Entropy™ 3.1
Release Notes


May 28, 2002

Contents

Introduction
Release Contents
Getting Started
Documentation and Technical Support
Known Issues
Revision History
Copyright and Trademark Information

 

Introduction

Entropy™ is a robust, flexible, high-quality rendering system that incorporates the speed and low memory use of scanline renderers and the realism afforded by global illumination renderers. It supports a wide variety of geometric types, programmable shading, soft shadows, automatic dynamic tessellation, indirect illumination (sometimes, erroneously, known as radiosity), multithreading, high-quality antialiasing and motion blur, and a host of other powerful features that make it possible to make images of unparalleled quality and realism.


Entropy 3.1 comes bundled with integration for Discreet's 3ds max. For details on 3ds integration, please see the 3ds Integration Release Notes.


Entropy uses APIs that are very similar to those described in the RenderMan Interface Specification published by Pixar Animation Studios. However, neither Exluna nor Entropy are associated with Pixar, and no claims are made that Entropy is in any way a compatible replacement for PhotoRealistic RenderMan. Despite this fact, you may find that most applications, scene files, and shaders written to conform to the RenderMan Interface may be used with Entropy without modification.

 

Release Contents

The Entropy 3.1 distribution consists of the following files and folders:

index.html

this file

License.txt

Entropy License Agreement

.entropyrc

Entropy defaults file

doc/* documentation

examples/*

example input scenes and developer resources

lib/*

renderer interface libraries

shaders/*

compiled shaders

shadersrc/*

shader source files

texture/*

texture maps

bin/*

executable programs

bin/entropy

Entropy renderer

bin/sle

shading language compiler

bin/iv

image viewer

bin/rgl

fast OpenGL scene previewer

bin/mkmip

tiff to tiled texture converter

bin/unmkmip

texture to TIFF converter

bin/sletell

print information about compiled shader

bin/slpp

shading language preprocessor (called by sle)

etc/*

licensing and other administrative files

etc/license.dat

Entropy license file

etc/lm*

FLEXlm programs and administration utilities

etc/exlunad

Exluna FLEXlm daemon

 

Getting Started

For information on installing, licensing, and using Entropy, see Getting Started (Windows) or Getting Started (Linux/Irix).

Documentation and Technical Support

The Entropy Technical Reference Manual fully documents Entropy's input syntax, APIs, usage notes, and the like.

30 days of installation and licensing technical support is included in your purchase of Entropy. To contact technical support with an installation or licensing question, send email to support@exluna.com detailing the exact nature of your problem.

We greatly appreciate any and all feedback from our customers. If you have a comment, suggestion, or have found a bug, please contact us at support@exluna.com.

Technical support on issues other than installation or licensing, or extending the period of installation support past 30 days, requires a support contract. Further details may be obtained online, or by emailing sales@exluna.com.

A wealth of online information related to Entropy, including FAQs, newsgroups, bulletin boards, and the like, exist online. For more information, see Exluna's Entropy FAQ and Related Links pages.

Known Issues

Entropy includes a number of advanced features unavailable in other rendering systems. Please see the Entropy Technical Reference Manual for a discussion of the differences between Entropy and other RenderMan-friendly renderers.

Miscellaneous Known Issues

AreaLightSource can only be applied to objects that have a 2D parameterization -- Patch, NuPatch, Polygon, and all quadrics (Sphere, Cylinder, etc.). Primitives that don't have an overall 2D parameterization (PointsPolygons, PointsGeneralPolygons, SubdivisionMesh, Curves, Points) cannot currently be used as area lights. This restriction will be removed in a following release.

Interior, exterior, and imager shaders are not working in this release. We hope to issue a patch soon to re-enable these features.

The following optional features are not supported in this release of Entropy:

Subdivision surface creasing
CSG


Revision History

Changes in 3.1 Release 6 (May 28, 2002)

Changes in 3.1 Release 5 (May 10, 2002)

Changes in 3.1 Release 4 (April 12, 2002)

Changes in 3.1 Release 3 (March 8, 2002)

Changes in 3.1 Release 2 (March 4, 2002)


Changes in 3.1 Release 1 (February 25, 2002)

Major New Features:
Performance Improvements:
Enhancements and other additions:
Shader and texture changes:
Bug fixes:
Documentation changes:

Previous Releases

Entropy 3.1 Beta 7: February 14, 2002
Entropy 3.1 Beta 6: February 8, 2002
Entropy 3.1 Beta 5: January 29, 2002
Entropy 3.1 Beta 4: January 4, 2002
Entropy 3.1 Beta 3: December 21, 2001
Entropy 3.1 Beta 2: December 14, 2001
Entropy 3.1 Beta 1: December 7, 2001
Entropy 3.1 Alpha 3: November 17, 2001
Entropy 3.1 Alpha 2: November 2, 2001

Copyright and Trademark Information

Entropy™ is a trademark of Exluna, Inc. The Entropy software is:
Copyright © 2002, Exluna, Inc. All rights reserved.
Portions Copyright ©1990-2000 Larry Gritz.

slpp is a renamed, unmodified version of the Free Software Foundation's "cpp". The full source code for cpp, including additional notes and credits, is available online, or from Exluna, Inc. upon request. You may distribute and/or modify slpp/cpp under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) as published by the Free Software Foundation.

pthreadVCE.dll is part of the Pthreads-win32 package, which is distributed under the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL). Full information on Pthreads-win32, including credits and information on obtaining updates, is available from http://sources.redhat.com/pthreads-win32/

The full text of the GPL and the LGPL may be found online (see www.gnu.org), or from the Free Software Foundation, 59 Template Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

RenderMan is a registered trademark of Pixar Animation Studios.