Rendering

 
 
 

Enhancements in High Quality Viewport

 

The following new options are available in the High Quality viewport to improve the quality and performance of the Ambient Occlusion:

  • Iterations
  • Blur Result
  • Blur Samples
  • Blur Edge Tolerance
  • Blur Blend

For more information about the Ambient Occlusion options, see Ambient Occlusion.

Shader Caching in High Quality Viewport

 

Caching mechanism is now available in the High Quality viewport. You can choose to enable or disable caching shader particle states to memory, using the Shader Cache option is available under the File Preferences Display High Quality Viewport Options.

Enabling the shader caching mechanism improves the display performance in the HQV.

For more information, see High Quality Viewport Options.

Viewing Shadow Casts from Transparent Objects

 

You can now view shadow casts from objects with transparent materials. To view shadows of transparent materials, turn on the Shadow Transparency option in the Camera Display Property Editor High Quality tab.

For more information, see Camera Display Property Editor.

Support for OpenEXR File Compression Formats

 

Softimage now supports the OpenEXR (.exr) Codec file compression format types.

NoteThe OpenEXR file compression format is only available for capturing in the FxTree, and not for rendering.

You can choose the OpenEXR compression formats by clicking the Codec button from the FxTree FileOutput node property editor.

The supported OpenEXR codecs are RLE, ZIP (individual scanlines), ZIP (multi-scanline blocks), PIZ (lossless), PXR 24 (24-bit float, lossy), B44 (lossy), and B44A (lossy).

For more information on the FxTree File Output options, see File Output.

You can also select the OpenEXR codec formats from the Capture Viewport window. In the Viewport, choose Camera View Start Capture to open this window.

Support for mental ray version 3.11

The NVIDIA mental ray® rendering software in Softimage is now updated to version 3.11.

Support for the GPU Ambient Occlusion Feature in Mental Ray

 

Softimage now supports the new GPU Ambient Occlusion feature in Mental Ray. It speeds up the Ambient Occlusion (AO) calculations by using the power of your GPU.

NoteThis feature requires a video card and driver that supports CUDA 4.2.

For more information about the GPU Ambient Occlusion options, see GPU Ambient Occlusion.

Choosing Renderer Specific Color Correction Settings

You can now choose to apply color correction to the output from the renderer in Softimage according to your needs. To apply color correction, based on the settings defined in your renderer, choose the Defined by Renderer option from the Preferences Display Color Management Render Preview Color Correction Settings Has Pre-multiplied output drop-down list.

NoteThe render specific color correction settings are applicable only for preview rendering. The settings do no have an impact on the final render.

See Display Preferences.

Support for Importing more DDS File Formats

The following .dds file format types are now supported for importing into Softimage:

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