Kerkythea

http://www.kerkythea.net/

About Kerkythea
Kerkythea is a standalone renderer, using physically accurate materials and lights, aiming for the best quality rendering in the most efficient timeframe. The target of Kerkythea is to simplify the task of quality rendering by providing the necessary tools to automate scene setup, such as staging using the GL real-time viewer, material editor, general/render settings editors, etc., under a common interface. The development of the Kerkythea (KT) application began in September (2004) without having much time to invest on the application at that time. The good thing, is that it started with the kernel and libraries of Phos (an older render engine), so a big part of the source code was already tested and well structured. It took more than half a year before Kerkythea was finally born (April 2005)! In that phase, the first users were not so many but there were enthusiasts that joined my efforts and gave substantial feedback. Seeing that a general weakness of other render engines was the lack of an interface, I decided to make a turn and enhance the user interface even more. The enhanced version was based on Fox toolkit, with the additional benefit of KT becoming platform independent (October 2005). Reaching now the 3rd year of development and gaining popularity, I want to believe that KT can now be considered among the top freeware/open source renderer engines and can be used for both academic and commercial purposes. In the beginning of 2007, we have a strong and rapidly growing community and a new site that is more "alive" than ever! Ioannis Pantazopoulos February 2007

After one more year of development we have reached a new release at the end of January 2008. A very powerful release with lots of improvements. Kerkythea has grown constantly over the last year, growing into a standard rendering application among architectural studios and extensively used within educational institutes. Of course there are a lot of things that can be added and improved. But we are really proud of reaching a high quality and stable application that is more than usable for commercial purposes with an amazing zero cost!

Alternatives
The Kerkythea team has shifted focus to another product (a commercial one), so we won't see many updates to it. Fortunately, there are alternatives, like:
 * 1) http://www.luxrender.net/
 * 2) http://www.yafaray.org/