We are pleased to announce public release of version 2.0 of the Advanced Rendering Toolkit, or ART for short. ART is an Open Source rendering framework for physically based rendering, and is licensed under the GNU GPL v. 3.0.

A brief description of the project can be found in the About section, and documentation PDFs plus information how to check out the source tree from our git server can be obtained in the Downloads section. There is also a section where we answer Frequently Asked Questions about the project, and features which are missing or inefficient in the initial released version are discussed in a separate post, as well as in the changelog.

Please also take a moment to read our release dedication.

Updates to the source will be announced in this blog. We will also occasionally post about features of ART, and discuss certain technical aspects.

And in case you are wondering why the initial release version of ART is 2.0: the reason we do not start with version number 1.0 is explained in the FAQ.

Please note that in its current form, ART is experimental research software. There are bugs, there are missing features, the documentation is spotty, rendering speed is very low, and it is totally unsuitable for any sort of production work. If you download and use it, you do so entirely at your own risk.