Infinity 3D addon for Blender is now available for download. Installing this addon adds a new selectable real-time render engine into Render Engine panel inside Blender.

This addon takes the route of trying to not present settings in a custom way compared to render engines bundled with Blender. It can be just toggled on in many scenes with suitable materials. Ray traced subdivision surfaces feature works transparently through Subdivision Surface modifier. However, there’s a few custom settings related to ambient lighting in World section and lights added to simulate indirect lighting can be designated to be “Indirect” which disables their specular component and also makes them play well with texture baked indirect lighting. There is an optional automatic updates feature in addon preferences section which allows to update to the latest version by only pressing a button.

This release is free to download however the render backend licensing has a time limit of around five months into the future so it has to be updated or re-installed every once in a while for the addon to keep functioning. Early bird creator’s license purchase option is planned to be introduced at some point which allows to get a perpetual license at the cheapest price.

The 3D artist made scene shown above was rendered here by first rendering a quick and noisy equirectangular panoramic environment map with only indirect light with Blender’s Cycles rendering engine from above one of the restaurant tables and then using that texture as world environment and then placing spotlights and area point lights into positions of direct light sources, although most of those already came ready with the model.

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Addon for Blender became ready and was packaged for distribution and.. it can’t be distributed without more work due to Blender’s specific type of open source licensing.

Luckily, there should not be any meaningful performance difference with a properly optimized “inter-process” solution or with a driver based solution similar to what GPU vendors are doing which are are compatible with Blender’s licensing so the end result will be the same. However, implementing any of this will take an unknown amount of extra time.

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Infinity 3D now supports real-time ray traced surface transparency. This enables basic glass effect and alpha channel in textures for plant leaves.

The image shown is 3D artist made restaurant interior scene with transparency used for glass materials and plant leaf textures. The image was rendered with a new Blender addon that is getting ready for a release. The image upon clicking it links to full 2k uncropped render.

In comparison, standard alpha blending with back-to-front rendering suffers from artifacts because sorting happens at a geometry level which often leads to an incorrect sort at a pixel level. This is not an issue with ray tracing.

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Tuomas Tonteri sole proprietorship develops Infinity 3D technology. The business was founded June 1, 2022 and it is based in Finland.

Infinity 3D render engine addon for Blender 3D software is estimated to be released autumn 2022. Also, I will be attending Slush startup event in November 2022 in Helsinki.

Update: 22 March 2023 with a new logo.

The post Business founded first appeared on Infinity 3D.

A new video that introduces Infinity 3D real-time graphics technology is now available to watch here. Each scene in the video highlights one feature enabled by real-time ray tracing.

The post Infinity 3D introduction video released first appeared on Infinity 3D.

Infinity 3D editor 1.0 has been released. Infinity 3D editor is a scene editor, a 3d model viewer and a technology demo for Infinity 3D real-time graphics engine.

Editor controls

• scene tree
• transform control
• slider based inline material editor
• drag & drop add lights, primitives and cameras
• mesh import
• primitive specific options

Primitive specific options include spotlight’s ray traced shadow casting toggle and surface representation toggle of a mesh between polygonal or subdivision.

The editor’s source code should be available as part of SDK 1.0.

Picture above is Infinity 3D editor 1.0 running in OS X in its dark mode. The editor is a native GUI program in Windows, OSX and Linux with visual look and behavior determined accordingly.

Get Infinity 3D editor

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Hard real-time ray traced shadows are supported for a spotlight light source which also works as a kind of directional light source when placed further away.

The difference in image quality between standard shadow mapping technique and ray tracing is quite drastic for hard shadows. This is because even the smallest details cast accurate shadows, there are no visible “peter panning” issues, there are no pixelated and blurred shadow edges and shadow movement is not jittery.

Like primary ray tracing, shadow ray tracing runs smoothly in real-time in Infinity 3D.

Some support was also added for shadow mapping shadows which can run faster for example when using static shadows or when using low shadow map resolution.

New first release date estimate for the engine and editor is now before the end of 2019. Considering that there is now very little missing from programming perspective it should be a very realistic goal.

23 May 2020 update: Image updated.

Below is a render of subdivision surfaces sportscar now with ray traced shadows (click for full resolution image):

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Infinity now has native support for subdivision surface polygonal meshes, allowing to import assets from standard mesh modeling tools. Another major new feature is a new GUI editor. Additionally, first release date estimate for the engine and the new editor can be now made to late this year or early next year.

Supported subdivision surfaces are of the standard Catmull-Clark type. The engine internally represents the subdivision limit surface with patches that are directly ray traced, allowing to zoom in or render at any resolution without seeing polygons. The sportscar model image shown above links to high resolution image that was scaled down from 8k resolution.

Infinity’s new GUI editor allows access to most of the engine’s features without any programming.

First release date of engine SDK and the new editor are estimated at the end of this year or early next year.

The post Subdivision surface meshes support first appeared on Infinity 3D.

Infinity 3D sneak peek video gives a glimpse of real-time 3D graphics with Infinity 3D. Link to the video.

The post Infinity 3D sneak peek video released first appeared on Infinity 3D.