PRESS RELEASE
Los Angeles, California, July 27, 2010: Luxion, the leading developer of advanced rendering and lighting technology and makers of KeyShot, the first realtime ray tracing and global illumination program, today announced a breakthrough in realtime ray traced subsurface scattering. This breakthrough makes it possible to render realistic natural materials such as human skin interactively and in realtime, without any approximations. The realtime ray traced subsurface scattering will be demonstrated as part of KeyShot 2.1 as one of several new developments at SIGGRAPH 2010, held from July 27 – 29 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
The subsurface scattering algorithms represent the next generation of the Academy Award winning work by Dr. Henrik Wann Jensen who is Chief Scientist at Luxion. Jensen’s algorithms have been essential in motion picture movies like “Lord of the Rings” and “Avatar”. Dr. Jensen and the team at Luxion achieved the breakthrough by using new sophisticated mathematical algorithms that make it possible to rapidly compute the effect of complex natural lighting on translucent materials.
At SIGGRAPH 2010, Luxion will show a fully interactive ray traced human head with subsurface scattering, where the skin is rendered using the true optical properties of human skin. This technology is likely to revolutionize film making as it can eliminate the traditional long rendering times faced by modern movie productions.
Following the Luxion tradition, these subsurface scattering algorithms run on both PC and MAC without the need for special hardware. Even laptops are perfectly capable of rendering high quality ray traced images with subsurface scattering interactively.
In addition to subsurface scattering KeyShot 2.1 adds multi-host realtime ray tracing which can utilize multiple machines for interactive rendering.
KeyShot 2.1 also integrates support for GPUs for additional rendering effects. KeyShot 2.1 is using open standards for the GPU component and runs very well on any graphics card.
Luxion’s latest developments can be seen in their own booth #1232, as well as in their partner booths’ INTEL #512 and ATI/AMD #301. To learn more about Siggraph 2010, visit www.siggraph.org/s2010.
About Luxion
Luxion specializes in technology advancing state-of-the-art in computer based lighting simulations. We have expert knowledge in areas related to daylighting (atmospheric scattering), light scattering by materials (BRDF and BSSRDF models), light transport algorithms such as photon mapping, and realtime rendering technology. We develop proprietary applications and libraries for customers in need for software capable of precisely calculating the scattering of light in complex 3D environments.
