Today I want to talk about Armory, a Blender’s real time render engine under development.

Lubos Lenco, Armory‘s developer, explains that its creation goal is to bring real time rendering to 3d artists in a way  fully integrated into Blender; that means that it will no longer be necessary to jump from an application to another to create the final product: a game or, in the future, a Virtual Reality experience.

REAL-TIME, IN BLENDER

The goal of Armory is to bring real-time rendering to artists. Everything is fully integrated into Blender, turning it into a complete authoring tool for real-time content.

The result is a unified workflow from start to finish, making you work faster and more efficient. There is nothing forcing you to jump between different applications and constantly export data from one to another.

Behind the scenes Armory uses Kha, a key to unmatched performance and portability. Both Armory and Kha are open-source projects.

Armory will work close to Cycles engine, as it will use a subset of its nodes so every scene created to work in Armory will also work in Cycles; unfortunately at the moment vice-versa is not possible (in fact Lubos recommends to use Armory PBR node to prepare materials); in the future Armory may support all Cycles nodes.

USE NODES

Armory is heavily oriented towards nodes. For materials, a subset of standard Cycles nodes is used. This means every scene created for Armory can be rendered as-is in Cycles. We plan to eventually support all Cycles nodes. Performance remains the priority.

• Material nodes
• Compositor nodes
• Logic nodes
• Render path nodes

Do you need more info? Click HERE to visit Armory‘s website.

Lubos’s presentation at Bconf16 is HERE.

Lubos has kindly allowed me to test a “preview” version of Armory; in the next future I’ll give my impressions.

Thanks for your interest!