Indigo Renderer is a 3D rendering software that uses unbiased rendering technologies to create photo-realistic images. In doing so, Indigo uses equations that simulate the behavior of light, with no approximations or guesses taken. By accurately simulating all the interactions of light, Indigo is capable of producing effects such as depth of field, spectral effects, refraction, reflections, and caustics. Indigo features Monte-Carlo path tracing, experimental support for bidirectional path tracing and MLT on top of bidirectional path tracing, distributed render capabilities, and progressive rendering (image gradually becomes less noisy as rendering progresses) and it supports subsurface scattering and has its own image format (.igs).


Indigo 3.0 introduces realtime scene editing - now you can tweak your materials, and the results will be displayed nearly instantly.

You can tweak materials, camera position, camera f-stop and focal length, all in realtime, with both a ray-traced and OpenGL preview.

Indigo now has built-in animation and render queue support, thanks to the introduction of the Indigo Queue (.igq) format.

Render queues integrate smoothly with network rendering, which means you can use all the computers on your network to render an animation or set of images easily and rapidly.

Many changes resulting in improved rendering performance and image quality have been made in the core. Indigo 3.0 produces better images for the same number of samples per pixel as 2.x.

Indigo 3.0 also introduces optional camera vignetting and faster HDR environment mapping.

These are just a few of the many changes that have been made to the core rendering engine in Indigo 3.0 - with many more still to be introduced!

Bump mapping is now more accurate, especially with strong bump scaling and in regions of high curvature. Even models with relatively few polygons benefit from the visual quality added by bump maps.

Subdivision and displacement has been greatly improved, with much better UV mapping behaviour and support for mixed triangle+quad meshes. This dramatically improves the quality of subdivided meshes compared to first triangulating them and then applying triangle-based subdivision.