Tachyon renderer pro

../../_images/tachyon_renderer_panel.png

This is a software-based ray-tracing renderer. It can produce renderings of the scene with ambient occlusion lighting, shadows, and depth of field. The visual quality of the Tachyon renderer is slightly better than the one provided by the OSPRay renderer, but it requires more memory. Both rendering engines offer higher visual quality than the Standard renderer but are typically considerably slower.

The “More Options” (vertical ellipsis) button next to each numerical parameter opens a context menu with the option to reset each parameter to its default value.

The depth of field effect and the direction of the direct light source are specified on the Effects tab of the rendering page, because they apply to all rendering engines alike.

Parameters

Anti-aliasing

To reduce aliasing effects, the Tachyon ray-tracer can perform supersampling by computing multiple rays per output pixel. The anti-aliasing samples parameter controls the number of rays.

Direct light

Enables the parallel light source, which is directed from an angle behind the camera. Its direction is set on the Effects tab of the rendering page. The brightness parameter controls its intensity.

Shadows: Enables cast shadows for the directional light. Note that, with the current Tachyon version, you cannot turn off shadows when ambient occlusion shading is enabled. In this case, you can only completely turn off the directional light source.

Ambient occlusion

Enabling this lighting technique mimics some of the effects that occur under conditions of omnidirectional diffuse illumination, e.g., outdoors on an overcast day. The brightness parameter controls the intensity of the ambient light.

Sample count: Ambient occlusion is implemented using a Monte Carlo technique. This parameter controls the number of samples to compute. A higher sample number leads to a more even shading but requires more computation time.