3Delight
3Delight, now 3DelightNSI, is a 3D computer graphics software that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Developed by Illumination Research Pte Ltd, it is both a photorealistic and NPR path tracing offline renderer based on its scene description and on Open_Shading_Language for shading. It comes with supported, open source plug-in integrations for several DCC applications, such as Autodesk Maya, Houdini, Cinema4D, Katana, OpenUSD Hydra, and a democratic free license that allows for commercial use. It also provides a fully distributed cloud rendering service called 3Delight Cloud.
History
Work on 3Delight started in 1999. The renderer became first publicly and freely available in 2000. 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 were paid. 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. 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, introduced the Nodal Scene Interface 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.