Affogato:About

From Affogato

Affogato was developed as Rising Sun Pictures' (RSP) internal Softimage XSI to RenderMan translator.

Originally it was used on the feature film remake of 'Charlotte's Web', which got released into cinemas December 2006. Every shot involving any 3D that RSP rendered for this show went through Affogato.

Affogato is very much like the Liquid plugin for Maya. Affogato and Liquid currently don't share any code for obvious reasons, but there are plans to make that happen, where applicable.

The name Affogato was originally suggested by crazy effects TD & über-leet-automata-h8xor Dan Wills during an internal poll done at RSP when Affogato's development had just kicked off. The reason Dan came up with this particular name was that RSP had once planned to use nVidia's Gelato renderer. Gelato is Italian and means 'ice-cream'. Affogato is also Italian and stands for an espresso that is served poured over a ball of (vanilla)-gelato. RSP ended up choosing 3Delight instead of Gelato soon after, but the name was set and we happily kept it.

Affogato was mainly written by Moritz Mœller over a period of four months. During which namely person experienced the pain of the worst documented and mediocrely designed API south of the north pole. And I'm not talking about the RenderMan interface. Amen!

On a sidenote, it would be very easy to make Affogato work straight with nVidia's Gelato. The rendering interface is completely abstracted in a class. I.e., Affogato doesn't use the RenderMan interface directly.