Written to take advantage of the Quadro FX’s powerful GPU, Gelato 2.0’s highlights include the Sorbetto relighting system, volume shadows for hair and smoke and a brand new plug-in for 3ds Max.

Veterans of the 3D industry — especially regulars on mailing lists and specialty forums — may recall the days when neophytes were regularly laughed at for asking how quickly their scenes would render if they invested in a new video card. Invariably, some patient sage would explain that the video card didn’t assist in the rendering of scenes — that was dependent upon their CPU speed and system memory. The embarrassed newbie would sheepishly slink away, and the process would be repeated again the next week. Fast-forward to the present. Leveraging the power of the Graphics Processing Units (GPU) on NVIDIA, Quadro FX cards take much of the burden of rendering off your computer’s CPU. But what good is hardware without the software to go with it? Consisting of Gelato, Amaretto, Sorbetto and Mango, NVIDIA’s film software products may sound like a smorgasbord of sweet Italian desserts, but it’s actually a powerful suite of rendering tools. Written from the ground up to take advantage of the Quadro FX’s powerful GPU, Gelato 2.0’s highlights include the Sorbetto relighting system, volume shadows for hair and smoke and a brand new plug-in for 3ds Max. The software runs under Windows and Linux and employs Python, Pyg (Gelato’s Python-based scene format) and C++. Gelato can open any file format it has a plug-in for, and you can write your own plug-ins for the file format of your choice. There’s already a RIB importer, for example. In addition to GUI rendering through a host program such as Maya or 3ds Max, Gelato supports command line rendering. Of course, studios that want to create their own tools to use with Gelato will appreciate its clean and flexible API and the openness of its Python and C++ interfaces.

Gelato shaders in the 3ds Max Material Editor. All Gelato screenshots courtesy of Bryan Hoff.

I tested the latest Gelato 2.0 Beta using Autodesk 3ds Max 8 professional 3D software and Alias Maya 7 Unlimited. Admittedly, my testing system is seriously underpowered for this software, with the most powerful component in the pipeline being my Quadro FX 1100 video card, but I’ll endeavor to bring you the best information on Gelato 2.0 from a production and improved workflow perspective.

A Cup of Gelato
Building on Gelato 1.2’s toolset, which includes sub-surface scattering (SSS), global illumination (GI), motion blur, efficient NURBS rendering and ambient occlusion, Gelato 2.0 brings even more cards to the table, as it introduces the following new or improved features:

• Sorbetto — Gelato’s powerful new relighting system. Sorbetto’s benefits are best witnessed with larger scenes, with a reduction in re-rendering times of up to six times in the example I saw. Sorbetto is also accessible via the API.

• Mango — The Gelato plug-in for Alias Maya. Mango can directly translate many Maya Hypershade shaders, and allows you to visually edit existing shaders in Maya, although if you want to create your own from scratch you’ll need some programming ability, since there’s no GUI access for that. As David Wilton, Gelato product manager suggests, “Anyone who can do C++ programming, can write a Gelato shader. Once written, however, non-programmers can change the shader parameters from the GUI.”

• Amaretto — A 3ds Max Gelato plug-in created by Frantic Films and re-sold by NVIDIA, Amaretto gives you GUI access to all of Gelato’s features and allows editing of Gelato shaders in the Material Editor (shown in Figure 2), plus conversion of 3ds Max materials to Gelato’s shader networks (GSO).

• Volume Shadows — Gelato 2.0 now supports volume shadows for hair and smoke, adding realism to your renderings.

• Stereo Rendering — Allows you to create stereo images faster than rendering the two stereo images separately, either full-color ones or red-blue images that appear three-dimensional when viewed with red-blue glasses. An example of stereo rendering is shown in Figure 3.