Changelog

Materials

• Put 3Delight Car Paint parameters in meaningful categories.
• Improved 3Delight Material's Reflectance parameter range. Artist do not have to dial extremely small values to  obtain realistic results.  This will change the look of current renders. 

• Fixed an issue in the rendering core affecting instances organized in hierarchies (#7212). This issue caused objects to be clipped.
• Added Sign In tab in 3Delight Display's sidebar. This will work only for users registered for beta testing 3Delight Cloud.
• Faster render stops during the synchronization phase of 3Delight Cloud renders.
• Fixed wrong error message when stopping 3Delight Cloud renders.
• Correct rendredl -h output.

3Delight for Maya

• Fixed Material Viewer. Viewing and editing of both shaders and environments are supported. 
• All 3Delight^NSI error messages are now shown in the Script Editor instead of the terminal. This is particularly important on macOS and Windows where the terminal is not always available, making error messages not show at all.

OSL Shaders

• Added 3Delight Car Paint and Random Material.
• Added Random Color utility shader.
• Added Flake 3D texture shader.

• Further improvements on ray intersection bias. This solves #7179 and #7216.
• Fixed potential crash bug at the end of a 3Delight Cloud render.
• 3Delight Display has an updated and nicer About dialogue.

3Delight for Maya

• Improvements to the templates generated for auto-loaded OSL shaders.

OSL Shaders

• Added a Facing Ratio utility shader.
• Added a Worley Noise and a Flake 3D Textures.

• Added a progress indicator in 3Delight Display for 3Delight Cloud scene synchronization.
• Improve accuracy of ray intersection to remove various "bias"  problems.
• Fixed various issues with 3Delight Display lens tool.
• Removed various legacy include files from package.
• Fix rendering of OpenVDB volumes on 3Delight Cloud.

3Delight for Maya

• An NSI file export now has the same scene output as a batch render. This means frame buffer and overrides options are ignored (not included) in the NSI file.
• Fixed dlMetal presets (Presets menu in the Attribute Editor).

OSL Shaders

• OSL shaders can now declare a classification string. This is in preparation of an automated way to create Maya shading nodes directly from OSL shaders. This string has no effect in Katana. 

• User friendly error messages for 3Delight Cloud error conditions.
• 3Delight Display offers better performance and responsiveness for the 3Delight Cloud tab (sign in and activities). This is achieved by running all related operations in a separate thread.

• Fixed minor memory leak.
• Upon exit and reentry into 3Delight Display, the application will automatically sign-in to 3Delight Cloud account if user was signed in during the previous session.

3Delight for Maya

• Updated URLs for Help and updated About dialogue.
• Removed obsolete icons.

• 5% to 15% faster rendering, depending on the scene.
• Fixed a problem with refractions (GGX BRDF) causing noticeable darkening.
• Fixed an error on linux when using 3Delight from python.
• Update of the first passes of a live render are now much faster (up to x2 times faster).
• Faster time to first pixel for scenes with large emissive meshes. Scenes with millions of light sources could start as much as x10 times faster.
• Added support for rendering VDB velocity from three float grids instead of a vector grid.
• Fixed some live render crashes related to instances.
• Fixed VDB emission.
• Added new python binding to NSI.
• Fixed changes to camera shutter in live render.
• Improve performance of sky shader.
• Fix performance of displacement after a change in live render.

3Delight for Maya

• Improved VDB rendering speed in viewport.
• Add support for Maya's Light Editor. This includes ability to output a light group as a multi-light layer.
• Add Color Blend utility node. This node has a similar functionality to the Layer Shader.
• Better support of Light Linking. Light links to sets and shading groups are now supported.
• Fixed a problem with instanced objects when each instance has a different shader.
• Support Maya's built-in UDIM tag, including support for UDIM tiling on file node.
• Improved UI for all materials and shaders.

3Delight for Katana

• Instantaneous opening of VDB files, even large ones.
• Fixed a crash with some VDB files.
• Draw lights behind the selection too instead of in front (usability suggestion by Matthew Bennett).
• Multi-Threaded scene export and scene export optimization.
• Find OSL shaders without Katana Resources.
• Various fixes to XGen loading.
• Do not link with Katana's Python libraries anymore. Those are not needed.
• Implement automatic conversion of textures into TDLs (mip mapped tiff files).