Animation and Image Rendering
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Platforms, prices, and company
- Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME; Linux in 2002
- Single-user license: $300; Single-user educational license: $100; Educational site license: $1000
- SiTexGraphics: http://www.sitexgraphics.com
Applications
- AIR AIR is an advanced 3D graphics renderer with a unique architecture and extensive features designed for the rapid production of high-quality images. AIR is a hybrid renderer, combining the advantages of scanline rendering - fast rendering of complex scenes, motion blur, and depth of field - with the flexibility of on-demand ray tracing for accurate reflections, soft shadows, global illumination, and caustics.
AIR supports a broad range of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes, trimmed NURBs, subdivision meshes, curves, particles, and implicit surfaces. All primitives are supported in their natural form; no pre-meshing is required. AIR also provides true (sub-pixel) displacement and high-dynamic range (HDR) input and output.
AIR offers the flexibility of fully programmable shading and procedural modeling. Users can extend the shading language by writing new functions in any programming language. User-written programs can also be used to generate models on-demand.
AIR employs tiled rendering with user-controllable tile order for efficient rendering of complex scenes. AIR is fully multithreaded on Windows and Linux. AIR also ships with Vortex, a distributed rendering manager that enables multiple machines to work on a single image.
AIR doesn’t tie you to a particular modeling or animation program. AIR can be run from a command prompt or used with any of the many compatible plugins for popular 3D software.
AIR is used by designers, architects, free-lance 3D artists, and production companies around the world.
AIR is compatible with the RenderMan® standard for the description of 3D scenes. RenderMan® is a registered trademark of Pixar.
. AIR accepts scenes exported from modeling and animation programs in RIB format.
Examples/Samples
Functions
- Rendering
- Fast Scanline Primary Rendering
- Ray Tracing for sharp shadows, reflections, and refraction
- Global Illumination using irradiance
- Programmable Shading: support for the RenderMan® Shading Language
- Depth of Field effects simulating the limited focal range of a physical camera
- Motion Blur
- Texture Mapping using mip-maps for efficient, anti-aliased texture generation
- Shadows using ray tracing or shadow maps
- Reflections using ray tracing or environment maps
- Hemispherical Lighting
- Area Lights
- Advanced Anti-Aliasing and Gamma Correction for high-quality output
- Rich set of Geometric Primitives: convex and concave polygons with holes, quadrics, bicubic patches, trimmed NURB surfaces, subdivision meshes, and CSG objects
- Level of Detail
- Animation
- Key frame and procedural animation
- File formats
- Importing file formats: RIB
- Exporting file formats: TIFF, BMP, TGA, JPEG, and PNG
Web Resources