Caustic Graphics Enters Into Multiple OpenRL License Agreements

LOS ANGELES, July 26 /PRNewswire/ -- SIGGRAPH 2010 -- Caustic Graphics® today announced that e-on software, Lightwork Design, and Strata have licensed Caustic's OpenRL™ (Open Ray Tracing Library) SDK for their interactive ray tracing applications; showing further momentum behind the world's only cross-platform, cross-OS specification for writing real-time, interactive ray tracing applications.  The company, together with these developer partners, will be launching and demonstrating several applications built on OpenRL at SIGGRAPH 2010, July 27 - 29, in Los Angeles.

OpenRL on Display at SIGGRAPH

At SIGGRAPH 2010, the company will have applications accelerated by OpenRL on display in the following locations:

• e-on software (Booth #325) — will be showing a new OpenRL interactive preview tool in Vue 9 that offers enhanced photorealism over OpenGL preview displays.

• Lightwork Design (Booth #225) — OpenRL will be accelerating Artisan Snapshot Studio, a new application for the quick and easy generation of photorealistic images from 3D CAD data.

• SplutterFish (Booth #211) — will be demonstrating Brazil for Developers, a real-time, fully interactive renderer based on the popular renderer Brazil r/s, that is targeted at developers of a wide range of 3D graphics applications.  The product will be shown using a new plug-in framework developed for Autodesk® 3ds Max®.

• Strata (Booth #211) — OpenRL delivers impressive rendering speed increases to Strata Design 3D CX, the popular cross-platform 3D application that tightly integrates with Adobe's Creative Suite®.  Strata will be introducing OpenRL ray tracing acceleration in an upcoming release.  Stop by for a product and technology demonstration.

"With OpenRL, developers are discovering the enormous benefit of having standardized access to a wide range of graphics devices for ray tracing," said James McCombe, co-founder and CTO of Caustic Graphics.  "We're very pleased with how OpenRL is helping to finally eliminate the expensive and redundant task of writing custom interfaces and drivers for each piece of hardware."

"We are pleased to be a member of the OpenRL developer alliance and look forward to working with Caustic on advanced ray-tracing technologies and standards," said Nicholas Phelps, CEO of e-on software, the leading provider of Digital Nature solutions.

Dave Forrester, CEO at Lightworks commented, "Last year at SIGGRAPH 2009 we embarked on an exciting project with Caustic Graphics to bring their extraordinary ray tracing technology to our platform.  This year we're pleased to show great progress from this effort with tremendous advancements from OpenRL for our Artisan SnapShot Studio product."

"Our partnership with Caustic Graphics helps keep Strata Design 3D CX on the leading edge of software and hardware performance," said Ken Bringhurst, Strata CEO.  "3D rendering is a very time intensive task and our customers will benefit greatly from the speed enhancements made possible by Caustic's OpenRL, without compromising the superior rendering quality they have come to expect."

About OpenRL

OpenRL (Open Ray Tracing Library) is the world's first specification for writing ray tracing applications that have standardized access to a wide range of graphics hardware devices from AMD®, Intel®, and NVIDIA®, as well as Caustic Graphics.  In the past, developers were forced to program their ray tracing applications "to the metal" by writing to each specific device or accept "vendor lock-in" by using a proprietary closed standard that is limited to a specific subset of hardware.  In direct contrast to these expensive and redundant coding methods, OpenRL is a cross-OS, cross-platform API that provides a flexible foundation upon which many different applications can be built.  It takes advantage of multiple heterogeneous compute devices simultaneously, so that all CPU, GPU, and RTU (ray tracing unit) cores are fully utilized during the rendering process.  Interested developers can evaluate OpenRL by registering at www.caustic.com.

About Caustic Graphics

Caustic Graphics, the creators of the OpenRL specification, is reinventing ray tracing and changing how interactive cinema-quality 3D graphics are produced, used, and enjoyed.  Caustic's customers currently include AfterCad, Autodesk, Strata, e-on, LightWork Design, Open Design Alliance, and Robert McNeel & Associates.  The company is headquartered in San Francisco.  For more information, please visit www.caustic.com.

Autodesk and 3ds Max are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries.  All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

SOURCE Caustic Graphics