Conduit Pixel Engine licensing

Artist-friendly, film-quality realtime visual effects engine for Mac and Windows software development

At the heart of Conduit's realtime graphics power is the Conduit Pixel Engine developed by Lacquer. Conduit Pixel Engine takes the effect graph created by the artist and produces optimized multipass shader programs directly targeted for the available graphics hardware and API. Conduit is compatible with both Direct3D and OpenGL.

Conduit Pixel Engine is highly savvy about not wasting rendering passes: the effect graph will always be compiled into a single shader program when possible. All the nodes in Conduit have been designed to support this. Conduit also avoids look-up textures in favour of direct computation whenever possible (e.g. tone curves). This approach guarantees that full 32-bit floating point color precision is retained to the maximum degree. Naturally less rendering passes also means better performance.

Conduit is available on a multitude of platforms, so artists can design visual effects in the application of their choice, and the effects can then be easily deployed in a realtime application that uses the Conduit Pixel Engine. This opens new possibilities in e.g. game development: a single visual look can be designed in Conduit and applied to both in-game content and pre-rendered cut scenes.

Licensing Options

The software can be licensed in two forms. The full Conduit Pixel Engine SDK contains rendering libraries for both Windows and Mac OS X. These libraries implement the full Conduit feature set, including the multipass compiler, HDR blurs, etc. A callback architecture allows custom code to be inserted into the rendering process.

For applications that don't require multipass rendering, Conduit Pixel Engine can also be licensed as a shader generator that creates single-pass shader assembly programs for both supported architectures (Direct3D 9+ pixel shader and OpenGL fragment program).

Pricing and Availability

Please contact sales (at) lacquer . fi for pricing and other information.