ANN: 3Delight 9.0 and 3Delight For Maya 5.0
Aghiles
3Delight 9.0.0 and 3Delight For Maya 5.0 are available for download.
Here is a list of the most important improvements:
New Unlimited-threads License
* A new unlimited-threads license is now available for both the
3Delight standalone renderer and the 3Delight for Maya plug-in.
Clients that purchased the 8-thread license (and under yearly
support) are automatically upgraded to unlimited-threads. The
8-thread license will no longer be available, but the 4-threads
and
2-threads will continue to be available at a reduced pricing.
3Delight For Maya
* Introducing RIB Fragments: a user-friendly and flexible way of
creating and managing RIB archives. This feature is useful to
accelerate re-renders.
* The display drivers UI has been improved and simplified making it
easier to manage and visualize output variables (AOVs). "Primary
Displays" and "Secondary Displays" have been collapsed into the
same UI.
* Major performance improvements to the 3Delight Relationship Editor
which make it responsive even with very large scenes.
* Improved UI in the 3Delight Relationship Editor by using
distinctive icons for different shaders and attributes.
* Added support for many useful Hypershade nodes, most importantly:
misss shaders, car paint, metallic paint, glossy reflection and
glossy refraction.
* Scene parsing optimizations reduce RIB output time by 20%.
* It is now possible to render Shave and a Haircut nodes without
loading the 3dfmShave plug-in: 3Delight for Maya automatically
uses
Shave plug-in's RIB export function in that case.
* Maya sprite particles can now be rendered as "volumes" for correct
shadowing.
* Maya fluids implementation enters a beta stage. All current
limitations are listed in the user's manual in the Rendering
Guidelines chapter.
* Added Maya 2010 support and dropped Maya 8.0 support.
3Delight Features
* Introducing multi-camera rendering. This features enables the
output of many camera views from a single render. This
functionality is especially useful for stereo rendering as it
saves
rendering time.
* Improvements to point-based occlusion quality: concave corners are
rendered more accurately.
* The subsurface shadeop can proceed from a point-cloud file. This
can save a potentially costly pre-processing step when rendering
sequences.
* Billboard particles can now be rendered with a "thickness" for
correct shadow casting.
* Network caching, a feature unique to 3Delight, is now available on
Windows systems.
* Added detailed memory statistics to 3Delight to better track
memory
usage.
3Delight Performance
* Improved performance of occlusion() and indirectdiffuse() shadeops
when rendering dense meshes. Speedups can reach 200%.
* Improved multi-threading performance on scenes containing
procedural geometry (such as delayed read archives). Procedurals
are now allowed to execute in parallel which can lead to speed
improvements linear to the number of threads used.
* Accelerated point-based occlusion as it nows respected the
"irradiance shadingrate". Speedups with default settings are in
the
200%-300% range. Also improved quality of the occlusion in concave
corners.
* Improved multi-threading performance and memory consumption of
subsurface scattering algorithm.
* Improved deep shadow map creation performance. On large shadow
maps, performance increases linearly with the number of cores.
Temporary disk space usage during DSM creation has been reduced
three-folds.
* A new memory allocation scheme in the ray-tracer significantly
lowers memory consumption when rendering object: only one object
instance is kept in memory at any time. This feature is enabled
through a special variable.
* Improved point-cloud loading time. This has a positive performance
impact on effects such as point-based occlusion and color
bleeding.
Shader Compiler
* RSL 2.0 improvements including resizeable arrays, better supports
for shader classes and more efficient execution.
Pipeline & API
* Introducing the "VolumeTracer" API. This RSL plug-in allows user
to
easily write volume renderers.
* The "Sx" shader evaluation API is now embedded with the 3Delight
library (takes a single 3Delight license when used).
* Added "Implicit Field" plug-in support (extension to the
`RiBlobby'
primitive).
* Display drivers can now access 3Delight's deep frame buffer which
provides the list of visible surfaces for each pixel sample.
* Added new entries to the Ptc API and fixed compatibility issues.
* `RiNuCurves' now support vertex normals.
Thank you,
-- aghiles
www.3delight.com