JIG IS A STAND ALONE SOFTWARE RENDERING PROGRAM.

Jig is a fast, extensible, and open general purpose renderer for special effects companies and post production facilities of all sizes. Jig is a comprehensive solution for rendering traditional geometry as well as photorealistic hair, volumes, and particles. Jig is designed to be scalable, performing well on modest workstations as well as large rendering clusters. 
 

Current productions demand a wide range of complicated effects from renderers. These demands often result in the development of extremely complicated and fragile rendering pipelines on the part of the post production company using the renderer. It is our aim to ease this process by providing an exceptionally open rendering system. Jig has been designed from the ground up with total flexibility and ease of use in mind.

The Jig Algorithm

It is our belief that no single algorithm will satisfy the needs of any production facility. As a result, the Jig rendering system encompasses various rendering algorithms and focuses on combining them with an easy to use pipeline. Instead of limiting the user with a single rendering algorithm such as ray-tracing or a-buffer rendering, Jig provides multiple algorithms each tailored towards solving a different rendering problem. Not only does the user benefit directly from this modularity, but indirectly from the flexibility of the architecture required to allow such integration.

Flexibility

Jig strives to be flexible at every level of the production pipeline. Jig may be easily integrated into a production pipeline with Perl, an industry standard scripting language. New shaders, maps, surfaces, displacements, volume objects, and image processes may be easily added to Jig with its open C++ plug-in system. Jig's plug-in system allows the user to layer maps and shaders as if it were a standard composite, allowing the end-user the ability to construct more sophisticated shaders without requiring any programming knowledge.

Advanced Antialiasing

All renderers are faced with the problem of anti-aliasing, or removing what are artifacts commonly referred to as "jaggies" or "sizzling". Many techniques have been created to eliminate these problems in traditional rendering algorithms. However, extremely small or thin geometry such as particles or hair still poses a big problem. The only available solutions up until now have been brute force super sampling techniques which increase render time and/or memory usage. Jig's point and line primitives are anti-aliased properly regardless of the super sampling rate. This allows for fewer samples resulting in faster renders. These anti-aliasing techniques applied to the self-shadowing of these objects also provide soft shadows without introducing artifacts.