EIAS Camera

Introduction

Camera is the EIAS rendering engine, it produces extremely high-quality images at astonishing speeds. It gives you 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, saving you money while getting your work done well ahead of time.

Quality and Speed

For over a decade, Camera has been at the 'head of the pack' when it came to speed. We are proud to announce that "With version 8 it's even faster." But we just don't stop with the fastest renders, 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. This powerful application provides tremendously quick rendering as well as high-quality raytracing, global illumination, anti-aliasing, and motion-blurring. It is able to do this because of a combination of technical factors which make Camera unique, some of which include:

1. Camera is written in C, not the slower C++ programming language.
2. We do ALL our own memory management which gives far increased efficiency.
3. Camera renders facet-by-facet, not line-by-line. This is central to our speed.

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Network Rendering

EIAS Camera also gives you the power of network rendering over multiple platforms, our network rendering solution is known as Renderama which comes built in with EIAS. With the substantial decrease in computer hardware costs it is now possible to work on one platform (Windows or Macintosh) and render on another.

Shaders

Also included with the Electric Image Animation System are a vast array of procedural shaders. These shaders allow you to create some of the most difficult textures that do (or do not) exist in the world. It is widely accepted that EIAS comes with the most comprehensive set of shaders seen in the 3D world.

New Camera 8.0 Features

The Lighting Pack

Key Features

1. Fast Soft Shadows.
2. Area Lights.
3. Light Objects.
4. Photon Mapping.
5. Quadratic light drop-off.
6. Light Customization tools.
7. GI Saturation Option.

Fast Soft Shadows

The soft shadow system has been completely rewritten. Fast soft shadows can be enabled for all types
of lights. There is also a new method of optimization that utilizes the GI engine to sample the shadows and this method is upwards of 16x faster. The old optimization ("Optimize shadow generation") has been re-written to give more control for the user.

Area Lights

Area lights are a fundamental requirement for most indoor and room scenes. EIAS 8 includes them as a built-in light type. Area lights can be equipped with HDRI textures (e.g. to replace a series of small lights with only one textured Area light). They can be also used in the role of tube light with real soft shadows.

Light Objects

This variation of Area Lights uses real geometry (polygons) instead of an abstract light shape. You can create lights with any arbitrary luminance shapes. There is also a special "hidden" option for Light Objects that allows them to have bouncing illumination for sky light and outdoor scenes.

Photon Mapping

Photon mapping is a popular and effective way to calculate indirect illumination and light bouncing. Photon maps can be stored and reused, thus allowing fly-through animations to be rendered much more quickly. Their illumination can also be baked, that is to say, transformed into illumination maps.

Quadratic light drop-off

Quadratic falloff is a new kind of light drop-off. It provides a physical light-model that corresponds more realistically to real-world lighting. An example of this type of drop-off can be found in a simple household light-bulb. Its intensity is huge when you hold your hand close to it (you can even see light transmitting through your hand), but, as you move your hand away, this intensity drops-off very quickly.

Light Customization tools

This new graph tool is a flexible modifier of a light's behavior. Unlike the GI Diffuse and Luminance multipliers, the Customize Tool changes illumination selectively. For example, you can increase the illumination in dark areas only, but leave the brighter areas of the scene unchanged.

GI Saturation Option

This new option decreases the GI reverse illumination saturation providing more color bleeding control.

The User Pack - Camera

Key Features

1. Renderama now displays the output file name of the job being rendered.
2. You can now re-order jobs inside the Renderama interface.
3. Whenever you enable or disable a job or a slave, this is now instantly saved to the preferences to aid in crash recovery
4. Renderama can now see and use folders nested inside the EI Shaders and EI Sockets folders.
5. Rendering to PNG format
6. Bump normals map are now supported for camera maps.
7. GI Saturation Option.

Fast Soft Shadows

The soft shadow system has been completely rewritten. Fast soft shadows can be enabled for all types
of lights. There is also a new method of optimization that utilizes the GI engine to sample the shadows and this method is upwards of 16x faster. The old optimization ("Optimize shadow generation") has been re-written to give more control.

Shader Bevel

This new shader creates a bump to fake bevels/champhers along the unshared edges of a group. This 
creates Instant and flexible results even for very low-detailed models.