Toxic?

[salf]

Was taking a look at the news on the main page, theres an opersource renderer called Toxic, have any of you tried yet?

 

You think it could be a success?, is free after all.

[dleon]

I googled the string, and found the Toxic website. It appears that they are developing a suite of open source tools. I surfed to the gallery and saw many well known examples of 3ds Max art such as Sponza. If these examples were actually rendered with their own open source render engine, they are damn impressive indeed.

 

The Cornell box example was probably the most impressive of the lot. Although apparently trivial at first blush, this particular Cornell box test is one of the hardest to get right. Most render engineers curse this one. Even the mighty VRay and awesome MentalRay show splotchiness with this test. Lightwave choaks up bad without serious efforts at tweaking.

The site doesn't seem to have a good expository overview. Important facts are scattered around. It seems that this thing offers a Renderman RIB interface. This is a bitch because I hate shelling and command prompt rendering. Of course, this is what UNIX guys live for.

[salf]

no need for google it, its on this site (CGarchitect) news page:

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/news/newsfeed.asp?nid=1892

 

or

 

http://toxicengine.sourceforge.net/index.php

[dleon]

I downloaded the sucker and cranked out the Cornellbox at 640x480. It is command prompt driven. It needs an XML source file and some .obj files. I suppose if there were maps and images, those also would have to be external files.

 

The render engine seems to be very single threaded. It would not exploit both hyperthreads on my test workstation. CPU utilization never really went above 50%. As a consiquence, this render took a long time.

 

I must confess, I haven't got the slightest idea how I would integrate this render engine with 3ds Max, or any other package. It would be hard to shake it down.

 

Dave

[salf]

how much time did that render take you?

[dleon]

The render engine's verbose feedback did not keep track of the time, or report the final figure. I should have benchmarked it precisely, but I didn't, but it was about 30 minutes on a single 3.0 GHz P4C 800MHz bus i865G with 512MB. That's my test box's configuration.

 

Obviously, this is not a stirring figure. VRay can achieve this quality level in 300 seconds tops on this same box. The bottom line is that the lack of support for Hyperthreading caused Toxic to run on just 1 Hyperthread, and it only used 50% of the system's power. I recon this one would be best on an Athlon 64 or Opteron.

 

Dave