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- Relighting: 3Delight is now able to continuously rendering scenes while accepting updates. For Maya users, this means IPR support and for Softimage users it means real-time render view updates.
- Introducing multiple-importance sampling to the trace() shadeop. This allows easy development of physically-plausible materials.
- New subsurface algorithms improves performance (up to then ten times faster in global illumination contexts) and renders crisper images.
- Out-of-the-box support for MARI textures (UDIMs).
- Statistics in the multi-threading case are as precise as in the single-threaded case.
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- Ray-tracing performance has been improved to such a degree that we now recommend using the ray tracing hider as the default renderer for scenes with highly complex geometry (instead of REYES). Users can expect gains up to two orders of magnitude when using multi-bounce global illumination and glossy reflections.
- Ray-tracing of motion-blur, even in the most extreme cases, is not a problem anymore. Performance is such that there are no objectionable speed differences between motion-blurred and static frames.
- Ray-tracing of dense and translucent surfaces, such as hair, is up to 300% faster.
- Ray-tracer startup time has been diminished. Space partition build has been multi-threaded and other, geometry specif optimizations, have been implemented.
- Sampling in the ray tracing algorithm has been greatly improved. This means
- Subsurface scattering is 500% faster when combined with the path tracer.
- Multi-threading scalability have been improved for both the REYES rendering algorithm as well as in the path trace.
- Better multi-threading of texture reads. This can drastically improve render times when using a very large amount of texture files. We measured improvements of up to 25%.
- Rendering dense volume clouds (region with many interior shaders) is up to 250% faster.
- Point-cloud writing is now multi-threades.
- Shader compiler produces better code and is able to use up to 50% less varying variables as before. This translate to faster renders.
- Access to very large files have been improved by using memory mapped I/O when possible. This is especially useful when accessing large point-based files.
- Memory usage usage for very large polygonal meshes. We measured up to 4 time less memory used on some typical production scenes.
- tdlmake is two times faster.
i-display
We have been working to improve i-display so has been inproved to provide users with a more complete image viewing software. In this release i-display contains three important features:, it provides the following improvements:
- Thumbnails view.
- Sequence Image sequences and thumbnails as well as sequence management (deleting and moving images).
- AOV viewing.
- Image bookmarking.User Friendly UI
- Overhaul of the menu items and shortcuts to make i-display more consistent and easier to use and learn.
RenderMan Interface
- Implemented the Rtx Plug-in interface. Meaning that users can provide reading functionality for their own texture formats.
- Curves now accept ’
vertex’ width parameters (and not only ’varying’ as before).
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