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The Longbow Rendering Engine

Current Features

  • OpenGL based
  • Cg Shaders for hardware acceleration
  • OpenEXR support for image loading
  • Photon mapping for interactive global illumination
  • Variety of radiosity approximations for global illumination
  • Component based design
  • Lua scripting for set-up purposes
  • Networking support for distributed computing

Preview

A 5.9 MB DivX encoded avi is now available from here. This is a demo of the Longbow 2.0 system in action. Apologies for the poor quality, but it was captured on VHS...

Screenshots

Photon mapping in big scene Nice wall More photon mapping

History

Longbow 2.5

This is planned to be an overhaul of the base 2.0 system. The 2.1 networking extensions will be reworked and improved. Emphasis will be placed on workflow, and a development environment will be introduced.

Longbow 2.1

This introduced networking, enabling distributed computing methods.

Longbow 2.0

Complete rework on the system. New architecture and design ideas, but continuing the ethos of the system.

Longbow 1.0

Original version. Networked client-server system, with the client running on one machine, making render requests to the server, running on another machine. The system was such that the server loaded in modules that provided the rendering functionality. In theory, anything could have been incorporated into a module, so the system was not necessarily just a renderer. The server could handle a number of clients, although the networking methods were very rudimentary, and communications often failed.