news

Hello,

3Delight 9.0 and 3Delight For Maya 5.0 are now available for download (from the download area).

Change log: http://www.3delight.com/en/modules/doku … _changelog

From the official release notes:

3DELIGHT 9.0 AND 3DELIGHT FOR MAYA 5.0
============================
December 2009

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 now supports the
          "irradiance shadingrate". Speedups with default settings
          are in the range of 200% to 300%.

        * 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.


Big thanks to everyone for helping us with this release!

  -- aghiles

Last edited by aghiles (2009-12-10 21:21:32)