NVIDIA Acquires Rayscale, Raytracing Start-up
Word from sunny Santa Clara-based NVIDIA Corp, is that the graphics giant has moved in on an acquisition of Utah-based RayScale, a 10 year-old start-up and productization of development work from few key people at the University of Utah. RayScale currently has a product available for Autodesk Maya, dubbed LightNow. Lightnow apparently offers interactive feedback with physically-based raytracing techniques, in combination with high quality batch rendering. One of the advantages of physical-based rendering is that it automatically calculates raytraced shadowing from all available light sources.
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Raytraced image - courtesy RayScale
Rayscale is currently in the beta phase of their first product release with support for the following features:
- Lambert, Phong, PhongE, Blinn, and Anisotropic materials
- Maya lights
- Fully responsive ray traced rendering window that updates to changes in the Maya model's geometry or materials
- Integration with Maya Rendering window
- Simple ray tracing
- Global illumination
- HDR rendering
- Environment mapping
