New Features of RELIGHT from The Bakery

RELIGHT - Version 1.1.6

This section lists the changes made since version 1.1.5.5.

New nodes /commands

• New Material Velvet, specialized for Velvet / Silk shaders.
• New Material Glass, specialized for Glass / Water shaders (with physical parameters).
• New Light Global_illum_rt, computes global illumination using raytracing (instead of point clouds)
• New Light Environment_rt, computes environment-lighting (for image-based lighting) using raytracing (instead of point clouds)
• New Light Switch, switches between 2 lights depending on a condition
• New Tessellator Realflow, reads bin geometries exported by realflow.
• New compositing node Contour, does contour edge-detection, for example for toon shading.
• New command geom2uv_area_distortion, generates a scalar texture image encoding the distortion between areas in UV space and the standard 3D world space. The output image is computed in a way that, when bound to a density attribute, it makes the resulting distribution more uniform while trying to keep the density globally unchanged.
• New command uv_viewer, allows to visualize the UVs of a Gop
• New command uv_bake, allows to bake the result of a shading in a UV texture
• New command ptx_bake, allows to bake the result of a shading in a PTEX texture

Export from 3d applications

• Simplifications in the export, concerning the exported vizgroups (now only 2 vizgroups are exported : viz_materials and viz_render)
• Sub-assets folders are simpler now, and do not contain the full AssetName of each sub-asset.
• Improvements in Alembic Export :
  • Fur is exported from Maya
  • Multi-UVs are exported (using alembic custom datas)
  • Motion vectors are exported (using alembic custom datas)
  • When exporting a shot, the original alembic file is referenced, to keep the same benefits as using Gops + Point caches
• The full name of Maya objects in the scene are exported in the extra-attribute "ui_path", so that the Hierarchy View in Path mode shows the same hierarchy as in Maya

UI

• New Display mode Path (set by default) in the Hierarchy view, displays a hierarchy based on object's extra-attribute "ui_path". By default, the hierarchy is determined by each object's class. It is possible to drag and drop the objects in the hierarchy view to modify the UI Path.
• New Window LightSet_Editor, displays the current state of the light sets in the scene.
• Material Picking in the 3d view, selects the picked material (in current Vizgroup)
• Right-clicking in the 3d view displays a contextual menu with several actions (assign material, assign displacement, invert normals, create camera from point of view, etc...)
• Middle-click in the button containing the name of each window toggles to the previously displayed window
• Array attributes can now be re-ordered from the array attribute editor
• In 3d view, the menu "Vizgroup" now filters the vizgroups by their referenced scene's prefix
• It is possible to snap any object to another one in the 3d view (see 3d view's UI documentation for more details)

New features

• It is now possible to save a Lighting Scenario, that stores the list of visible lights for each light set. These scenarios are stored in the lightset's extra-attributes, and can be saved/loaded by the menus Edit->Save/load/remove lighting scenario
• When right-clicking on a GOP Tessellator, UV Map Viewer displays the geometry's UVs.
• From 3d view, it is now possible to save selection as Gop / Fur (useful for instanced geometries, or for procedural ones).
• New attribute invisible_primitives in Tessellator, constains a list of primitives indices to be hidden (a primitive can be a quad, a triangle, a patch, or a hair strand).
• Added menu Help->Enable Profiling and Help->Display Memory Usage to get details about the memory allocated by the application
• In the Render view's Render Settings, flag Release Geometry forces the releasing of the geometry after calculation.
• Ptex textures are now displayed in the 3d view (in texture/texture inspect display modes, as for other textures)
• Added options that control the output image formats in relight's render view and pim_view.
• In Volume::Light_beam, new attribute light_sampling_multiplier, allows to decrease the amount of light's sampling when seen by the volume shader. Directional Lights can now also be used for light beams.
• In Particle::Surface_sprinkler, new attribute density_multiplier, can be connected to any shadop (for example a texture) to modulate the density of points generated on the surface.
• In Material::Cutout, new attribute shadow_mask, allows to set the light's shadows values in the resulting alpha. This can allow to composite easily different passes (like separate hair layers for example).
• New variable, to be used in filenames ${self.dir}, returns the directory of the object's scene. This allows to use relative paths, without any problems with included files.
• New attribute extra_attributes in all objects, contains a POD description of any new custom attribute.

Improvements

• pim2map is now multi-threaded
• Reduced the footprint of shadowmaps (in disk space and in RAM)
• Improvement when opening a scene with a huge amount of objects. Less memory is used by the application, and it is faster to open the application.
• Improvements and optimizatiobns in Alembic support. Fixed bugs on scenes with lots of objects
• Reduced the footprint (in RAM) of polygonal and fur geometries
• Improved the manipulation of the 3d view with scenes containing a lot of objects, as well as when lots of geometries are merged in a single tessellator
• Clipmaps now taken into account by raytraced shadows
• Fixed several bugs in the file browser, to select sequences (e.g. for input textures).

API

• It is now possible to create / edit / save POD files using scripted and C++ API
• In MUD class definitions, it is now possible to use multipiple filename filters
• A file can now be included in a MUD scene with a custom parser, by creating a custom MUD class (please contact Bakery support for more details)

Modified behaviour

• Changed the Texture Subdivision algorithm. It now matches Softimage's subdivion.
• Consider Camera's near_plane / far_plane in the 3d view
• In Tess::Fur_from_isoparam, set the root offset in the texture's V coordinates.
• Removed lots of unused attributes in Joints (and therefore in child classes as Tessellators).