VIRTUALIGHT is sophisticated standalone rendering engine that allows previewing and photorealistic rendering of 3D scenes. Like the RenderMan Interface® from Pixar, its interface may be thought of as a 3D scene description format (this interface is not Renderman compliant). It can be used as a communication protocol between any modeling programs or production packages and the VIRTUALIGHT renderer to produce photorealistic quality images.
VIRTUALIGHT is freeware and distributed with several utilities that allow data conversion from other 3D geometry file formats to the VirtuaLight Interface Bytestream.

RENDERING
Distributed ray-tracing
Global Illumination
o Indirect diffuse illumination model (Monte Carlo irradiance)
o Indirect specular illumination model (Photon tracing for true reflective and refractive caustics)
o Diffuse solar radiation (skylight) with or without Sunlight (from 06:00 to 18:00 GMT)
High Dynamic Range Image
o Input: .HDR (Radiance) + .PFM
o Output: .HDR (Radiance)
Full Quasi Monte Carlo low-discrepancy sampling method to avoid *random noise* and ensure faster convergence to the final result.
Volumetric rendering (participating media also able to interact with photon mapping)
Chromatic light dispersion (including interaction with photon mapping)
6 different light source types including Area lights (spherical, flat and soft spotlight)
6 camera lens models (perspective, orthographic, wide angle, fisheye, panoramic, omnimax)
Black hole
Multiple light attenuation models (constant, linear, quadratic, cubic, range)
Basic atmospheric effects (fog, ground fog)
Depth of field
Adaptive spatial antialiasing
12 built-in pixel filters in order to perform pixel sampling
Gamma correction
Film exposure
6 output formats: Targa, Tiff, Jpeg, Png, Bmp or HDR
Alpha channel
Z-channel
Fast (black or colored) hidden line removal rendering for scene preview
Experimental scanline rendering method (with ray-traced shadows, reflection and refraction)
OpenGL rendering mode for very fast display preview (with surface shader simulation)

SHADERS
Programmable surface shaders
Complete set of surface properties (including brilliance, absorption and iridescence)
Multiple specular BRDF for primitive surfaces (Blinn, Phong, Cook, Reitz, Gaussian)
Texture mapping (Image and Bump mapping from TGA, PNG, JPG and TIF file formats)
Stochastic reflection and refraction models (blurred reflection/transmission)
UV mapping
True Displacement Mapping
Spectrum of colors
Multi-layer shaders
Composite shaders
Indexed shaders (Spectrum of shaders)

GEOMETRIC PRIMITIVES
Bicubic patches (4 basis)
Triangular patch
Polygon
Binary mesh file
Box
Disk and Ring
NURBS patch (uniform and non-uniform knot vector)
Quadrics and Superquadric
Torus
Blobby implicit surfaces (3 types)
Polynomial surfaces
Implicit surfaces
Parametric surfaces
Extruded surfaces
Surface of revolution
Height fields (4 types, image file-based and implicit)
Volumetric Hypershape
Object Array 2D (map-based placement of object instances)
Constructive Solid Geometry (6 operation types)

INTERFACE SUPPORT
More than 60 built-in functions for numeric, vector and functional expressions
Conditional processing
Tables & Arrays
Declarations & variable definitions
Binary VIB Development Kit for Visual C++ (6.0 and 7.0) and Borland C++ 5.6
Basic particle system
Basic animation system