What is Pixie Renderer

Pixie is a free, open source, photo-realistic ray-tracing renderer for generating photo-realistic images. Developed by Okan Arikan and George Harker from the University of Texas, Austin.
Pixie is a RenderMan-like photo realistic renderer. It has been developed as a useful graphics research tool and for people who can not afford a commercial renderer. Pixie is licensed under GNU Public License. Most important features are: Reyes style rendering, motion blur, depth of field and global illumination.
Pixie is popular with students learning the RenderMan Interface, and a suitable replacement for it. It compiles for Windows, Mac, Linux and Unix.


Key features

  • 64-bit Capable
  • Fast multi-threaded execution.
  • Able to distribute the rendering process to several machines.
  • Motion blur and depth of field.
  • Programmable shading (using RenderMan Shading Language) including full displacement support.
  • Scalable, multi-resolution ray-tracing using ray differentials.
  • Global illumination.
  • Support for conditional RIB.
  • Point cloud baking and 3D textures.

 

Pixie Renderer Alternatives and Similar Software

 

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LuxRender

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POV-Ray

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Clara.io

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Mitsuba

Physically based renderer. Mitsuba is an extensible rendering framework written in portable C++. Free Mac Windows Linux

 

 

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RenderMan

PhotoRealistic RenderMan, or PRMan for short, is a proprietary photo-realistic Non-compliances renderer. Primarily using the REYES algorithm. Free Personal Mac Windows Linux

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Keyshot

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Appleseed

Appleseed is a modern, open source, physically-based rendering engine designed to produce photo-realistic images, animations and visual effects. Open Source Mac Windows Linux