Kerkythea FREE render engine

[georgedrakakis]

Kerkythea 2008 Echo Edition has now been released!

It has been a long year of waiting, but the latest version of the incredibly simple, powerful, and amazingly flexible renderer “Kerkythea” is now available at the Kerkythea website.

Kerkythea 2008 Echo is a full staging application for rendering your models. And now it’s available for all major platforms Windows, Linux and MacOSX! It accepts .3ds or .obj models, as well as having powerfully developed free exporters for SketchUp, Blender, and 3dsMax/GMax.

The power of Kerkythea lies in it’s simplicity… you may set up your lights and materials once, but you may choose from more than 6 different rendering ‘methods’ including Photon Mapping (biased method similar to “Radiosity”) and Metropolis Light Transport (unbiased).

Introducing the Kerkythea Instancing Brush (Earning KT2008 the name “Echo”)

It features instancing by loading the “Brush” with any model or group of models and painting (scattering) instances of that onto any model “canvas” object you choose. Or, you can choose auto-population of the canvas determined by grid, or driven by image mask!

Now featuring MLT(BiPT) Metropolis Light Transport on top of Bidirectional Path Tracing to handle the most demanding indirect lighting scenes.

Robust and completely re-vamped material editor featuring nk/ior measured data support, synthesis layer, procedural ramps, improved materials and the new plugin SDK for user developed customized objects.

Also featuring:

-15-25% render speed increase

-Multithreading support for all render methods

-Network rendering to unlimited machines/threads/cross-platform

-Instancing and grouping of Lights or Models

-Sky Portals, Supersampling

-Physical Camera definition enhancements

-Parallel View Rendering for plans/elevations, etc.

-IES Light implementation

-Specular, Light, Diffuse, and Diffuse Texture passes

-Improved depth map rendering

-alpha channel auto-recognition for .png and .tif files

-Drop and align commands

-and much more…

[georgedrakakis]

hi, i forgot to add some links for the renderer:
forum: http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/
download link: http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42&func=select&id=2

currently there is no exporter for cinema 4d,
so if anyone wants to give it a try, i would be more than happy to introduce him to the developer's team.

[georgedrakakis]

hi,
i've found some tutorials in French & also a French GUI for Kerkythea 2008.
Kerkythea en Francais:
http://www.kerkythea.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4339
Tutoriaux en Francais:
http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42&func=select&id=12

you should also download this Kerkythea Material Editor Guide for KT2007:
http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=42&func=showdown&id=49
most of the fancy stuff is there already!

and finally my wip on Kerkythea forums:
http://www.kerkythea.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4772

i'll post some test with instancing brushes, it's amazing, you can use any model (grass, chairs, you name it) and actually "paint" the scene.

[shtl]

Hello George!

Did you give it a try by yourself? If so, would you show us? Tell about the workflow between c4d and kerkythea?

ooops, just saw your wip link, I'm gonna check it out.

[georgedrakakis]

Hello George!
Did you give it a try by yourself? If so, would you show us? Tell about the workflow between c4d and kerkythea?
ooops, just saw your wip link, I'm gonna check it out.

hi Corentin,
i exported a .3ds model, added a physical sky and pressed the render button.
no materials applied yet, but if you check the material manual you'll see a lot of goodies.
this is the original work done in C4d: http://studiomoccoro.googlepages.com/4residents_project4

and a small test of instancing-> a chair used as a brush to "paint" (populate) an infinite plane (<- floor object as in c4d!)

[georgedrakakis]

instancing is really great!
open the dialog box, under Tools-> instancing brush,
double click (choose) the model , click the brush button
same thing for canvas, and hit populate, or brush manually.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o271/studiomoccoro/instance_test_21mins.jpg

[shtl]

Thanks for feedback George :)

Sounds cool! Like a mix of Vue Infinite/xtream ecosystem tool and Vray instance systeme. Does it keep ram free?
I saw massiv poly images from this renderer, there must be a way...?

Mmmm... that would certainly be more cool to get a bridge indeed, cause having to re-do all shaders is a big work, especialy when c4d procedural shaders are so cool to use :?

Anyhow, keep up :)

[georgedrakakis]

Sounds cool! Like a mix of Vue Infinite/xtream ecosystem tool and Vray instance systeme. Does it keep ram free?
I saw massiv poly images from this renderer, there must be a way...?

Mmmm... that would certainly be more cool to get a bridge indeed, cause having to re-do all shaders is a big work, especialy when c4d procedural shaders are so cool to use :?

i am new to Kerkythea, i'll have to ask about the ram.
about the bridge, yes, that's my big plan, but i think a talented coder is needed.

[georgedrakakis]

Thanks for feedback George :)

Sounds cool! Like a mix of Vue Infinite/xtream ecosystem tool and Vray instance systeme. Does it keep ram free?
I saw massiv poly images from this renderer, there must be a way...?

well, i've read that what the raytracer or photon-mapping methods can't handle, than it's time for the trully unbiased methods, which i think that they are not dependent by polygon density.




Mmmm... that would certainly be more cool to get a bridge indeed, cause having to re-do all shaders is a big work, especialy when c4d procedural shaders are so cool to use :?

Anyhow, keep up :)

maybe i'll have good news on this one too!!