Note

This repo is the old version of Psychopath, and no further development is happening here. The new repo is at https://github.com/cessen/psychopath

Overview

Psychopath is a path tracer, aimed at rendering animations and VFX for film. It is currently still in an early prototyping stage of development. You can view a brief video of some animations rendered with it in this (now somewhat out-dated) video.

The long-term goals of Psychopath are to support efficient global illumination rendering of scenes that are significantly larger than available RAM and/or that contain procedural elements that need to be generated on-the-fly during rendering.

The approach that Psychopath takes to enable this is to try to access the scene data in as coherent a fashion as possible via breadth-first ray tracing, allowing the cost of HDD access, expensive procedurals, etc. to be amortized over large batches of rays.

In its current state this principle and its effectiveness are demonstrated by by refining geometry to sub-pixel microgeometry on the fly during the rendering process, somewhat analogous to the Reyes rendering architecture. Even with geometry caching completely disabled, Psychopath is able to render using this technique very efficiently.

Current Features

Spheres
Bilinear patches
Bicubic bezier patches
Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces
Spherical light sources
Rectangular light sources
Simple shader system (assign BSDF's to objects)
Multiple importance sampling
Spectral rendering (via monte carlo, not binning)
Focal blur / DoF
Camera motion blur
Deformation motion blur
Transforms and transform motion blur
Full hierarchical instancing

Features Currently In-Progress

A novel method for efficiently handling many (i.e. thousands or millions) of lights in a scene. See this thread for an overview.

PsychoBlend

Included in the repository is an addon for Blender called "PsychoBlend" that allows you to do basic rendering of Blender scenes with Psychopath. Most Blender features are not yet supported.

Features Supported