Lightflow Rendering Tools
Version 2.0

The Lightflow Rendering Tools have now reached version 2.0.
The main introductions are:

• a speed improvement of about 150% - 200% !
• a new lighting engine that allows to render scenes containing thousands of light sources with a small time increment...
• passivation / activation mechanisms for radiosity and shadow maps. This allows the user to compute a global solution only once and store it for later reuse. Then he can modify any scene parameter, and re-render everything at a fraction of the original time!
• procedural anisotropic shading
• powerful on-disk texture caching, to manage very huge amounts of textures
• optimized surface-engine, now used to manage every parametric surface with the run-time adaptive splitting technology, in order to avoid completely any memory overflow
• optimized nurbs and bspline objects, with automatic displacement mapping (click here to get an example!).
• optimized volumetric engine now with on-disk data caching
• improved depth of field, thanks to an incredible hint from Nathan Vegdahl, who found a theoretical mistake in the previous version. Now added as an automatic post-processing filter
• a wonderful cartoon shader
• a new glitter post-processing filter

Lightflow Rendering Tools
Client Side API

The Client Side API is the C++ API for the client side of the Lightflow Rendering Tools. This API allows to use the Lightflow Rendering Tools as a common dynamic library.

This tool, together with its powerful proxy mechanism, is almost necessary for programmers who want to write professional Lightflow plugins for any 3d package.

Supported platforms include Linux and Windows NT.

This trial product is completely free for non commercial uses.

Lightflow Rendering Tools
Python Module 1.5

The Python Module is an extension for the Python language incorporating almost all of the Lightflow Rendering Tools.

This tool is meant for advanced 3d users who don't need any 3d modeling tool to develop their own scenes, and still prefer simple scripting...

Supported platforms include Linux and Windows NT.

This trial product is completely free for non commercial uses.

Over 5000 downloads...

At the end of January, after three months from its world wide publication, Lightflow reaches a new frontier!

Freedom to the Users!

Lightflow Technologies brings ahead its software distribution politics, and makes all of its products freely available for non commercial uses. This means that previously locked features, such as unlimited resolution, multithreading support (Debian Linux only), and post-processing filters are now available to everyone!

AseToLf

Emanuele Zattin, an accustomed 3D programmer, has developed a new tool to convert 3D Studio MAX export files to Python files that can be rendered with the Lightflow Rendering Tools. You can see his (free!) work in progress on the site: http://web.tiscalinet.it/asetolf

Profile of the Month!

I (Jacopo Pantaleoni) am pleased to announce that I have been selected as the Profile of the Month at the 3D webportal of www.3dwired.com. Visit it now to see some of my unpublished images...

Lightflow connects to 3D Studio MAX!

Borislav Petrov, an expert 3D Studio MAX user, is paving the road for the Lightflow to MAX connection with MAXflow!
Waiting for MAX Elf, the complete integration of Lightflow into MAX, MAXflow is Borislav's free and personal attempt to allow MAX users to render their scenes with the Lightflow Python Module.
You can see Borislav's work in progress on the site: http://gfxcentral.com/bobo/mxs3/maxflow/

www.lightflowtech.com reaches 1000 accesses per day!

A post on www.freshmeat.net (2 Nov 99) caused a stunning reaction in the Computer Graphics community!
In less than 3 days, accesses have reached a throughput of more than one thousand per day, while the daily rate of downloads is going to reach one hundred.