3Delight, or as currently known as 3Delight^NSI, is 3D computer graphics software that runs on Microsoft Windows, MacOS (both Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux. It is developed by Illumination Research. It is both a photorealistic and NPR path tracing offline renderer based on its NSI API scene description and on OSL for shading. It has been used to render full CGI animation and VFX for numerous feature films. It comes with supported, open source plug-in integrations for several DCC applications, such as Maya, Houdini, Cinema4D, Katana, OpenUSD Hydra, and a democratic free license that allows for commercial use. It also provides a fully distributed cloud rendering service called 3Delight Cloud.

History

Work on 3Delight started in 1999. The renderer became first publicly available in 2000.^[1] 3Delight was the first RenderMan-compliant renderer combining the REYES algorithm with on-demand ray tracing.

The 3Delight team decided to make it available free of charge from August 2000 to March 2005 to build a user base. During this time, customers using a large number of licenses on their sites or requiring extensive support were asked provide fiscal compensation for this.

In March 2005, the license was changed. The first license was free and subsequent licenses cost 1,000 USD per two thread node and US$1,500 per four thread node. The first company that licensed 3Delight commercially was Rising Sun Pictures in early 2005.

Since 2018, all purchased licenses are unlimited multi-core. The first license is free; initially limited to four cores/thread, later increased to eight and currently twelve.

As of 2018, Illumination Research, due to the aging of the Renderman Interface (RI), introduced a new interface, the Nodal Scene Interface (NSI), to replace the old Renderman one, and updated the name of the renderer to 3Delight^NSI. As a consequene the new 3Delight NSI renderer is _not_ Renderman-compliant anymore.

Features

Until version 10 (2013), 3Delight primarily used the REYES algorithm but was also 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 and RayTracing when needed. The 3Delight renderer was fully multi-threaded, supported RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) 1.0/2.0 with an optimized compiler and last stage JIT compilation. 3Delight always supported 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.

It3Delight implements:

• Area light sources
• Depth of field
• Displacement mapping
• Environment mapping
• Global illumination
• Motion blur
• Programmable shading
• Camera projections
• Path tracing
• Spatial overrides
• Texture mapping
• Volume shading
• Hierarchical subdivision surfaces

Other features include:

• Extended display subset functionality to allow rendering of geometric primitives, writing to the same display variable, to different images.
  For example, display subsets could be used to render the skin and fur of a creature to two separate images at once without the fur matting the skin passes.
• Procedural geometry is instanced lazily even during ray tracing, keeping the memory requirements as low as possible.
• Displacement shaders can be stacked.
• Displacement shaders can (additionally) be run on the vertices of a geometric primitive, before that primitive is even shaded.
• First order ray differentials on any ray fired from within a shader.
• A read/write disk cache that allows the renderer to take strain off the network, when heavy scene data needs to be repeatedly distributed to clients on a render farm or image data sent back from such clients to a central storage server.

Supported platforms

• Apple Mac OS X on the PowerPC and x86 architectures (The last version to support PPC architecture was version 9. All versions from 10 up are Intel x86 only and will not run on PowerPC Macs.) Apple silicon is also supported.
• Linux on the x86, x86-64 and, in the past, the Cell architecture.
• Microsoft Windows on the x86 and x86-64 architectures

Operating environments

The renderer comes in 64-bit versions, allowing the processing of very large scene datasets.

Discontinued platforms

Platforms supported in the past included:

• Digital Equipment Corporation Digital UNIX on the Alpha architecture
• Silicon Graphics IRIX on the MIPS architecture (might still be supported, on request)
• Sun Microsystems Solaris on the SPARC architecture

Film credits

3Delight has been used for visual effects work on many films. Some notable examples are:

• Assault on Precinct 13
• Bailey's Billion$
• Black Christmas
• Blades of Glory
• The Blood Diamond
• Charlotte's Web
• CJ7 / Cheung Gong 7 hou
• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
• The Chronicles of Riddick
• Cube Zero
• District 9
• Fantastic Four
• Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
• Final Destination 3
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
• Hulk
• The Incredible Hulk
• The Last Mimzy
• The Ruins
• The Seeker: The Dark is Rising
• Terminator Salvation
• Superman Returns
• The Woods
• X-Men: The Last Stand
• X-Men Origins: Wolverine

It was also used to render the following full CG features:

• Adventures in Animation (Imax 3D featurette)
• Happy Feet Two
• Free Jimmy