Work on 3Delight started in 1999. The renderer became first publicly and freely available in 2000.[1] 3Delight was the first RenderMan-compliant renderer combining the REYES algorithm with on-demand ray tracing, pre-dating BMRT.
In March 2005, the license was changed: the first license was free and subsequent licenses cost US$1,000 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 of 3DelightNSI are unlimited multi-core and the pricing was reduced to US$360 per year subscription or US$720 permanent with two year support. The first license is still free; initially limited to four cores/thread, later increased to eight and currently increased to twelve.
As of 2018, Illumination Research, due to the aging of the Renderman Interface (RI), introduced the Nodal Scene Interface (NSI) that replaces the old Renderman one. To reflect such a change the name of the renderer has also been updated to 3DelightNSI. Consequently the new 3DelightNSI renderer is not Renderman-compliant anymore.
Specifications
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 used path tracing, with the option to use the REYES and RayTracing when needed along with point-based global illumination. 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 supported distributed rendering. In 2018 3DelightNSI 1.0 was introduced as a forward path tracer based on the new NSI API and using OSL for all shaders and light emitters.
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