Welcome to Iguana v. 1.5! Iguana is a global illumination rendering engine that runs on Windows (XP and 2000) and Red Hat Linux, it's multithreaded, and it's for Maya 6.0 / 6.0.1 only. It works with Maya as a plugin, and it can read Maya scenes directly, without any translation at all. It's terribly simple to use. And it's free - yes, my darlings, free...
Some of its parts have been completely rewritten, and many have been optimized. Some issues have been fixed, too. Iguana now runs faster, and it can go faster by a minimum of 40 % to 300 % with certain scenes. And more importantly, it has some cool new features!

What's new in v. 1.5:

- Interactivity: When Iguana runs interactively, every change you do in the scene is immediately reflected in a small render window that stays atop of Maya. You can change the point of view, you can add or remove objects or lights, move them around, play with colors of lights and materials - the render window gets updated in real time. In interactive mode you can use raytracing and global illumination, too. Please feel free to download the following movies that will show you all these things in action with Interactive Iguana: the_basics.mov, raytracing.mov and global_illumination.mov (you will need QuickTime 6.5.1 or later to view them. If you don't have it, you can download it here).

- Complete integration with Maya: Now Iguana is a plugin, and everything is automatic now (in previous versions of Iguana, you had to explicitly call scripts. This is all gone now). Iguana can be chosen like any other renderer, it has its own Render Globals, and you can now render in the Render View;

- Anti-aliasing and filtering : Now anti-aliasing in Iguana is much simpler, definitely faster and much more accurate. You can choose between some presets in the Render Globals, or fine tune anti-aliasing and filtering parameters as you wish.

You are all invited to download it, use it and abuse it in any way you like. I would also appreciate your feedback, comments, and any kind of suggestions. Please feel free to send me your own renders, so I can put them in the gallery...