EIAS Camera 7.0

Why is Camera a Seperate Application?

EI Technology Group made the decision several years ago to make Camera a seperate application. It has proven to be a valuable one. With Camera separate from Animator you have the ability to render across an entire Network with NO EXTRA COST. Utilizing Camera's impressive power you can create a low-cost network rendering farm that will smoke the competitors.

EIAS' Camera also gives you the power of network rendering over multiple platforms, known as Renderama. With the substantial decrease is computer hardware costs it is now possible to work on one platform (Windows or Macintosh) and render on another. For example, you create your animation on your $3,000 Macintosh but render using a swarm of $500 PCs. This allows you to save tons of cash while dramatically decreasing your production time.

Also included with the Electric Image Animation System are a vast array of procedural shaders. These shaders allow you to create the most difficult textures that do (or do not) exist in the world. Several 3rd party developers have created a substantial number of quality 3rd party shaders. The included shaders as well as 3rd party shaders let you create some truly beautiful and unique effects.

Mind-Boggling Speed

For over a decade Camera has been the fastest 3D software rendering system in the world. We are proud to announce "We are still the fastest." Some competitors have tried to fool these results by turning off functions, but when it's crunch time, the Electric Image Animation System is the fastest rendering engine when similiar settings are applied within any given 3D application. But we just don't stop with the FASTEST engine, many critics believe our rendering engine also produces the BEST images in the 3D business.

EIAS' true Gem lies in the power of its rendering engine. Identified as Camera this powerful application provides blazing fast rendering and superb raytracing, phong shading, antialiasing, and motion blur images and movies.

New Camera 7.0 Features

Multi-Layer Rendering

A new plug-in shader system has been added for post processing which gives you the ability to create multi-layer output files in the PSD and RPF file formats. This means you can render the different material properties of your scene on to different layers of a Photoshop file directly. You can render the diffuse on to one layer, the specular highlights on to another, the reflections on to another, etc.

EIAS layer system is organized as a set of modules (Layer Shaders), it’s opened for third party developers and future expansion. Three basic Layer Shadera are included in the 7.0 release.

1. EI_Layers.shl Render out the scene to a layered Photoshop file
2. RPF Saver.shl Render out data to an RPF file. This format is used by a variety of applications.
3. DOF.shl This layer shader provides dof effects directly at sub-pixels level without multiframe rendering.

The layer interface in Animator is very easy to use. Any Layer Shader can be applied to a whole scene and/or to any sets of objects. The name of the set will be used as the folder name in the Photoshop Layers window. The new "pseudo-transparency" feature allows a layered render of objects even they are obscured by others in a scene. With EI_Layers you can also render front and back sides of phong transparent objects on separated layers.

The layer system is fully supported by Renderama. When you render using the layer shaders a completed image file will be created along with a sequence of .psd or .rpf files. Renderama will return all of the files to the host. The files are stitched for strip network render.

Image-Based Lighting (IBL)

This powerful new feature creates lighting and shadows based on Global Illumination Sky map image. It allows you to match the lighting between a photograph and your render or to save time by using a photograph itself as the source of lights' color and intensity. The IBL is fully integrated into EI GI system. All you need is to assign a desired Sky map (typically HDRI but any texture can be used as well) and select “Adaptive Sky Map” mode in GI Sky panel.

New Raytrace Sky Maps

The World Info window's Raytrace tab now contains both: raytrace reflection sky maps and raytrace refraction sky maps. If a ray is cast and does not hit any objects, these maps can be used to assign a color to the ray for reflected and refracted rays respectively. Effectively, you can use these maps as skydomes environments around your raytraced scenes.

New Mapping Types

Three new mapping projection types have been added in order to allow you to work with the large number of existing HDR files on the web. These include: SkyDome, LightProbe, and VertCross. These options appear automatically in the Texture Info window for any Reflection or Sky map.

GI Glossy

In addition to diffuse lighting, GI now can perform a fast highlights calculation based on the Sky map color and intensity. It’s a huge time saver for GI scenes. Instead of “manualyl” creating numerous auxiliary lights to add speculars to your scene, you can derive the highlight directly from the brightest points in the sky map.

More Camera Features

Global Illumination rendering engine

Global Illumination (GI) is a lighting technique that has been integrated directly into Camera for creating a large range of outdoor and indoor scenes. The goal is to create a balance between render speed, photorealistic image quality and ease of setup and use. GI relies on the ray casting system that is already well tested in Camera.

Ray traced Shadow Transmission

Camera supports volumetric scattering (also known as subsurface scattering). This can be used to give objects subtle surface characteristics and supports translucent shadows. Marble, wax, a lot of organic materials (including skin) benefit from this feature.

Ray trace Volume Transparency

Provides a new transparency model, based on volume of solid objects. The new model emphasizes the object's volume and solves the old problem of an "empty shell with nothing inside" - that's how solid transparent objecst typically look in CG.

Fresnel Controls

Automatic calculation of the reflection and transparency based on an object’s Index of Refraction. Automatically varies reflection and transparency as the angle between the camera and the surface vary. Works with both Phong and ray traced effects. Makes it very easy to set up realistic water and other transparent surfaces.

Shadow Mode Only

Allows you to use transparency edge settings for ray traced shadows but regular transparency settings for the object’s ray traced transparency calculation. This allows you to have fully transparent objects that cast some subtle shadows at their edges. Previous versions allowed you to duplicate your group and set the duplicate to Shadow Object Only, but this approach was slow and cumbersome.

Caustics

Camera can generate caustics of reflection and refraction. What is a caustic? A caustic is light reflected or refracted by a curved surface. You see caustics all the time without even thinking about them. The ripples of light on the bottom of a swimming pool, the bright reflections from a drinking glass that you see on the table, these are examples of caustics and Camera 6.6 can create these effects automatically and quickly. The user interface allows you to control which objects generate reflective caustics or refractive caustics (or both) and which objects receive caustics.

Image File Support

Camera can write out Image files larger than 2GB. This feature extends to the texture cache file as well. Previous limitations on shadow buffer size and the number of shadow buffers in your projects has been eliminated. New QuickTime plug-ins for the Image format (Mac and Windows) are included so that third party applications can read in the large Image files.