Rendering solutions provider, ArtVPS, has launched Shaderlight 1.0, the first full release version of its interactive rendering plug-in for 3ds Max. Shaderlight is a physically-based, progressive ray-tracer that enables interactive changes to be made to materials, environments, lighting and textures – the key MELT attributes – at any stage within the rendering process. 3D artists are able to make changes to an image and see the results in real time without compromising on image quality or restarting the render.
Shaderlight works by maintaining the relationship between the colour of the rendered pixel and the elements of the 3D scene that contribute to that pixel. When changes are made to any of the MELT elements the software uses the information embedded in the intelligent pixels to update the image without the need to re-render.
New features in Shaderlight 1.0 include: zoom and scroll; super-sampling has been improved with the addition of Mitchell filtering; changes to image-based lighting improve both rendering time and quality; the Active Photon Tracing algorithms have been strengthened, resulting in smoother indirect illumination; texture filtering has been improved, particularly with respect to environment textures; Shaderlight MELT allocation has been improved to ensure that memory usage does not exceed available system resources; and several bugs have been fixed to improve overall stability.
