ArtVPS has brought out Shaderlight 1.0, the first full release version of its interactive rendering plug-in for 3ds Max. Shaderlight 1.0 features a new approach to rendering that is designed to unlock the workflow bottlenecks faced by 3D artists. Shaderlight is a 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.It lets 3D artists 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. Everyone who downloaded pre-release versions of Shaderlight 1.0 will qualify for a 50 per cent discount off the price of the full version.
New features in Shaderlight 1.0 include: zoom and scroll capability, which lets users render an image that is larger than the available screen size and zoom into an image to view pixel-level details; Mitchell filtering, which has improved super sampling; changes to image-based lighting to improve rendering time and quality; strengthened Active Photon Tracing algorithms, resulting in smoother indirect illumination; improved texture filtering, particularly with respect to environment textures; improved MELT allocation, which ensures that memory usage does not exceed available system resources, while maximising the MELT-ability of the image; and improved stability as a result of fixing many of the system's bugs.
ArtVPS is offering a 50 per cent discount to anyone that downloaded pre-release versions 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3. New users can take advantage of a free 14-day trial. During the free trial, users will have access to all of the features in Shaderlight 1.0.
