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3DelightNSI

Artist-friendly, fast, high quality production renderer

3DelightNSI is a modern path tracer optimized for multi-threaded interactive, offline and network / cloud rendering. Based on the lightweight Nodal Scene Interface API (NSI), it uses programmable Open Shading Language (OSL) for all shading and lighting. It is integrated on popular DCCs and platforms with open source plug-ins.

J Cube is an authorized reseller in Japan, offering 3DelightNSI at US pricing and with customer support in English. Additional pipeline R&D services can be offered under consulting.

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Platforms

O/S Win, Linux, macOS
+ 3Delight Cloud

Supported DCCs

Maya 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023
Houdini 18.x, 19.x
Katana 3.x, 4.x
Cinema 4D R21, R22

About

3Delight was first available to the public in 2004, and became known as the fastest hybrid REYES/raytracing renderer on the market, largely outperforming the competition. Since then it was used in hundreds of productions worldwide until 2017.

As of 2018 a new era begun with the introduction of 3DelightNSI: a completely new, modern rendering engine based on the proprietary NSI API and using OSL at core level. It is already praised as the fastest & easiest path tracer for multi-core CPU hardware, distributed network & cloud rendering. 3DelightNSI proudly does not require, nor is limited by, any GPU hardware. It is being adopted by an increasing number of customers working on high-profile content such as Hollywood feature film productions, Original TV Series by Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Apple, elaborate TV commercials and much more:

Feature Highlights

EASY TO LEARN & USE

3Delight is designed for artists that seek high quality without the need to delve into unnecessary technicalities: making images is a creative endeavor that transcends the tech beneath. The quality of user experience is the difference between feeling like an artist or a computer technician, and 3Delight, with a simpler set of controls, its elegant workflows, its unmatched speed and interactivity, lets artists focus on their artwork. There are only three intuitive global quality controls overall, so you can stop losing valuable time tweaking obscure knobs to address quality or speed problems! 3DelightNSI intelligently solves all of this for you: no technical burdens and shortened learning curve.

PARAMOUNT QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE

3DelightNSI is able to deliver the lowest time-to-first-pixel in the rendering panorama, no matter how complex your imagery is. Render start-up times are fast and memory footprints are low. 3Delight achieves this through its proprietary unified sampling, which also allows for unlimited light emission from any scene element.

VOLUMES AND ATMOSPHERE

3DelightNSI has fast and robust support for volumetric atmosphere and volume shaders, with all adjustments fully supported in interactive rendering. OpenVDB Volumes can light a scene via their own emission grids or by using artist friendly ramp-like emissions.

INFINITELY SMOOTH GEOMETRY

3DelightNSI renders infinitely smooth subdivision surfaces, smooth curves (hair & fur) and displacements completely free of any faceting artifacts. Displaced geometries are actually rendered to sub-pixel accuracy. No user input is required to choose a level of tessellation. And since 3DelightNSI doesn't do any "pre-tessellation" of geometries, this translates to faster startup times.

DISTRIBUTED CLOUD RENDERING

3DelightNSI comes with a cloud rendering service called 3Delight Cloud. It is stunningly simple to use in all supported DCC applications: simply select "3Delight Cloud" in 3Delight Display and render as usual. Your renders will be done at incredible speed on the cloud using hundreds to thousands of cores. 3DelightNSI takes care of data management transparently: there is nothing to manually upload or download. All is needed is a registered user account with rendering credits with the 3Delight Cloud rendering service. See the 3Delight Cloud documentation.

DISTRIBUTED LOCAL RENDERING

3DelightNSI comes with a local network rendering service called 3Delight Collective. It is stunningly simple to use in all supported DCC applications: simply select "3Delight Collective" in 3Delight Display and render as usual. Your renders will be distributed on "collections" of machines in your LAN network that you can specify at your desire, and use hundreds to thousands of cores depending on your on-premises resources. 3DelightNSI takes care of data management transparently: there is nothing to manually copy. See the 3Delight Collective documentation.

UNIFIED SAMPLING

3DelightNSI has a unique, rapidly converging light sampling algorithm that allows to render large amounts of light sources (hundreds of thousands) efficiently. This is paired with an advanced Multiple Importance Sampling (MIS) algorithm that can combine samples from lights, materials ( BXDFs) and environments in an optimal manner to produce beautifully anti-aliased images. Volumes, such as atmospheres and OpenVDB, benefit from the same technology. The end result is a single control over shading quality. This frees the artist from tedious sample count adjustments both on materials and lights.

HIGH PARTICLE COUNT

3Delight permits rendering of extremely high particle counts, thanks to it's incredibly efficient point primitives, which can be rendered as infinitely smooth flat disks(if normals are present) or as infinitely smooth spheres. The primitive is a first class citizen, so there are no rendering artifacts nor tessellations. Particles may be lit by any light source, and can act as a light source themselves, with no limitations. All motion blur types for particles are supported.

COMPREHENSIVE MOTION BLUR

3DelightNSI allows for any type of motion blur: transformation, full 3D deformation (with multi-segments), velocity-based and acceleration-based 3D motion blur which are ideal for varying topology simulations such as liquids, fractures etc.

ANYTHING CAN BE A LIGHT

3DelightNSI comes with distant, point, spot and area lights of various shapes. What makes 3Delight stands out is that any geometry, whether mesh, subdivision, curve, point or volume can be turned into a light emitting source which can also be textured with your pattern of choice. OpenVDB volumes can illuminate a scene from things like fire and explosions. Environment-based lighting from HDRI images and from a physical sun&sky light utilize the advanced 3DelightNSI environment sampling technology, providing fast renders, accurate scene shadows, and removing the need for any blurring, or use of lower resolution images.

MULTI LIGHT

Output lights or groups of lights in separate image layers. This allows for physically correct light manipulation during compositing. Such light layers can also be output to 3Delight Display for real-time interactive adjustments at 4K resolution. Remarkably, 3DelightNSI multi-light output has negligible impact on rendering times.

SIMULTANEOUS MULTI CAMERA

3DelightNSI can render a scene from multiple-views simultaneously and efficiently using shared scene geometry. This allows for efficient stereo rendering — and savings of up to 20% in rendering cost on complex scenes.

EXTENSIVE AOV SUPPORT

3Delight offers easy output of AOVs of various types: component AOVs, per-light AOVs, per-material AOVs (via AOV Groups). AOVs are easy to add to custom OSL shaders via 3Delight's unique outputchannel() closure. Additionally a one-click solution for CryptoMatte export is provided as a simple mean to export mattes. 3Delight always writes "multi-part" EXR files and supports EXRs with the DWAA compression.

EXPRESSIVE MATERIALS

3Delight comes with a complete set of simple to use yet powerful OSL-based materials, patterns and utility shaders. All materials are physically plausible and interact predictably with all light sources. Absence of unnecessary technical parameters, such as samples — thanks to 3DelightNSI's Unified Sampling technology — puts the focus on look development.

NETWORK CACHE

3DelightNSI optimizes network traffic by caching of server-side textures and NSI geometries into local storage, all without user intervention. 3Delight offers a unique and completely automatic solution to improve performance when rendering over networked environments: textures located on the network are LRU-cached on the local drive of the machine doing the rendering. This provides two key benefits: faster access to textures during rendering, especially if the local drive is an SSD, and reduced network traffic preventing several computers to saturate the network when accessing textures simultaneously while rendering.

MULTI-IMAGE VIEWER

3DelightNSI comes with a a versatile and elegant multi-image viewer using image layers (AOVs) presentation in contact sheet form, thumbnail view of previous renders and easy A/B comparison, graphical presentation of live rendering statistics, real-time per-light mixer and several tools to inspect images in details. It integrates OCIO color management and can sustain realtime 4K playback effortlessly. It’s a key component in the multi light mixing and multi camera workflows. In the multi-light workflow a lighting artist can click and drag on top of an image to re-balance light intensities and colors of individual lights or groups of lights. All edits are fed back to the DDC.

OSL SHADING

3DelightNSI uses OSL for all its shading infrastructure with full support for closures and patterns. All materials and lights in all DCCs are OSL powered. Additionally TDs can write custom OSL shaders without the risks of C++, this also makes all shaders cross-platform and cross DCC. Shaders UIs for the DCCs are created from from OSL metadata automatically.

POWERFUL INSTANCING

Very large scenes utilizing massive amounts of instances and nested instancing: can be rendered effortlessly with low time to first pixel, optimal memory footprint and processing scalability. And you can still override their individual properties: this is a fundamental aspect of 3DelightNSI architecture design. In addition, through its procedural interface, tools like Multiverse for Maya can use efficiently Alembic packed instances and USD point instancing.

MODERN SUBSURFACE SCATTERING

3DelightNSI uses "random walk" subsurface scattering, a technique that originates in 1940s physics with neutron diffusion in atomic chain reactions! This is integrated without the need of any quality or sampling control in the relative materials that use this effect, namely Principled, Standard and Skin, and is accessible via the OSL subsurface() closure to shading writers.

OPENSOURCE STANDARDS

3DelightNSI uses the latest versions of OpenShadngLanguage (OSL), OpecColorIO (OCIO), OpenEXR, ACES, OpenVDB, Alembic, OpenUSD (via Multiverse and HydraNSI), LibPng, LibTiff, LibJPEG, Cryptomatte.