LiAR isn’t a raytracer

My first render using an environment map as skylight … Using the technique described in Infinite Area Light Source with Importance Sampling by Pharr and Humphreys, it’s implemented in a breeze … (thanks Thomas, for pointing out that article =)

(Light probe: Grace Cathedral by Paul Debevec)

Today, I noticed there was something seriously wrong with the way local differential geometry was treated by transformation objects.
Basically, rendering goes like this: find intersection, find geometry of intersection, get shader at intersection, shade using the geometry. However, currently, if the object being intersected is a transformed one (by scenery::Transformation), all local [...]

I’m in a bit of a design dilemma right now … Currently, materials are implemented as shaders. This is similar to the RenderMan Interface. Each material is a piece of code that gets executed when the ray tracer hits the surface, and yields the outgoing radiance (the colour to be rendered). That’s great, [...]

Today, I’ve being translating the ever-famous Cornell box to a python module. Of course, I also had to make some render, so here it is. Since I still only have direct lighting (ok ok, I really need to fix that =), the result is not so terrific. But there’s at least soft [...]

Today, I’ve been playing a bit with area lights … They are implemented as a scene object scenery.LightArea that takes another scene object as light surface. I’m not entirely happy with it, but here’s some tests …
The first one is the good ol’ red sphere with a spherical area light. The entire [...]

We’re glad to announce that we’ve migrated the LiAR source code from the CVS to a Subversion (SVN) repository. SVN is generally available on sourceforge since February, and by making this move, we’ll allow for more flexible code management.
You can grab the latest code from the repository by the following command:
svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/liar/trunk/liar/
The repository [...]