3Delight

3Delight, is 3D computer graphics software that runs on Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux. It is developed by DNA Research, commonly shortened to DNA, a subsidiary of Taarna Studios. It is a photorealistic, RenderMan-compliant offline renderer that has been used to render VFX for numerous feature films, including Chappie.

Work on 3Delight started in 1999. The renderer became first publicly available in 2000. 3Delight was the first RenderMan-compliant renderer combining the REYES algorithm with on-demand ray tracing. The only other RenderMan-compliant renderer capable of ray tracing at the time was BMRT. BMRT was not a REYES renderer though.

3Delight was meant to be a commercial product from the beginning. However, DNA decided to make it available free of charge from August 2000 to March 2005 in order to build a user base.

During this time, customers using a large number of licenses on their sites or requiring extensive support were asked to kindly work out an agreement with DNA that specified some form of fiscal compensation for this.

In March 2005, the license was changed. The first license was still free. From the second license onwards, the renderer used to be 1,000 USD per two thread node resp. 1,500 USD per four thread node. The first company that licenses 3Delight commercially, in early 2005, was Rising Sun Pictures.

The current licensing scheme is based on number of threads or cores. The first license is free; initially limited to four cores and then later increased to eight (so currently allowing 16 threads).

Until version 10 (2013), 3Delight primarily used the REYES algorithm but was also well capable of doing ray tracing and global illumination. As of version 11 (2014) 3Delight primarily uses Path Tracing, with the option to use the REYES + RayTracing when needed. The renderer is fully multi-threaded, supports RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) 1.0/2.0 with optimising compiler and last stage JIT compilation. 3Delight also supports distributed rendering. This allows for accelerated rendering on multi-CPU hosts or environments where a large number of computers are joined into a grid / cloud.