GI or not,

 Indigo need pretty long time to render, especially when we use "day-light(sun)" which is supported by Indigo.