ANN: 3Delight 8.5 and 3DFM 4.5
aghi...@gmail.com
3Delight 8.5 and 3Delight For Maya 4.5 are available for download at
www.3delight.com. Here is a list of the most important features and
improvements:
3Delight For Maya
* Introducing the 3Delight Relationship Editor. This new
user interface replaces the now deprecated Shader
Manager and Attribs Node Manager and makes it much
easier to view, assign and modify 3DELIGHT shaders and
attributes, in a centralized location. The usability
of shader and attribute collections is substantially
improved thanks to this same feature and one can
inspect, for each pass and at a glance, what
attributes and shaders are in effect.
* Introducing "Pass Templates" It is now possible to
save a given render pass as a template and create new
passes based on existing templates.
* A new "round edge" features enables automatic edge
rounding of sharp geometric features. Using this
feature, one can round edges at render time (such as a
table edge) instead of performing a costly
modeling-time operator.
* Added a “dicing camera” attribute in the geometry
attributes node (in the “Culling and Dicing”
section). This features is useful to stabilize popping
displacement during animation.
* Updates to HyperShade:
- The "useBackground" node is fully supported.
- Checker node with much better anti-aliasing.
- 3D texture nodes now use texture reference
objects if these are exported.
* Scene export has been optimized and runs twice as fast
for certain scenes.
* The following MEL bindings have been added: `RiBound',
`RiDetail', `RiDetailRange', `RiOrientation' and
`RiShadingInterpolation'.
3Delight Performance
* An overall speed increase of 20% is to be expected on
all scenes thanks to SSE2 optimizations.
* Ray-tracing speed on displaced surfaces has been
substantially improved. The increase can reach tenfold
with large displacement.
* Cubic curve primitives take up to 20% less memory and
can render up to 50% faster when using Ray-tracing.
* Improved performance of RIB reading on Windows to
match that of other operating systems.
* Procedurals generated through `RiProcRunProgram'
require much less peak memory, especially for very
large primitives.
Improvements to multi-process rendering include:
* Multi-machine rendering is fully supported on Windows
platforms.
* Baking 3D point-clouds using many machines is now
possible.
* "Ri Filters" are supported in multi-host rendering.
* Improved behaviour with unresponsive or crashing
rendering hosts.
Pipeline & API
* Array support has been added to the Ptc API. This also
means that `texture3d()' and `bake3d()' accept array
parameters.
* Helper functions have been added to the Display Driver
API.
Shader Compiler
* 3Delight now supports co-shaders (as per RSL 2.0) and
completes the implementation of shader objects.
Thanks,
-- aghiles