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3Delight
Developer(s)	Illumination Research
Initial release	1999; 26 years ago
Stable release	2.9.132 / November 21, 2024
Operating system	Windows, MacOS, Linux
Type	3D computer graphics
Licence	Proprietary
Website	www.3delight.com

3Delight is a 3D computer graphics software that runs on Microsoft Windows, macOS (both Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux (both x86 and Graviton). Developed by Illumination Research, it is both a photorealistic and NPR path tracing offline renderer based on its NSI API scene description and on Open_Shading_Language for shading. It comes with supported, open source plug-in integrations for several DCC applications, such as Autodesk Maya, Houdini, Cinema4D, Katana, OpenUSD Hydra, and a democratic free license that allows for commercial use. It also provides a fully distributed cloud rendering service called 3Delight Cloud.

History

Work on 3Delight started in 1999. The renderer became first publicly available in 2000.^[1] 3Delight was the first RenderMan-compliant renderer combining the REYES algorithm with on-demand ray tracing.

In March 2005, the license was changed. The first license was free and subsequent licenses cost 1,000 USD per two thread node and US$1,500 per four thread node. The first company that licensed 3Delight commercially was Rising Sun Pictures in early 2005.

Since 2018, all purchased licenses of 3Delight^NSI are unlimited multi-core and the pricing was reduced to US$360 per year subscription or US$720 permanent with two year support. The first license is still free; initially limited to four cores/thread, later increased to eight and currently twelve.

As of 2018, Illumination Research, due to the aging of the Renderman Interface (RI), introduced the Nodal Scene Interface (NSI) that replaces the old Renderman one. To reflect such a change the name of the renderer has also been updated to 3Delight^NSI. Consequently the new 3Delight^NSI renderer is not Renderman-compliant anymore.

Specifications

Until version 10 (2013), 3Delight primarily used the REYES algorithm but was also capable of doing ray tracing and global illumination. As of version 11 (2014), 3Delight primarily used path tracing, with the option to use the REYES and RayTracing when needed. The 3Delight renderer was fully multi-threaded, supported RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) 1.0/2.0 with an optimized compiler and last stage JIT compilation. 3Delight supported distributed rendering. In 2018 3Delight^NSI 1.0 was introduced as a forward path tracer based on the new NSI API and using OSL for all shaders and light emitters.

3Delight implements:

Area light sources
Depth of field
Displacement mapping
Environment mapping
Global illumination
Motion blur
Programmable shading
Camera projections
Path tracing
Spatial overrides
Texture mapping
Volume shading
Hierarchical subdivision surfaces

Other specifications include:

Extended display subset functionality
Procedural geometry is instanced lazily.
Displacement shaders can be stacked.
Displacement shaders can (additionally) be run on the vertices of a geometric primitive, before that primitive is shaded.
First order ray differentials on rays fired from within a shader.
A read/write disk cache that allows for reduction of strain on the network.