Changelog

Come see us on 3Delight Discord to follow the development, ask us questions and get live feedback from the community.

3Delight Core

• Vastly improved sampling of instanced light sources. Users can now render unlimited numbers of lights while benefiting from the memory savings of instanced geometry.
• Fixed an issue with AOVs being mixed up when using a large number of layers.

3Delight for Houdini 

3Delight for Maya

• Fixed a delay in IPR updates when changing the timeline.

3Delight for Cinema4D

• Added missing .oso dlPrimitive shader.
• Fixed an error regarding multiple-defined parameters. While R23 is not supported yet, the project can now be built without errors.
• Fixed a bug related to the object's freeze transformation matrix.
• Added missing Depth of Field toggle. DOF can now be enabled from 3Delight Camera Tag.
• Fixed an error which was causing 3Delight Materials not build properly.
• Adjusted material's preview parameters to improve swatch update time.
• Fixed Spot Light intensity issue based on the chosen decay rate.

3Delight Display

• Fixed loading of EXRs with floating point layers. 

3Delight Core

• Fixed AOV names in EXR files. This affects the usual AOVS (Diffuse, Specular) and the light names when using the multi-light feature.

3Delight Cloud

• Fixed a bug which caused corruption in rendered images. This happened only when rendering simultaneously to file and 3Delight Display. 

3Delight for Houdini

• Fixed Display flag functionality for lights during IPR.
• Scene lights are no longer exported in the Stand-Ins.

3Delight for Cinema4D

• Fixed warning messages for non-existent parameters of 3Delight Shaders.
• Added new Output group of render settings.
• Changed output to file only, when exporting to NSI. It was outputting to 3Delight Display too.

Materials

• Toon material now have priorities for all outlines. Users can now decide which outline is on top of others.

3Delight for Houdini

• Updated to latest productions builds (18.0.597 and 18.5.351).
• Fixed "Lights to Render" toggle. 

3Delight fot Maya

• Removed 3Delight building dependencies from the plug-in. This is a work-in-progress work to allow moving to CMAKE and achieve a faster development rate.

Materials

• The reflection of DlStandard is now nearly identical to aiStandard.

3Delight Core

• Improved sampling of volumes and atmospheres. This removes fireflies without unnecessarily clamping the total perceived light.  
• Fixed a performance problem with procedural nodes.
• Fixed per-instance overrides of attributes on instances when a priority is applied (this NSI feature is only used in Houdini at the moment).

3Delight for Houdini

• ROP:  the Image Layers section has been simplified and a new Output section has been added. They work together for a simpler UI.

Materials

• Added volumetric refraction to dlStandard.
• Toon shader effects (both outlines and shading regions) can now be rendered though glass-like materials.
• Added a dlToonGlass shader which works well with dlToon and allows for coloured IOR-based transparency. 

3Delight Core

• License error messages moved from "Info" to "Error". This is particularly important for Maya as Info messages didn't show in the Script Editor.
• Fixed artifacts with shadows on polygonal objects.
• Fixed a crash in VDB rendering.

3Delight for Houdini

• Updated production build to 18.0.566 and added support for the 18.5 beta branch.
• Added missing toon AOVs.
• The installer now automatically downloads VS c++ dynamic library if needed.
• Added experimental scene view rendering mode.
  

3Delight for Katana

• Allow materials to be anywhere in the scene graph.
• Fixed 3Delight Cloud renders when using Monitor. Only 3Delight Display was working as a framebuffer.

3Delight for Cinema4D

• Add support for Custom AOVs. 
• Fixed tint dropdown for toon shader. The user will be able to use textures as well for this parameter.
• Fixed gradient export. This has to be adapted to 3Delight osl shader. (Linear, None and
• Fixed texture mapping for dlTexture shader.
• Updated Toon's shader width parameters (have values from 0 to 10) to adapt Cinema4D scaling. Although on OSL shader the same values as before are being used (0 to 0.1) to maintain the output logic and osl shader's limit.

Materials

• Added medulla control to Hair & Fur shader. This allows to render more realistic fur for creatures that have a solid core in each fur strand (wolves, dear, etc).
• Introducing dlStandard, a shader meant to mimic aiStandard and Autodesk Standard.
• Introducing refraction controls do dlPrincipled.
• Toon shader can now detect outlines on arbitrary textures and on object IDs. In addition, crease outline detection has been upgraded and now works with open creases (previously, only crease loops were outlined).
  
  

3Delight Core

• Fixed glitches when rendering curves in scenes with a small scale.
• Improved rendering of polygonal surfaces with self-shadowing features. This solves abrupt changes in illumination and unnatural shadows. 

3Delight Cloud

• Fixed a stall when rendering sequences from 3Delight for Houdini and from 3Delight for Maya on windows systems.
• Fixed a lag with the dashboard (in 3Delight Display) when rendering sequence on a very slow internet connection.
• Fixed rendering of fur when using the Yeti plug-in. 

3Delight Display

• Fixed a crash when stopping an IPR session.

3Delight for Cinema4D

• Added support for Multi-instances.

Materials

• Toon material can now detect edges on creases and on a geometry attribute called "outlineN". This adds extra flexibility to draw outlines on smooth surfaces.

3Delight Core

• Introducing a new multiple scattering algorithm for GGX surface. This algorithm fixes the high intensity regions at grazing angles and correctly renders color saturation at high roughness. 
• Fixed a performance issues with volume overrides. 
• Improved memory usage in the case of very large amount of curves. On a particularly heavy scene, the memory usage was improved twofold.
• Fixed rare crash when using toon shader.
• Added ability to output AOVs separately for direct and indirect components of the light path.
• Improved renderdl progress formatting when the output is redirected to a file.
• 10% performance improvements on Windows system.
• Fixed a crash in 3Delight outlines.

3Delight for Maya

• Added direct lighting components to the AOV list.
• Added a basic Stand-in import node. Stand-ins exported from Houdini can be rendered.

3Delight for Katana

• Added direct lighting components to the AOV list.
• NSI Archives are now loaded as multi-threaded procedurals. This can greatly improve performance of scenes with a lot of such geometry.

3Delight for Houdini

• Now runs on production build 18.0.532.
• Added support for Line lights.
• Added support for heightfields (Terrain FX).
• Fixed AOV naming problems with direct/indirect components.
• Fixed output of the N attribute on curves. Outputting this attribute will render curves as strands instead of cylinders.
• Fixed various IPR crashes introduced in 2.0.14. 
• The vdbVolume shader now has proper ranges for its parameters.
• Fixed rest/rnml attribute handling. This bug was introduced in 2.0.12.
• Don't include auxiliary variables in multi-light. These variables are the same for all lights.
• Added support for velocity blur to SOP-level and OBJ-level instancer. 
• Enabled IPR updates during playbar time drag.
• Added direct/indirect AOVs for diffuse and reflection components in the AOV selector. 
• Added a control for spot light radius. This allows rendering of softer shadow edges at a distance.
• Fixed a problem that caused lights to get dimmer behind glass and in volumes.
• Adding dlFacingRatio to utility shaders.
• Added support for timeline scrubbing in IPR.
• Added Stand-in export in the ROP. Stand-ins can be loaded using the object instancer and s@instancefile. Stand-ins include materials and can be rendered in Maya and Katana.
• Added support for camera's screen window parameters.
• Fixed projection maps on spot lights.
• Collapsed material groups for better layout.
• Multi-light export has been improved: lights can now be grouped together into one layer by placing them inside a bundle.
• Automatic creation of dlTerminal inside dlMaterialBuilder.
• Added 3Delight tab on instance object.
• Warned the user about mismatched build and run-time Houdini versions.
• Fixed SOP-level assignments with empty materials.
• Fixed file extension for deep EXR files (was wrongly named ".deepexr").

3Delight for Solaris

• Fixed macOS version, it was not rendering any geometry.
• Fixed a crash with the instancer. This fixes J Cube's Esper Room.
• Fixed support of disabled materials. 
• Implemented motion blur for all geometric primitives. This includes point instancers and instancers of instancers of ... .
• Added support for UsdSkel.
• Added support for primvars in point instancers.
• Added render quality settings (samples, ray depths) and object visibility settings.

3Delight for Cinema4D

• Added Stand-in export command.
• Added conversion of Cinema4D Material to 3Delight Material.
• Updated dlToon material UI for dlToon material and added support for drawing outlines (Silhouettes, Folds, Creases). Also added Physical layered link on this material (Can mix it with other materials).
• Added new AOVs for direct and indirect lighting.
• Updated light sources parameters value (Use float silder and some values have now Max or Min limit.)
• Fixed Export to NSI file command.
• Added Stand-in import node. Stand-ins exported from Maya and Houdini can be rendered. (Node scale must be adjusted since Cinema4D uses meters by default while Maya and Houdini use centimetres).
• Changed Multi-Scatter value of VDB's shader from checkbox to float value.
• Fixed Cinema4D crash when not finding the VDB directory provided.
• Added 3Delight Camera Projection type functionality.
• Fixed texture mapping for Gobo light filter.
• Updated the way of materials' assignment when creating them from the shelf.
• Added support for 3Delight Random Material.
• Added Light creation functionality for Area-Light types (square, circle etc.) on 3Delight Menu.
• Fixed a bug with IPR updates.
• Fixed Cinema4D crash when closing the project without aborting rendering.
  
• Fixed Interactive rendering for OpenVDB objects.
• Fixed issue regarding OpenVDB volume scaling (Volume size would not changing according to it's bounding box.)
• Changed Subsurface scale lower limit to 0 for dlPrincipled and dlSkin shader.
• Added 3Delight preferences menu Edit→Preferences→3Delight.
• Fixed Camera matching problem on Cinema4D Viewport.

Materials

• The Principled material now behaves properly at grazing angles.

3Delight Display

• Fixed toolbar customisation bug on macOS.
• Updated support for OCIO. This fixes many problems with color spaces and allows correct rendering of color spaces that have multiple LUTs.
  
  

3Delight for Houdini

• Fixed a bug with geo lights in IPR. They were not correctly rendering source geometry.
• OBJ-level instancer can now instance using the s@instance attribute (and using many different objects). This functionality was oftentimes broken.
• Fixed instancing and IPR when source geometry is invisible. This was a regression since 2.1.4.
• Fixed disappearing geometry problems with some simulations. This was caused by mismatching geometries in motion blur rendering. This fix will render the geometry without motion blur instead of not rendering at all. The right solutions for users is to use motion vectors in such simulations.
• Faster scene export when SOP-level material  assignment are used. This is particularly noticeable with large meshes and primitive attributes.
• Improved IPR: copying, renaming and duplicating objects is now supported.
• Added Casts Shadows parameter on OBJs.
• Added ability to disable atmosphere and switch volumes to single scattering in the Overrides section of the ROP.
• Fixed a crash during IPR when saving a scene.
• Started to link VOP's help button to 3Delight documentation. 
• Added Color Space selection to texture files.

3Delight for Katana

• Fixed ramp UIs in all affected shaders.

3Delight Display

• Fixed very long loading times when using large OCIO libraries (e.g. ACES 1.2.0). This was causing problems when launching renders from our plug-ins as 3Delight Display wouldn't open fast enough.

3Delight Core

• Important acceleration in multi-scatter volume rendering: the pre-pass is now at least x5 times faster and the main render is about 10% faster. This means that, depending on the scene, volumes can render up to x2 times faster.
• 3Delight now accepts  shader connections between incompatible OSL data types. 
• Improved quality of Toon shading. Some faint artifacts could appear when texturing toon regions.  
• Accelerated the Pre-Lit algorithm by x5 in high complexity scenes (e.g. fur and hair).
• Fixed quality issues with bump maps and normal maps (black spots).
• Fixed "speckles" when rendering deep refractions.
• Added  documentation for -cloud option to renderdl -h.

3Delight for Houdini

• Build against Houdini 18.0.460 and 17.5.460.
• Some temporary files for COPs support were deleted too soon. Fixed.
• vdbVolume now works in Material Builder.
• Shaders are now created in a smaller for factor.
• Added support for ROP scripts.
• Added support for motion vectors on curves.
• Added dlTerminal node to be used inside the Material Builder node.
• Avoid descending into TOPs, DOPs and SOPs to look for geo. This has a significant impact on scene parsing performance. This also fixes spurious simulations during scene parsing. 
• Improved shaders menu. 
• Fixed incandescence light.
• Fixed ROPnets when relative paths to objets were used.
• Fixed camera's crop: it was inverted in the vertical direction.
• Implemented geo lights.
• Added support for Disk particles:  particles with a N attribute attached will be considered as a disk.
• Fixed a visibility issue with OBJ instances: the instanced object can now be hidden without breaking the instancing.
• Including dlFloatToUV shader to be used alongside dlRamp. 

3Delight for Cinema4D

• Added 3Delight Texture Node (dlTexture)
• Added support of Sequence Render for OpenVDB and Texture node
• Placed 3Delight Material menu under root of Create menu in material manager.
• Added support for Cinema4D hair and instance object.
• Added Primitive Attribute shader for reading primvars.
• Fixed lightGroup crash-bug when no lights were added on the set upon its creation.
• Fixed rendering issue of instances generated by Cinema4D cloner object.
• Added support for shader connection to all attributes of Environment shader.

3Delight for Maya

• Added support for Maya 2020. Oldest support is now for Maya 2018.
• Added support for Anamorphic DoF through the Lens Squeeze Camera attribute.
• Fixed swatches rendering.
• Fixed UI of the DlToon shader.

3Delight Display

• Fixed background image rendering. Some images were not properly scaled.
• Improved thumbnail rendering performance.
• Fixed a (rare) crash happening on 3Delight Display launch. 

3Delight Core

• Added ability to render anamorphic DoF

3Delight for Houdini

• Implemented a much more evolved IPR mode. Users can now do most scene manipulation procedures (creating shaders, objects, connection, etc.)
• Hid the render mode menu in 3Delight Cloud ROP
• Added dlSolidRamp shader.
• Sequence renders on 3Delight Cloud are now tagged as batch instead of interactive renders. This affects cores usage as specified for the spending rates in the online cloud settings.

3Delight for Katana

• Fixed a Python exception.

3Delight for Maya

• Added support of the Lens Squeeze camera attribute. This allows to render anamorphic DoF.                                                                   

3Delight for Cinema4D

• Added missing 3Delight shading components and auxiliary variables of AOV Layers.
• Fixed light filters placement for Area Light an light normalization units.
• Added support to some of 3Delight shaders (Ramp Texture, Solid Ramp Texture, Box Noise Texture amd Triplanar)
• Added support for gradient parameters of 3Delight materials. (Only 3Delight shaders' gradient were supported)
• Added support for some of 3Delight materials (Toon Material, Layered Material where connection to other materials is supported)
• Implemented AOV export to non-multilayer files.
• Re-implemented JPG output with image layers. Now it works with automatic filename expansion.
• Added multilight file output, both multilayer and separate files. Also changed multilight UI to a single toggle to export all lights as multilight.
• Fixed faceset connection and outputting a message if no face is being selected.
• Updated 3Delight shelf. New materials and light sources are added.
• Fixed JPG output of multilight passes.
• Fixed a bug on cloud rendering regarding the upload of texture files.
• Added lightgroup functionality for multilight rendering.
• Added a default material (dlPrincipled) with default parameters attached to NSI root. All objects will now have it as a default shader, matching C4D workflow.
• Fixed a bug with scene traversal for nested generators.

3Delight Display

• Fixed a crash when stopping renders.
  

Materials

• Transparency is now properly handled in AOVs for all materials.
• Fixed a bug in dlUV shader tiling.

• Improved sampling quality and speed for non-quad area lights and lights that uses the "spread" parameter.
• Improved light sampling speed by about 5%.
• Detect 0 valued displacements. This could improve rendering speed in scenes where this occurs. In one production case, a x2.7 speed increase was observed.

3Delight for Solaris (hdNSI)

• Fixed materials. 
• Added support for Ramp parameters
• Added support for VDB Volumes.
  

3Delight for Houdini

• Built against Houdini 18.0.416 Production build.
• 3Delight parameters are now properly assigned to OBJs in subnets. As a side effect, this fixes various problems with Alembic cameras.
• Improved parameters presentation in OBJ UI.
• Fixed UI in the following nodes: dllRamp, vdbVolume and dlColorCorrection. 
• Added support for projection maps in spot lights.
• Vastly improved spot light sampling quality in addition to fixing a bug that made spot lights shine backwards.

3Delight for Katana

• User AOVs, defined in dlAOVGroup, are now listed in the AOV Selector.
• Removed the "Duplicate AOV" button. The current workflow has no need for such a feature.

3Delight for Cinema4D

• Fixed shader name for environment light (dlEnvironmentShape.oso → dlEnvironment.oso)
• Changed Render Settings layout. 3Delight Cloud has been removed as a separated render settings and instead it is now being added as an option of 3Delight renderer. Also the render command button was removed from render settings.
• Created a separated file for error handler implementation so it can be reused for both viewport and i-display renders.
• Brought back numeric edit fields for area light size which seems to be removed in the latest version.
• Fixed bug with two-sided area lights. Cylinder lights were not rendered correctly when two-sided is disabled.
• Removed temporary debug outputs which were used to test different parts of the plugin.
• Implemented custom material preview for 3Delight materials.
• Disabled 3Delight error messages for viewport rendering. Since the viewport rendering routing is also used for material preview, the error messages would constantly appear on the console as soon as one or more 3Delight materials were present in the scene.
• Fixed materials dropdown menu. Skin shader was added twice, whereas metal shader was missing.
• Improved loading speed of custom material preview.
• Implemented NSI export command.
• Changed the directory from where we access uvCoord osl shader (as the default one was in Maya plugin). This avoids the need to install the Maya plugin to access the shader on Cinema4D.

Materials

• dlRandomColors now works with ... colors! It previously needed a color connection. Connections are of course supported as well.

• Introducing a new IPR rendering algorithm, which is both faster and smoother. 
• Rendering speed of empty regions have been greatly improved. 

3Delight for Houdini

• The Multi-Light UI has been deprecated and replaced by a single toggle. There is a new grouping scheme that will automatically create light layers from any bundle that contains at least on light. Lights that are not in any bundle will be output in their own layer.  This change might generate Houdini warnings when loading older ROPs.
• Added a new light type: The Incandescent light.
  
• Ensured that OBJ nodes nested in objnets also receive 3Delight attributes.
• Fixed a major performance problem with motion blur when velocity vectors were used. 
• Fixed crashes when loading some of the shaders.
• Fixed default values for many of the shaders (Ramp, Box and Worley Noise).
• Added missing dlLayerMaterial to the list of shaders.

3Delight for Katana

• Added build date information on plug-in initialization.
• Implemented export arbitrary attributes on Curves.
• Implemented export Custom XGen attributes.

3Delight for Maya

• Added support for multiple UV set. This is accessible through the dlUV shader.

3Delight Display

• Fixed crash that happened when stopping an IPR session.

Shaders

• Added support for color grids in the vdbVolume shader. The color grid multiplies the scattering color in the shader.
• Added the dlUV shader to control various UV tiling and fitting parameters.

• Fixed a bug with SSS and live rendering. Firsts iterations of the live rendering were showing inconsistant colours.
• Spatial volume overrides now work when the camera is contained inside such volume.
• Got rid of a harmless, but annoying, automatic texture conversion error that reports a "bad magic number".
• Live rendering of displacements has been improved substantially. There was a very noticeable slowdown in many IPR manipulations  (e.g. camera movements) when displacements were present. This slowdown has been fixed. This fix affects all supported plug-ins.

3Delight for Houdini

• Implement OBJ-level instancer.
• Implement Scene Elements → Matte Object to tag objects as mattes.
• Improved export speed (and memory use) of NSI when VDBs are present. Export times can be as much as 10 times faster.
• Added support for "op:" textures (COP nodes).
• Fixed motion-blur problems related to instances.
• Fixed detail material assignments on instances.
• Added the necessary flags to the vdbVolume VOP so it is correctly listed as a material in Houdini UI.
• Default velocity grid in the vdbVolume shader has been changed to "vel".
• Ignore Speed Boost Overrides when exporting NSI files.
• Added missing motion blur attributes to Camera objects.
• Improved usability of the Select ROP tool: when only one ROP is present, select it automatically. If there are no ROPs, create one.
• Multi-Light light selection now searches for VDBs at the current time. 

3Delight for Maya

• Fixed motion blur on Yeti nodes.
• Fixed Image Sequence for File and dlTexture Node.

3Delight for Katana

• Fixed XGen support on Windows with Maya 2019.

3Delight Display

• Removed annoying suffix that was added automatically to file names, regardless of usefulness. 
• Added an in-application "stay on top" option for 3Delight Display's main window (menu Window).
  
• "Loop" play mode is now remembered as a preference between sessions (menu Navigate > Loop).
  

Shaders

• Fixed default color parameter of the dlTexture shader. It was not working properly when texture was not specified. It was just putting the default colour outside of the UV range.
• dlTexture: added a Default Color parameter. The colour is used when outside of the UV range or when there is no texture specified.
• dlToon now has a "Physical" parameter in which any of the physical plausible materials (Principled, Metal, ...) can be plugged to obtain a mixed look of toon and physically based rendering.

• Fixed a source of cracking when using displacement shaders.
• Added motion vector AOV. Exporting this AOV automatically removes motion from the scene (so that applying the motion vector AOV to the rendered image produces the right result).
• Alpha channel has been added to the Toon outlines AOV.

3Delight for Houdini

• Starting with this version, the plug-in is only compatible with 18.0.391 production build an up.
• Fixed memory leak. Rendering a scene was holding resources permanently. 
• Added support for creased edges (using the creaseweight attribute).
• 3Delight Cloud renders now show correct frame numbers and project names in 3Delight Cloud Dashboard and Transaction History.
• All instance attributes are now properly exported, not only Cd.
• SOP-level material assignments are now working in instances.
• Removed useless Maya OSL nodes. 
• Fixed material assignments with relative paths.
• Added the following OpenGL attributes to 3Delight materials: ogl_diff_rough, ogl_metallic, ogl_emit_intensity, ogl_spec_model.
• Improved support for Ramps: the default values are now properly read. This affects shaders such as Worley Noise and Toon.

3Delight for Katana

• Fixed the types of output variables P and N. They were declared as colors instead of points/normals.

• Added support for smoothcreasecorners attribute on meshes. Allows to disable 3Delight's advanced smoothing algorithm.

3Delight for Maya

• Added light source icons to the toolbar. Creating light sources from 3Delight's toolbar will set quadratic decay automatically. 

3Delight Display

• Fixed a crash when loading images larger than 4GB.

Shaders

• dlToon shader has now a Physical plug in which a PBR material such as Principled can be plugged. This allows mixing Toon and PBR-like effects while retaining the outlines.
• Added a Default Color parameter to dlTexture. It allows specifying a constant color when no texture is provided.
• dlDistanceFade shader, which is meant to change the size of the outlines in the dlToon material depending on distances, now can change the width of the outline relative to field of view. It means that zooming in on outlines will make them appear larger.
• Removed the Width Fade parameter from the UI. That parameter is meat to be plugged with dlDistanceFade, not modified in the dlToon shader itself.
• VDB Volume shader now has a Multiscatter slider instead of a checkbox. This slider controls how deep the light penetrates inside the volume but doesn't affect reflectiveness.
• Toon shader now have a "Region" outlining option. It automatically outlines regions enclosed by hard edges.
• Improved Height-Blending in Tri-Planar shader.

• Added manifest side car to CryptoMatte files.
• In all packages, exporting CryptoMatte ID now automatically enables CryptoMatte (the checkbox enabling the feature have been removed).
• Fixed an IPR bug: in very rare cases, a transform change was ignored by the renderer.
• Fixed problems with environment edits in Environments.
• Fixed reflection ray depth counts: internal reflections (inside glass for example) will count towards refraction depth. This allows artists to just change refraction depth without increasing the reflection depth of the scene.
• Slightly more efficient processing of empty space during rendering.
• Improved multi-threading in the display system.
• Fixed a problem with negative values in OSL shaders. Plugging negative values into shading components (such as diffuse and specular) was producing wrong images.

3Delight for Houdini

• Added support for the Display flag in Scene Elements section of the ROP.
• Fixed toolbar placement and added a Select ROP tool.
• Fixed various problems with 3Delight properties creations. 
• Diffuse color in 3Delight material now affect the OpenGL view.
• Exporting animations to NSI files takes much less space now as static geometries are exported only once for the entire sequence.
• NSI files are now output in a binary format that takes less space than the ASCII encoding.
• Avoid recursing into SOP primitives when building NSI scene. This was causing useless (and harmless) warnings.
• Instancing of many primitives at once is now supported.
• Added support for dlTexture node. This node automatically reads texture coordinates and uses them to access the texture file. (No further uv connections are necessary.)
• Added support for @pscale attribute on particles.

3Delight for Katana

• Work in progress for the 3Delight Toon workflow and Toon Shading, including: new Toon AOVs. Outlines on AOVs can now be created using the dlAOVGroup supertool.

3Delight for Maya

• Fixed export of Nref attribute (normal reference).

3Delight for Houdini

• Added a shelve icon to create 3Delight for Houdini ROPs
• Added support for "rest" geometry. 
• Added all 3Delight Shaders to the package.
• Fixed a crash with cameras not having a Render SOP.
• Added support for "Cd" attribute on instances.
• Added missing "Relighting Multiplier" and "Relighting Reference" AOVs. Those are needed for the Prelit Workflow.
• Fixed a potential crash with motion blur (corner case).
• Fixed a crash with the AOVs dialogue. 
• Added support for Velocity blur on particles ans meshes.
• Made the plug-in compatible with all 18.x Houdini versions.
• Fixed another OBJ inheritance problem with sub-components.
• Added a 3Delight Shelve toolbar.
• Now using lower render priority when rendering using Houdini UI.
• Added labels with useful Houdini and 3Delight version numbers in Debug tab.
• Added version comments to the NSI stream in export mode.
• Added spread parameter to disk lights too.
• Added 3Delight-specific parameters to environment lights.
• Fixed a problem with certain kind of hierarchies.
• Disabled frame buffer output in export mode.
• Ignore Display flag; use Objects to Render instead.
• Completed Spatial Overrides feature.
• Implemented all object visibility flags (i.e. "Render Stats").

Materials and Shaders

• TriPlanar node has new tile removal feature to remove the repetitive patterns generally appearing in tiled textures.

Materials

• Added dlFloatToColor and dlFloatBlend utility node
• Made dlTriplanar work well with displacement maps.
• Added dlRamp node.
• Fixed a problem with the geometry of the spot light casting shadows on objects. This only showed when the radius of the spot light was large enough.

• Fixed visual glitches rendering of large curves.
• Fixed crash in long NSI curves with many segments.
• 3Delight will not attempt to auto-convert empty texture files during rendering.
• Improved sampling of very narrow spot lights in volumes.
• Improved light sampling in cases of thin and long area lights.
• Fixed a glitch with the GGX BRDF when index of refraction = 1.
• VDB motion vectors grid can now be of different resolution than the density grid.
• Improved performance of the first passes in live rendering when subdivisions and displacements are present. This can improve the speed of these passes by a factor of 2.
• Ignoring badly specified "ids" to point particles. This fixes a problem with our integration of Multiverse.

3Delight for Houdini

• Implemented primitive-level material assignments.
• VDB volume were exported many times for VDBs with multiple grids. This was causing wrong and slower renders.
• Added 3Delight properties to newly created Lights.
• Fixed a problem with 3Delight light properties appearing in the wrong location.
• Fixed erroneous export of the width attribute on curves.
• Fixed crashes with sequence rendering.
• Stopped render when exiting Houdini. This was causing a crash.
• Added missing 3Delight's "Prelit" parameter to lights.
• Disabled the IPR toggle in export mode, since it's going to be ignored.
• Fixed build for Houdini 17.5.
• Added a user friendly "Attribute Read" node that can read any Houdini attribute (point, vertex, primitive, detail).
• The "Render" button is renamed to "Abort" during a render. Pressing "Abort" stops the render.
• The "Render" button is renamed to "Export" when a user chooses to export an NSI instead of rendering.
• Fixed crashes when stopping a sequence render.
• Don't include 3Delight Display "feedback data" in exported NSI files. That information is only meaningful in Previews renders. NSI files exported with this information could hang indefinitely when rendered using renderdl.
• Better UI presentation in the Debug section.
• dlPrimitiveAttribute now appears in the list of Houdini shaders.
• Fixed dlPrimitiveAttribute. Users can now fetch geometry attributes and use them in a VOP context.
• 3Delight surface shaders are now properly tagged as Houdini materials. This allows for proper material selection in various widgets.
• vdbVolume shader now has a functioning "Grids" tab. 
• Implemented velocity scale in the vdbShader.
• VDB file nodes now appear as a light in the Multi-Light section. This means that emission coming from effects such as fire and explosions can be separated in their own channel.
• Live rendering sessions can now be started from 3Delight Display.
• Added support for 3Delight Display's crop region. Note that in a live session, the crop region becomes a "region of interest" and can be resized or move interactively (offering a functionality similar to the "follow mouse" feature in similar software).
• Fixed output of Houdini point attributes. This includes UVs and Normals.
• Completed work on 3Delight's camera attributes. This includes depth of field attributes and various projection attributes. 
• Added support for smooth curves.
• Fixed texture inversion in the "t" axis.
• Preview renders now use a circular bucket pattern.
• Installation is now done with the use of Houdini's packages feature instead of relying on "houdini.env". Any traces of 3Delight in that file, done is previous installations, should be discarded.

3Delight for Maya

• Added Lights and Materials to the 3Delight Menu.
• Fixed crash when removing an object in IPR.
• Added Material selection to the 3Delight Menu.
• Added support for constant radius in particles.
• UI auto generation for OSL shaders now supports the ram widget. 
• Improved the file sequence UI in the VDB node.
• Added support of constant particle radius.
• Put a soft min/max, instead of a hard min/max, on light's exposure attribute.
• Renamed "Volume Overrides" to "Spatial Overrides". In addition, shapes tagged as spatial overrides now draw in wireframe.
  

3Delight Display

• Fixed loading of EXRs.

Materials

• Added a "Color to Float" attribute to all packages.
• The Color Variation node now works on particles who have the "id" attribute.

• Rendering of empty space is x2 times faster.
• Fixed live rendering crashes when deleting shaders.
• Implemented support for disappearing particles during a motion range.
• Fixed visible glitches at the center of particles.
• Fixed problems with the quantize() closure and transparent rays (toon shading). 
• OpenVDBs now take 10 times less memory when multi-scatter is enabled. This is mostly apparent when rendering large amount of VDBs (e.g. a cloud cover). This also makes such renders 10-15% faster.
• OSL's getattribute() now has a looser type checking. For examples, vector primitive variables can be read into a color shader variable.
• Introduced experimental support for volumes in pre-lit scenes.
• Substantially improved sampling of spot lights. This also improved the sampling of the "focus" parameter. This also affects sampling of such features inside volumes.
• Better sampling of disks. This also affects sampling such primitives inside volumes.
• The GGX BRDF now does multi-scattering for the reflection component. This means that rough surfaces will not exhibit darkening anymore.
• Fixed quality problems with SSS.
• Introducing Attribute Bounds. A powerful feature to assign attributes to a region of 3D space.

3Delight for Maya

• Fixed Yeti support.
• Fixed connection of float attributes into float[2] attributes in shading networks.
• Proper handling of partially connected uvCoord attribute.
• Added support for per-face material assignments.
• PFX geometry now renders using smooth curves by default.

3Delight for Katana

• Added support for arbitrary attributes on instance array.
• Improve primitive attribute support (point attributes and array attributes were not working properly).
• Use the finalizeRuntime() call with the aim of improving memory usage.
• Make preview render without DlSettings to have alpha.
• Fixed DlOpenVDB behavior with filename expression.
• Don't error if Network Material node is not found.

3Delight for Houdini

• Added support for both deformation and transformation blur.
• Added the Render Polygon as Subdivision on geometry. This allows for rendering polygons as smooth subdivision surfaces. 
• Debug: allow exporting of NSI stream to a file instead of just to stdout.
• Added depth of field parameters, and supporting functionality, to Houdini's camera. 
• Added focus and contributions attributes to Houdini lights.
• Added support for motion blurred particles.
• Introducing (as part of the 3Delight package) an early beta version of our upcoming 3Delight for Houdini. It will work with both Houdini 17.5 and Houdini 18.0. 
• VOPs  can now be defined in a matnet SOP.
• Improve scene parsing performance.
• Added support for subdivision meshes.
• Fixed normals computation.
• Added support for relative paths in Objects to Render and Lights to Render.
• Added support for light's Render Light Geometry.
• Work-in-Progress live rendering allows for modification of lights, cameras and shader parameters.
• Added support for tube lights.
• Added support for light area scale.
• The plug-in now honours the display flag.

3Delight Cloud

• Through improved efficiency, batch rendering costs is reduced by up to 50%. For reference, HD frames from this movie were rendered at about 40 cents per frame (5-10 minutes render time using 100 cores on average).
• Faster (i.e. cheaper) start times on very large assets (such as the Moana asset).
• Milestone: in the past two weeks, clients used more than 500,000 cores to render thousands of production images.
• Improved general stability of the system, especially during sequence rendering.
• Fixed performance problems on Windows during Sync (computer could become unresponsive because of sustained load). 

3Delight Display

• Fixed core count statistics in 3Delight Cloud dashboard.
• Allow reading of incomplete EXR files.
• Fixed issues with the Mixer tool. One problem made it difficult to obtain the same image after a re-render.

Materials

• Accelerated renders of 3Delight Glass material with embedded volumes. Such setups will render up to 35% faster. 
• Added Solid Ramp 3D texture.
• Added Color Blend Multi utility nodes to blend up to 8 materials together. 
• Added Tri-Planar shader.
  

Hydra Delegate (hdNSI)

• Use latest USD release.
• Implement cylindrical lights.
• Improve USD Preview Material.
• Add texture support to Dome Light.
• Make lights invisible to camera.

• Minor fix to the GGX BRDF when both reflection and refraction are used at the same time (does not affect standard 3Delight materials).
• Improved random walk SSS on sharp geometric details. 

• Introducing a new random walk subsurface scattering algorithm. The algorithm allows for richer rendition of the subsurface effect and replaces the now deprecated dipole approximation and all its variants. To switch back to the old dipole approximation algorithm, please define the following variable: RANDOMWALK_SSS 0

• Fixed a crash bug with NSI Procedurals. 

3Delight Cloud

• Fixed missing buckets problems.
• Fixed TGA texture support. 
• Fixed problems when rendering scenes with duplicated OpenVDB files.

3Delight for Maya

• Making PFXs smooth curves by default.
• Fixed the Viewport2.0 rendering of 3Delight shaders.

3Delight for Katana

• Fix DlOpenVDB behaviour with filename expression. 
• Don't create a NetworkMaterial node inside a ShadingNode when using the 'S' 3Delight menu (when creating new shading nodes).

3Delight Display

• Improved reading of EXR files (EXRs with non standard channel naming were not read properly).

Materials

• Principled material now uses the new subsurface algorithm. 

• Improved time to first pixel in many scenarios:
  • Significantly improved startup times when a very large amount of textures is present. For a large asset with 2000 textures we reduced the time to first pixel by 20%.
  • Improved the NSI API for multi-threading operation. This will positively affect the time to first pixel of multi-threaded exporters such as Katana. An improvement of 20%-50% is to be expected for multi-threaded exporters that can saturate the NSI API.
  • Fixed startup time in multi-camera renders which contained a large amount of instances. This problem was causing important slowdowns in multi-camera renders. After this fix, there is no difference in time to first pixel between single camera and multi-camera renders.
    
• Cubic curves are now rendered smooth to sub-pixel accuracy. 
• Fixed a corner case crash with subdivision surfaces.

The Nodal Scene Interface

• Introducing the "procedural" node for dynamic loading of procedurals in a multi-threaded fashion.
• Adding a public API to query OSL shaders (ShaderQuery.h). This allows application linking with 3Delight to query OSL shaders without the need to link with the OSL libraries. 

3Delight Cloud

• PTEX textures are now efficiently rendered on the cloud.
• Optimized upload of assets. Large scene can see a x2 improvement in initial scene synchronization.
• Optimization of scene loading and initialization significantly reduces the cloud renders cost for large assets. On Disney's Moana asset we see 30% price drops on batch renders a 50% price drops on interactive renders.
• Optimized thread usage on sustained syncing tasks. This was causing some machines to be non-responsive.
• Fixed a bug where renders wouldn't receive all the buckets even if the render is "completed".

3Delight Display

• The Thumbnail View is now standard Qt widget. This adds some free features such as "rubber band scrolling" and better Drag & Drop.
• Improved design and content displayed in the image info's "Stats" tab.

3Delight for Maya

• Added  a complete and easy to use Custom AOV system.
• 3Delight Principled and 3Delight Metal materials now have a good VP2 shading.

3Delight for Katana

• Disallow creation of shading nodes in locked groups.
• 3Delight Display now properly communicates colors to Katana when using the Light Mixer Tool.

• Fixed UV interpolation problems on seams of subdivision surfaces. 
• Made the sampling pattern (for anti-aliasing) varying in time. This is the best behaviour for most scenarios (animation, stereo rendering, etc).
• Improved multithreaded performance on light scenes (up to 5%).

3Delight Cloud

• Added documentation with performance measurements - see Cloud Rendering Speed.
• In 3Delight Display, the sync progress shown in the image view is now synchronized accurately with the progress shown in the dashboard.
• Fixed a potential problem with Abort renders (jobs wouldn't abort on rare occasions).
• Fixed a hanging problem with cloud renders started by renderdl on Linux systems.
• Improved statistics stored with the image: texture statistics are now shown properly and CPU time matches closely the 24-core minutes charge.
• Project name now shows correctly for sequences on the 3Delight Cloud dashboard (3Delight Display).
• Fixed a problem where 3Delight will not receive the image correctly after scene synchronization (the Sync wheel would hang until user stops the render).

3Delight for Maya

• Added a user friendly AOV system. Artists can now output matte and texture AOVs easily.
• Fixed a crash bug in sequence rendering.
• Optimized Environment node drawing. 
• Added support for Texture Reference objects (#7338).

3Delight for Katana

• Scene parsing is now fully multi-threaded. Speed improvements are scene dependent; simpler scenes gaining 30% and larger ones parsing up to x4 times faster.
• 3Delight Cloud is now available out-of-the-box in Foundry's Katana (through an option in the preference dialog). It allows artists to launch interactive renders on the cloud (Batch not yet supported).
• Connect shaders to terminals in NetworkMaterialGroup (in Katana 3.2 and higher).

Materials

• Fixed a problem with the glass shader when the camera is inside the volume defined by the enclosing geometry. In some situations the volume scattering simulation would disappear. 
• Fixed soft max and hard max in Worley Noise (UI improvement).
• The White Hair parameter in the Hair & Fur shader now works on Dye color too. It was previously only applied to color produced by melanin levels.
• Made a slight optimization in the Hair & Fur (5%).
  
  

• Fixed 3Delight's depth output. It was incorrect in live rendering as well as in Multi-Camera rendering.
• Prelit renders now produce a "relighting_reference" AOV which contains all the elements together.  These AOVs are accessible in both Katana's and Maya's AOV Selector.
• Fixed bugs in Prelit renders which made some surfaces appear brighter than they should.
• Faster Prelit renders by a factor of x2.
• Fixed crashes with 3Delight's automatic tangents generation. This affected assets that used anisotropic materials.
• Improve quality of tangents generated by 3Delight.
• Fixed automatic texture conversion for textures lying on Samba mounts. This affected Linux systems only.
• Fixed a memory leak. The leak was too small to cause any real issues.
• Fixed crashes in 3Delight's OSL getattribute() implementation.
• Fixed the Z output (AOV). It was showing a wrong uniform value. 
• A more powerful quantize() closure now accepts separate color data for each auxiliary AOV. Needed for the infinite number of controls desired in the toon shader. The major downside is this uses more memory now. But we can now have separate quantized colors for each detected outline.
• Better alpha on outlines.

3Delight Cloud

• Fixed problems with memory consumption during the Sync phase.
• Improved overall performance when rendering long sequences. 
• Fixed crashes with multi-threaded scene export in Katana.
• Improved upload speeds during the Syncing stage. Transfers can go as much as x10 times faster. 

3Delight for Maya

• Now showing the 3Delight -> AOV section in the Hypershade. It is now possible to add AOVs that output attributes set on objects. AOVs are shown automatically in the AOV Selector.
• Fixes to array connections in HyperShade now allows artists to connect to color arrays (e.g. Ramp shader).

3Delight for Katana

• Added Multi-Camera functionality. This allows artists to render multiple-views simultaneously.
• Fixed filename tags in DlSettings. The <light> tag was not functional for example.

Materials

• Improved Hair shader Specular parameter behaviour: it is now  more linear across the entire range.
• Implemented gettextureinfo("exists").
• plusMinusAverage (from Maya) is now supported for floating point input/output.

• Rendered DeepEXR files now contain 3Delight statistics.
• quantize() closure can now output quantized AOV components as well (specular, diffuse, etc.)
• NSI objects can now be tagged as contributing or not to the quantize() closure.
• 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).
• Fixed 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).
• 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

• Fixed a problem with sequence rendering that stopped image rendering.
• 3Delight Display's Cloud Dashboard now shows a project and frame indicator when necessary.
• 3Delight Display's Cloud Dashboard now shows completed renders in a subdued shade.
• 3Delight Display's Cloud Dashboard now shows the average number of cores used for completed renders.
• Better behaviour of the "sync wheel" in 3Delight Display for very short renders.
  

3Delight for Maya

• Fixed a crash in Material Viewer when modifying shader parameters.
• Fixed a problem with Material Viewer that made objects appear black.  
• Introducing distortion capabilities to the camera.
• The quantize() closure now accepts an array of up to 8 points to specify the quantize regions.
• Improved OSL's concat() function performance (x20 faster).
• Fixed a problem with custom plug-in registration.
• Fixed live render problems with nodes such as place3Dtexture. Adding such a node during a live rendering  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.
• Thanks to 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

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

NSI – The Nodal Scene Interface

• Faster parsing of double precision floating points in the NSI stream.
• Introduced a special encoding for double precisions matrices for fast read.
• Introducing a new instances node to efficiently describe a very large number of instances.

Materials

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

3Delight Display

• The i-display  command now accepts the -metadata flag to print any metadata attached to images rendered with 3Delight. For now, this amounts to rendering statistics.
• Fixed thumbnail view glitches with dual monitors.

• Optimized how images are transferred to 3Delight Display.

  This release contains a 3Delight Display which is incompatible with previous packages.

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 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 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 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.
• Introducing PreLit workflow to easily integrate real footage into VFX shots. 
• 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 3Delight Cloud Dashboard 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).