RenderDotC

RenderDotC is a photorealistic renderer that was designed to meet the demands of special effects for film. The primary reason people give for choosing RenderDotC is its favorable price per performance ratio. Moreover, RenderDotC scores high marks on everything that matters for a production renderer:

Image Quality

ï¿­ Images produced with RenderDotC possess that indescribable yet beautiful quality that some people refer to as "the RenderMan look". All phenomena that are prone to aliasing artifacts are effectively anti-aliased and noise is kept to a minimum.

Speed

ï¿­ RenderDotC was designed in the 1990s to take advantage of the current hardware and software technologies. Its CPU and memory performance is unsurpassed by all renderers in its class.

Robustness

ï¿­ There are hundreds of details to get right when developing a renderer and that only comes with maturity. RenderDotC has been shipping since 1996 and has proven itself on complex scenes from feature films from The Matrix to Orange County.

Features

ï¿­ The RenderMan standard prescribes a rich set of geometric primitives and features. RenderDotC provides all of these plus some exclusive features such as NURB curves, DSO shadeops that can call built-in functions, and complete support for extended headroom rendering.

Flexibility

ï¿­ Being RenderMan-compliant, RenderDotC supports user-programmable shading. It also has other plug-in interfaces including DSO shadeops, procedural primitives, and display drivers. Since shading is decoupled from hiding, one can easily tune the speed/quality tradeoffs of each.

Price

ï¿­ RenderDotC is priced competitively for both the film and broadcast markets. When considering price, its important to take into account speed. A faster renderer means that the same number of frames can be produced per hour with a smaller render farm. Fewer computers to purchase and maintain further reduces the bottom line.

Support

ï¿­ As a company, Dot C Software has been around since 1992. Our customers needs come first and we have the agility to respond to requests quickly. The people who wrote RenderDotC are the same ones that provide customer support. At Dot C we make software, period. We do not compete with our customers in the arena of computer graphics production.
RenderDotC for SGI is distributed as n32 mips3 and n32 mips4 binaries. On
Linux, RenderDotC is an i386 Linux ELF binary linked with libc.so.6.
RenderDotC for Win32 is distributed as Intel Pentium binaries which run
on all 32 bit versions of Windows. On BSD/OS, RenderDotC is an i386 ELF
binary linked with libc.so.1.
Here are some key features of "RenderDotC":
ï¿­ Arbitrary output variables
ï¿­ Light categories
ï¿­ Matrix variable type in shading language
ï¿­ Subdivision surfaces
ï¿­ Soft shadows
ï¿­ Level of detail
ï¿­ DelayedReadArchive, RunProgram, and DynamicLoad procedurals
ï¿­ DSO display drivers
ï¿­ Arrays in shading language
ï¿­ Message Passing
ï¿­ Points primitive
ï¿­ Curves primitive
ï¿­ NuCurves primitive
ï¿­ Trim curves
ï¿­ User-defined vertex variables
ï¿­ Compliant RenderMan Shading Language (SL)
ï¿­ Native RenderMan Interface (Ri/RIB)
ï¿­ Motion blur of transformations and geometry.
ï¿­ Displacement mapping.
ï¿­ Reflections, both spherical and cubical environment maps.
ï¿­ Depth of field effects.
ï¿­ Texture mapping with high quality filtering suitable for film.
ï¿­ Antialiasing through supersampling and filtering.