What's New? 5.3

Area Lights
Lights in HDR Light Studio with 3D mapping can now be promoted to become Area Lights in 3D space. The first Connection to support this new feature is the Maya Connection. The updated Maya Connection supports live HDRI map and Area Light creation with renderers: Mental Ray, Arnold, V-Ray, Maxwell, Redshift, Octane, Renderman (RIS) and iRay for Maya. (Renderman (RIS) is currently supported on Windows and Linux only.)

Convert to Uber Light
There is a new menu command that can be used to convert any selected light into an Uber Light. For example, the user may place a Picture Light from the tool bar, and decide they want to add an alpha to the image. This is only possible when using the Uber Light, therefore using ‘Edit > Convert to UberLight’ allows the light to preserve all of the light’s settings, and gain the flexibility of being an Uber Light with more properties available to change.

Render View – Continuous Updates
Users can drag lights using LightPaint on the Render View, and experience continuous updates to the Canvas and Render View.
New Area Lights can also be moved, scaled and rotated with continuous updates in the Render View.

Aspect Ratio on Images
New button in image content,  to adjust the height of the light to match the image's aspect ratio.

License Management Panel
Users can now easily see what licenses they have installed and when they will expire. The new License Management panel displays both main app and connection licenses, their type, expiry date (days left), plus the last build date that the licenses will run.

New Compatibility:
Maya / iRay for Maya
Modo 902
SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2016

Improvements:

Canvas
Canvas view has been flipped horizontally, so the user is now looking at the HDRI map from world origin. Therefore when area lights are added, the Canvas is an accurate view of the lighting scene from the world origin viewpoint.

User Interface
Keyboard shortcuts are now displayed in menu commands where possible. Example: Edit > Undo   Ctrl + Z

Render View
Support for specifying the fresnel as an IOR.
Display LUT is active during camera moves.
3d scene file slot, and the background image file slot both support dragging and dropping files from the OS.
Performance has been improved when moving the camera.
New Fit Scene to View button for Freecam mode.
The time in the Render View is now specified as a frame number, which is more useful for a 3D artist than the seconds that are embedded in an Alembic file. Therefore we have now added a FPS setting in the Render View, so the user can input the frame rate for the shot.
Added Tilt Camera Tool for Freecam mode.

Render Settings
New roughness setting for the reflection roughness/glossiness value
Added checkbox for toggling floor plane on and off.

Production Render
New optional settings for the additional output of Thumbnail PNGs for lights, Render View PNG, and a Saved HDR Light Studio Project File.

Light Controls
New keyboard controls to change the sensitivity when dragging.
New Smart Dolly button, click and drag and Smart Dolly selected area light.

This entry was posted in .