Changelog

NSI – The Nodal Scene Interface

• Accelerate parsing of double precision floating points in the NSI stream.
• Introduced a special encoding for double precisions matrices for fast read.

3Delight Cloud

• 3Delight Display now shows a project and frame indicator when necessary.
• Completed jobs are now show in a greyed style in 3Delight Display.
• Each completed  job now displays the average number of cores used on completion.
• Fix a problem with 

3Delight

• Avoid sending incomplete buckets to 3Delight Display and files when stopping a render.
• Introducing the quantize() closure to OSL.  This allows quantization of local illumination for stylistic effects (e.g. toon shading).

Materials

• Fix Overlay blend mode in dlColorBland shader.

NSI – The Nodal Scene Interface

• Introducing a new instances node to efficiently describe a very large number of instances.


3Delight for Katana

• Vastly improved memory usage when using array instances. For large scene users will see a x4 improvement.
• The transform on the instance array location was not used. Now fixed.
• Removing and adding an instance array location in live render caused the sources to be permanently removed. Now fixed.

3Delight Display

• Fixed thumbnail view glitches with dual monitors.
• Optimized how images are transferred to 3Delight Display.

• Fix CPU usage overload during preview renders. 3Delight was taking all the available CPU power and this was making the machine sluggish on Windows.
• Fixed an instancing bug that could result in a crash when using instances of instances.
• Fixed a bug on Windows with automatic conversion of textures that are larger than 2GB. These textures were converted unnecessarily at each render.
• Fixed a problem with displacement on instances (displacement would appear as bump, #7378).

3Delight for Maya

• Fixed live render problems with nodes such as place3Dtexture. Adding such a node during an IPR  session was not working properly (#7052).
• Fixed a UI problem in the Render Settings: the  currently active resolution and aspect ratio were not shown.
• Silenced a warning about particleCloud shader.
• _3DFM_OSL_PATH and __3DFM_USER_OSL_PATH can now contain a list of paths separate by either a semi-colon or a colon. Using the semicolon is preferred on Windows as it allows for a user friendly editing using "Edit Environment Variable" functionality.
• The dlOpenVDBShape.filename attribute is now tagged as "usedAsFilename" so that it appears in Maya's File Path Editor.

Materials

• 3Delight's OpenVDB volume shader now allows density re-mapping using a ramp widget.  Both Maya and Katana benefit from this feature.

• Adding renderdl --callprocedurals to expand any NSI procedurals present in a give .nsi file.
• Fixed a crashbug that can occur if a render is aborted during the the initialization phase of the renderer. This mostly affected Maya renders (#7377),
• Implemented a substantial memory optimization for OpenVDB volume rendering. Memory savings are up to x8.
• Critical performance optimization for extremely large scenes (millions of primitives or instances). This problem affected startup time in such scenes.

3Delight Cloud

• Better behaviour of the "sync wheel" in 3Delight Display for very short renders.

3Delight for Maya

• Thanks the newly available displacement capabilities, the Material Viewer can now show displacements created by 3Delight shaders.
• Allow for custom export delegate for dependency nodes. 
• Support array of numeric attributes (including strings) on shading nodes.

3Delight for Katana

• Fixed live render crash.
• Support live render operations on the Render Working Set.

Materials

• Displacements can now be rendered directly from the surface material and are easily interchangeable with Bump mapping. This improves usability as it allows artist to develop the look of an asset in the most logical place: the surface shader. Creation of separate displacement nodes is not necessary both in Maya and Katana.

NSI – The Nodal Scene Interface

• Introducing a procedural API to NSI. An interesting design feature of this API is that NSI procedurals do not have to pre-link with any rendering  library, making NSI procedurals truly rendering agnostic.

• Optimized OSL optimization step for very large groups of shaders.
• Fixed bad values in CryptoMatte output when using half data types and floats.
• Fixed a major performance issue with instancing: scenes with millions of instances suffered from very long startup time.
• Fixed a bug with image intensity when using very low shading samples.
• Fixed the Blackman-Harris filter in 3Delight.
• The Relighting Multiplier AOV now contains proper alpha (for Prelit workflow).

• Overall improvements to the Prelit output. Some regions of the Relighting Multiplier AOV appeared too bright previous to this fix.

• Fixed a potentially serious performance problem on Window platform which could make renders several times slower than they should. The main symptom is a very low CPU usage when rendering larger scenes.
• Fixed a crash bug with displacement on Windows.
• Fixed stack trace output on Windows. The stack trace now contain more meaningful information, helping us pinpoint potential problems more rapidly.
• Reduced OpenVDB memory usage when the same OpenVDB is re-used.
• macOS packages are now properly signed. Installation won't mention an "unknown publisher" anymore.
• Floating point textures compress x2 better when optimized.
• 20% faster displacement in scenes with a lot of displacement. This also improves time to first pixel.
• Fixed normal interpolation along curves (it was not smooth).
• Fixed crashes and hangs at the end of renders affecting Windows packages.

• The path tracing algorithm can now deal with Prelit materials as described in: Prelit materials: light transport for live-action elements in production rendering

3Delight Cloud

• 3Delight Display window opens much earlier for cloud renders. This allow the "sync wheel" to show up earlier and provide more information to the user.
• 3Delight Cloud renderer in Maya is now visible to all users.

3Delight for Katana

• Always use local material for live render updates.
• Default filter is now Blackman-Harris as is to provides a nice balance between definition and softness in a variety of situations.
• Updating UI for Matte and Prelit attributes.
• Fixed dlSet AE template.
• Export arbitrary attribute with  pointcloud geometry.
• Added support for pointcloud geometry type.
• Export all arbitrary attribute along with geometry. Shaders can now access these attributes using the dlPrimitiveAttribute shading node.
• Added support for Curve primitives. Linear and Cubic (b-spline and camtull-clark) curves are supported.
• Fixed slowdown issues happening on Katana 3.1.
• Fixed rare exception on DlSettings creation on Windows machines.
• Added a Prelit attribute in the Visibility section as well as a RelightingMultiplier output variable.

3Delight for Maya

• Fixed handling of invisible objects feeding instancers.

• Updating UI for Matte and Prelit attributes.
• Allow a dlSet to be used as a group for Multi-Light output.
• It is now possible to render many frames simultaneously using 3Delight Cloud. This is possible by setting a frame range in the render settings and selecting 3Delight Cloud as a renderer. 
• Fixed OpenVDB crashes when a file can't be read.
• Fixed a crash bug when using OSL lens shaders.
• Batch renders are now using the horizontal bucket order instead of the spiral. This means that files save on disk will contain complete row of pixels early during the render process.
• Added ability to write custom OSL shaders that have message based parameter. For example, connecting a Maya camera to a string parameter now works (the shader will receive the name of the Camera's transform).
• Added Prelit workflow. This means Prelit attributes on objects and sets as well as a new AOV : "Relighting Multiplier".

3Delight Display

• Fixed renders that were sometimes sent to the wrong image.
• Improved light mixer performance when using many layers.
• Fix display problems when the device pixel ratio is not an integer (more usual for high resolution such as 4K displays).
• Fixed magnifier tool when looking outside of the image region.
• Fixed crash with OCIO profiles.
• Live renders from Maya now respect the crop window as a priority window.  In other words, this is the "follow mouse" feature for live renders.
• Fixed a performance issue on macOS when using sRGB color space.
• The mouse scrolls wheel can now be used to zoom in/out the image.
• A multi-touch trackpad can now be used with two fingers to pan the image and zoom in/out (pinch to zoom).
• Fixed Re-Render when renders are started from Katana.
  

Materials & Shaders

• Solved a problem with the bias parameter in SolidFractal shader.
• Introduced a projection node for camera and planar projections.
• Fix an orientation probled in place3dTexture.
• Fixed a problem with dlPrincipled when backfacing to the viewer.
• Fixed shadows from Glass shader when using scattering. Shadows appeared opaque.
• dlPrimitiveAttribute shading node can now read integers and float[4] attributes.
  
• The Glass shader is now significantly more powerful as it allows rendering of absorption and scattering of light inside the medium. This shader can now be used to render, e.g,  realistic volumes of water.
• Fixed IOR controls in Glass shader.
• Fixed a crash when using getattribute( "global:..." ) inside OSL shaders.

• Implemented multiple scattering in volumes.
• Fixed a crash during live renders when the main camera was deleted.
• Further improvements to displacement algorithm (mostly rare corner cases producing cracks).
• Improvement to 3Delight's geometric displacement algorithm. This important enhancement removes cracks due to difficult topology.

• Improved license management; 3Delight now communicates less often with the license server.

• Fixed many cases of cracks in displacements (mostly visible near screen edges (#7256)).
• Completion of recently introduced PTEX support. Quad polygonal meshes and non quad-polygons are now supported. 
  
• Fixed PTEX for clockwise winding meshes (currently affects KATANA only).
• Preserve user's 3delight.config file when re-installing the software on macOS packages.
• Fixed hard edged shadows appearing on polygonal surfaces.
• Automated texture optimization is now handled directly by 3Delight (see Handling of Textures) and offers better error reporting.
• UDIMs render about 8% faster.
• Fixed a performance issue in OpenVDB rendering. Scene with relatively large amount of textures (hundreds of megabytes) will have an acceleration between x2 and x3.

3Delight Cloud

• Fixed support of UDIMs on the cloud.
• Fixed 3Delight Cloud renders that sometimes could hang for very short renders.
• 30% faster syncing (upload) for models and shaders when using 3Delight Cloud.
• 30% faster startup (time to first pixel) when using 3Delight Cloud.
• Fixed rendering of VDB volumes on 3Delight Cloud when renders are started from a Windows platform.
• Fixed 3Delight Cloud issues when rendering high resolution images (eg. 4K) with several AOVs. The problem was sudden "jamming" of the application during rendering.

3Delight Display

• Improved performance when receiving high resolution renderings (>2K) and while in the Contact Sheet mode.
• Fixed Re-Render feature when renders are started from Maya.
• Changed hotkey for Zoom to Fit functionality to "=".
• Small presentation improvements in the Cloud tab (with links to the users' online account).
• Fixed the minute usage shown in the Cloud tab. It was underestimating the total usage.
• The "rendering" state in the cloud tab was sometimes overridden by "parsing". Fixed.
• The content of the sidebar can now be scrolled when the window is too small.
• When using the Loupe tool, a single click on the image freeze the Loupe view for a couple of seconds.
• Improved reliability of the progress indicator for Syncing stage when using 3Delight Cloud.

3Delight for Maya

• Added a mechanism for plug-ins to register attributes in the 3Delight section of Maya nodes.
• Fixed classification with auto-loaded shading nodes.
• Added multiple scattering option to Volume shader.
• Fixed dlAtmosphere and dlColorVariation look in the Channel Box editor.
• Improved presentation of 3Delight for Maya shading nodes in the Node Editor.
• Fixed issue where the Attribute Editor would show wrong attribute values after selecting a new node in some cases.
• Refined the UI of some of 3Delight for Maya shading nodes.
• Fixed a limitation with the Free 3Delight^NSI preventing simultaneous renders in different Maya views.

3Delight for Katana

• Added multiple scattering option to Volume shader.
• Fixed ROI. 

OSL Shaders

• Revisited the bump mapping implementation in Skin, Metal and Glass. It is now inline with Principled.
• Substance transparency is now a float.
• Lambert shaders now uses the same default values as Maya. 
• Added a "Open GL" normal map orientation option to 3Delight Principled material.
• Transparency has been replaced by single-channel Opacity in 3Delight Principled.

• Fixed timing statistics in relation to the "other" category.
• Fixed non-deterministic renders. Using different number of threads was not producing exactly the same image.
• Fixed visible intersection artefacts when using subdivision surfaces and sub surface.
• Introduced partial PTEX support.
• Fixed an issue in the rendering core affecting instances organised in hierarchies (#7212). This issue caused objects to be clipped.
• Faster render stops during the synchronisation phase of 3Delight Cloud renders.
• Corrected renderdl -h output.
• Improved accuracy of ray intersection to remove various "bias"  problems. (Issues #7179 and #7216).
• Removed various legacy include files from package.
• Fixed rendering of OpenVDB volumes with 3Delight Cloud.
• User friendly error messages for 3Delight Cloud error conditions.
• Fixed minor memory leak. 

3Delight Display

• Improved status reporting in the Cloud Rendering Activity dialog. Also, sequences are now listed as un-foldable items.
• More consistant alignment of values with using the picker (using the "P" key). 
• Better presentation of the cross in the Loupe tool. It is now precisely centered.
• Fixed support of .3DL color space file format. 
• Cloud renders now receive progress and statistics exactly as local renders.
• Added a progress indicator for 3Delight Cloud scene synchronisation.
• 3Delight Display has a new application icon and an updated About dialogue.
• Fixed various issues with the loupe tool, including the zoom factor to be consistent across screens of varying DPI (including Retina displays).
• The sign in condition is remembered upon exit and start of 3Delight Display.
  
• Added Sign In tab in 3Delight Display's sidebar. This will work only for users registered for beta testing 3Delight Cloud.

3Delight for Maya

• Removed the texture directory workspace option as this is now handled directly by 3Delight (see Handling of Textures).
• The workspace UI has been removed as it is now empty.
• 3Delight Glass now show transparency in the VP2 viewport. 
• Added a Volume AOV.
• Fixed 3Delight Display on Retina displays when started from Maya. The issue was causing the doubling of pixels.
• Fixed Abort button behaviour for Cloud renders. It was non-responsive and sometimes resulted in the application to crash.
• 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 shown at all.
• Improvements to the templates generated for auto-loaded OSL shaders.
• An NSI file export now has the same scene output as a batch render. This means frame buffer and overrides options are not exported in the NSI file.
• Fixed dlMetal presets (Presets menu in the Attribute Editor).
• Updated URLs for Help and updated About dialogue.
• Removed obsolete icons.

3Delight for Katana

• Removed the texture directory preference as this is now handled directly by 3Delight (see Handling of Textures).
• Added a volume AOV.

OLS Shaders

• Improved documentation for supported shaders.

• Added 3Delight Principled material. To become the standard material across all plug-ins.

• Added support for Volume AOV both in Atmosphere and OpenVDB shaders.
• Added 3Delight Car Paint and Random Material.
• Added Random Color utility shader.
• Added Flake 3D texture shader.
• Added a Facing Ratio utility shader.
• Added a Worley Noise and a Flake 3D Textures.

• 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.

  3Delight Material is being deprecated and replaced by 3Delight Principled. The later provides all the functionality provided by 3Delight Material, plus the ability to render metals, with less parameters and better usability (such as better parameter ranges, better naming, and better UI).

  The 3Delight Material is still part of the package for backward compatibility.

• 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.
• Fixed performance of displacement after a change in live render.
• 3Delight Display has a new Sidebar with a new Light Mixer UI and a new Loupe tool.

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).