Open Source RenderMan

Pixie is an open source project licensed under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). 

Help Pixie

Pixie is an open source project -- we're not making any money from it. We need your feedback to keep this project alive. Use Pixie, submit bug reports, pictures you rendered with Pixie or just your good wishes.

If you're interested in developing additional features / improving current features, improving the web site, optimizing Pixie, please let us know. 

Contacting us means leaving notes at sourceforge and following up your notes. If you're lazy, you can also send me an e-mail. But I must warn you; I prioritize sourceforge notes over personal e-mails.

Features

• Pixie now has a new raytracing engine that automatically tesselates surfaces on the fly to a desired accuracy determined using the ray differentials. This means rays tracing blurry reflections or computing global illumination are faster to trace and sharp reflections and shadows are more accurate. Pixie also contains a memory manager that keeps the memory that is used to keep these tesselations around under control. Similar to texture caching, Pixie will maintain a set of active surfaces and only those surfaces will consume raytracing memory.

• Using this functionality, you can save any value you compute in a shader to a file that you can later re-use. This allows you to perform expensive shading computations at a lower resolution and re-use these computations in the beauty passes. This functionality will also enable exporting shading data from Pixie into your own applications.

• Pixie rendering core has been first completely reorganized/optimized and then multi-threaded.  We are very proud of this change. You will see significant speed improvements over the Pixie v1.

• Pixie can save arbitrary variables (built in ones such as N, P as well as arbitrary, user defined variables) just like rgb values into images. Using this machinery, you can generate multiple outputs from a single pass and combine them as a post process.