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3Delight Changelog

What's new in 3Delight 10

Apr 23, 2012
  • Licensing:
  • From this release onwards, 3Delight Studio Pro will give users access to the
  • entire 3delight suit of products. This includes, 3delight command-lines
  • tools and libraries as well as Maya and Softimage plug-ins.
  • Performance:
  • The shading interpreter (the "virtual machine" which is responsible of shader
  • evaluation) is now using propetary just-in-time compilation technology which
  • translates RenderMan RSL 2.0 shaders into SSE2 machine code. This makes
  • the shader interpretation up to three times faster and gives a 30% speed
  • improvement on a typical beauty render.
  • Ray-tracing of occlusion and transmission rays has been greatly improved.
  • Speedups can go anywhere between 10% and 300%.
  • Ray-tracing of displacements has been optimized, speedups of up to 300% are expected.
  • Added automatic ray thresholding for improved performance on highly reflective/ refractive surfaces (for example, glass).
  • Improved performance of area lights when using the ‘illuminance’ sampling
  • mode. Acceleration can reach an order of magnitude with high sample counts
  • and deep ray levels.
  • Features:
  • A new point-based global illumination algorithm gives very high quality results and supports transparency, a first for this class of algorithms.
  • Added support for Ptextures.
  • Added support for multi-channel exrs. Writing such files doesn’t require the
  • installation of additional libraries anymore.
  • Per-frame shading for multi-segment motion-blur can greatly improve performance.
  • Point-cloud baking process produces a more even distribution of points and
  • the IO (reading and writing PTC files) has been multi-threaded.
  • Point-based occlusion() and indirectdiffuse() can receive a list of input files. An example usage is to separate static and dynamic elements for a more
  • efficient baking process.
  • Introducing dynamic output variables (using the new outputchannel()
  • shadeop). This unique feature enables shader writers to create output
  • variables on-the-fly inside shaders, lights and co-shaders. Along with
  • the previously available “display subsets”, this feature adds unparalleled
  • flexibility to layer-oriented rendering.
  • Added ability to use OpenEXR image files directly as textures. Additionally,
  • arbitrary “tags” can be passed to the OpenEXR display driver.
  • The ray-trace hider can now render in progressive mode. This makes it more
  • suitable for faster lighting work.
  • Multi-camera rendering can now shade grids once per camera to correctly
  • render view-dependent illumination such as reflections and specular highlights.
  • This feature, unique to 3Delight, can be enabled on a per-primitive basis using an attribute.
  • The renderer accepts a list of cameras to act as “dicing cameras”. For some
  • particular geometry, 3Delight will use the most suitable camera to perform the dicing. This feature can be used to properly bake geometry in preparation for a fly-through (by providing a number of dicing cameras along the fly-through path).
  • The subsurface scattering algorithm has been considerably improved: varying
  • absorption and scattering properties are now accepted, artifacts resulting
  • from low point density are fixed and memory usage has been cut by half.
  • Additionally, the pre-processing phase has been multi-threaded for a reduced
  • “time to first pixel”.
  • Ray-tracer’s building phase has been multi-threaded. Furthermore, the raytracer now supports features that were only available in REYES such as AOVs and matte objects.
  • Photon mapping quality has been greatly improved and photon maps are now % smaller. The photon-casting process has been multi-threaded. Speed
  • improvement is linear with the number of cores.
  • Texture mapping blur quality (during texture() calls) has been improved.
  • Additional improvements include better tessellation quality for subdivision
  • meshes, better non-raster oriented dicing and better distributions of rays for
  • ray-tracing functions.
  • Added ability to read and write TIFF textures larger than 4GB.
  • Shader Compiler:
  • Shader compilation speed has been improved for large shaders.
  • Improved RSL 2.0 support. This include better support for structures, dynamic
  • arrays, etc... .
  • Pipeline & APIs:
  • Introducing the 3Delight Gx API for evaluation of arbitrary geometry and
  • attached primitive variables. This very simple API allows the user to evaluate
  • any geometry supported by 3Delight (including subdivision surfaces).
  • Geometry:
  • can be evaluated both during an ongoing render or separately from any
  • rendering context. This makes 3Delight usable as a general purpose geometry evaluation library.
  • The 3Delight Sx API (for shader evaluation) has been improved and now
  • supports co-shaders. The API is also mutli-thread safe.

New in 3Delight 9.0 (Apr 23, 2012)

  • Delight 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.
  • Delight 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.

New in 3Delight 8.5 (Apr 23, 2012)

  • Delight 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;
  • Delight now supports co-shaders (as per RSL 2.0) and completes the implementationof shader classes.

New in 3Delight 8.0 (Apr 23, 2012)

  • Delight Performance:
  • Ray-tracing performance, especially for specular rays, has been significantly
  • improved.
  • Multi-threading performance has been further improved, in both memory use
  • and speed. 3Delight implements a true multi-threaded rendering core meaning
  • that all threads share as much memory as possible.
  • The photon casting algorithm has been multi-threaded.
  • Improved performance and memory use on subdivision surfaces with many
  • texture coordinates and vertex variables. Such geometry uses up to 5 times
  • less memory.
  • Atmosphere and interior shaders run much faster (up to an order of magnitude) and are controlled using an independent "volume shading rate".
  • Rendering Features:
  • Improved point-based occlusion and global illumination delivers higher quality results without loss of performance.
  • Photon mapping quality has been improved:
  • Photons can trigger surface evaluation for both caustics and color bleeding
  • to get correct reflectance and transmittance.
  • Caustics rendering quality has been improved.
  • It is now possible to cast photons from high dynamic range environment
  • maps.
  • Displacement shaders can run on vertices (instead of micro-polygons) for better ray-tracing efficiency. Additionally, many displacement shaders can be
  • assigned to a specific object and be evaluated sequentially.
  • Dicing cameras can be used to heal “pops” in displacements during animation.
  • Specular highlights from area ligths are correctly rendered (e.g. square area
  • lights will produce square shaped highlights).
  • Improved filtering of blurred cubic environment map lookups.
  • Edge detection has been further enhanced and outlines can now be composited
  • directly over an output variable.
  • Improved the accuracy of NURBS and conics.
  • Implemented RiScopedCoordinateSystem.
  • Pipeline:
  • Introducing a new shader evaluation API and library: Sx. This API exposes
  • methods to load and execute RenderMan shaders, in SIMD.
  • Shader Compiler:
  • Initital support of “Shader classes”.
  • Functions can have multiple exit points.
  • Tools:
  • tdlmake supports a new output file format: directory textures. A directory
  • texture (or “dirtex” in short), is a standard directory with all mipmaps saved
  • as TIFF files. This new texture format enables a more fine grained data
  • transfer between the server and the network cache.
  • ptcview can load and display photon map files.