Caustic Professional, part of the Imagination Technologies Group have been hard at work on the absolute madness that is the Caustic Visualizer for Maya. This looks to be the next incarnation and new life for the dead and gone Brazil Rendering System from the defunct Splutterfish.

The worlds first fully interactive real time Raytracer for Autodesk Maya 2013 working viewports

Built on the OpenRL SDK which is Imagination Technologies’ implementation of the  OpenRL Ray Tracing Library (OpenRL) API,  It includes the OpenRL shading language (RLSL), which is based on GLSL and supplies run-time compiled, programmable shaders for raytracing.

The New Caustic Visualizer Plugin is dubbed “The worlds first fully interactive real time Raytracer for Autodesk Maya 2013 working viewports”… yes, in fact, viewports. Adding the plugin to Maya will give you a new choice under the viewport renderer pulldown with “Caustic Visualizer” added to the list under Maya’s standard Viewport 2.0.

Choosing this will set that viewport to render progressively in the familiar refined render passes similar to what we have seen before in Isotropix Clarisse, Mental Ray iRay, or V-Ray RT; The screen will update as changes are made to objects, lighting or shading attributes.

Here, we see the Caustic Visualizer in action at the Imagination Technologies office in San Francisco showing a scene with a honey bee that has had hair created in Shave and a Haircut, and converted to polygons, roughly 6.5 million polygons…

The interesting thing is the objects in the viewports that are set to Caustic Visualizer will still have editable wireframes and manipulators… all the standard Maya stuff that you are accustom to in a regular Maya viewport, only in an actual Raytraced scene, which to me, is pretty exciting stuff.

Caustic’s viewport can handle real and accurate reflections, Diffuse reflections, bounced light and global illumination, depth of field, soft shadows, blurred reflections and major parameters of the mia suite of mental ray shaders.

The Bad news is that the Visualizer is not yet available and only seems to be for Windows 64bit systems, but the good news is that the Caustic Visualizer is in an Open Beta Cycle where you are able to download and use the plugin with a simple registration.