Inside Nvidia HQ: What a $2T Company’s Office Looks Like | WSJ Open Office - YouTube
If you remember, the light simulation software mentioned many many times in this video (and which can even be seen early in the first few seconds), which helped to iterate over/create the NV HQ as-it-is, was of course, Iray.. :)
..just in time for christmas, this comes with tons of updates to our toolchain and 3rdparty software, along with improvements for fibers/curves, displacement and the usual bunch of bugfixes all over the place.
And once more, security patches and bugfixes..
After an internal/OV-only release (2023.0.3), 2023.0.4 is now being shipped. :)
Includes more bugfixes and some perf improvements for volume rendering, along with security updates.
Something technical again for a change: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/solving-self-intersection-artifacts-in-directx-raytracing/
What is this all about? Hopefully the final chapter in finally solving the infamous self intersection problem (leading to images that are too dark and harmed by small (sometimes large) artifacts) that has been plaguing ray tracing based rendering since the very beginning.
Note that Iray was the world-first product to ship with this new scheme. :)
Next small bugfix release is incoming today
.. released. “Just” a lot of bug fixes and small improvements this time. :)
..was just released.
Major improvements over the beta:
Performance, performance, performance. :)
We mostly got back all the perf loss we introduced in the beta when running the new caustic sampler 2.0 (compared to cs 1.0 in 2022.1.X), plus we optimized general performance on the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, and Iray is now faster when using rather complicated MDL materials (i.e. MDL JIT path is triggered).
Then a lot of performance optimizations all over the place, e.g. when using fibers/hair, rounded corners or cutouts.
In addition there is also one additional new major feature over the beta: Support for the new Mie phase function for volumes, introduced along with MDL 1.8.X.
On top we have dozens of important bug fixes, as usual.
The new release will also be available soon within Omniverse, of course, via the RTX Accurate rendering mode.
..obviously fully supported with iray, as usual :)
Small comparison on a tricky caustic scene (yup, swimming pools are still evil to render in 2023 ;)).
From top to bottom:
Caustic sampler 2.0.
Caustic sampler 1.0.
No caustic sampler (but with approximate caustics).
Main features:
Completely redone Caustic Sampler 2.0 with vastly improved precision and more complete simulation capabilities
Full MDL 1.8 support
General improvements to preprocessing and scene updates (with even more to come)
Iray Server is now part of the normal Iray SDK licensing (=“for free” on top)
..and tons and tons of fixes and minor improvements all over the place.
As usual, it will also be included as RTX Accurate inside of Omniverse as the Iray 2023.0.0 final arrives.
2023.0.0 beta Teaser..
ragnarokeotw asked:
Any chance that Iray will add "Albedo" to its list of canvas options?
The raw unlit colour data of surfaces is often needed for compositing and post production purposes, so it seems like a quite major missing feature.
The Iray SDK itself already has that (its called BSDF weights), so the app you’re using would just need to expose it.
