3Delight render engine in AE and Nuke

Just found out that company Jupiter Jazz has released their AtomKraft toolkit for both After Effects and Nuke. I read about AtomKraft sometime last year but as it was still in beta or whatever phase I forgot about it. Now I rediscovered it and guess what! It offers 3Delight engine in AE for only 99$ and in Nuke for 399$. They also have a free watermarked version for AE and free 2-thread version for Nuke. Kind of cheap really considering what it can do.

So what can it do?

Basically it can:

• read obj, Alembic and RIB files
• read Renderman Shading Language shaders and compile them render-time
• provide almost all features of 3Delight including GI, SSS, primitives, micropolygon displacement, motion blur, dof, HDRI lighting, image based shadows,  and so on
• use Cortex tools
• do camera projections (in After Effects!)
• texture baking
• render passes
• proxy geometry

A whole bunch of stuff and I missed a lot of features. These are the primary ones that I noticed while reading their docs.

This whole thing made me think that maybe it is time to try to render our next animation project in 3Delight through Aftereffects. Sounds a bit odd but it's probably worth a try. Only thing to do now is get Blender Alembic exporter working and simply stuff things together in AE...