ActiveShade Improvements
ActiveShade preview renderings now support the NVIDIA® mental ray® renderer, in addition to the NVIDIA® iray® renderer and scanline renderers previously supported. With ActiveShade, artists and designers can see the effects of changing lighting or materials interactively, helping them more easily refine their work—the ability to match the final renderer helps artists more accurately preserve creative intent. For both iray and mental ray, interactive updates are now faster, while viewport navigation and switching, adjustments to light parameters, and certain other scene changes—creating, moving, or deleting objects—are captured more frequently, offering finer grain updates.
For information about changes to the ActiveShade interface, see iray and mental ray ActiveShade.
NVIDIA® iray® Renderer
The iray renderer now supports Rendering Elements Separately. See iray Render Elements.
The String Options rollout lets you enter options as you would in a iray MI file.
The iray renderer now supports the Blend material, and support for map types has been improved. On the other hand, it no longer supports the Wave map.
State Sets Improvements
State Sets can help manage rendering as well as interoperability between 3ds Max and Adobe® Photoshop® and Adobe® After Effects® software. They have been improved to accelerate performance, enhance usability, and to streamline the interoperation with the Adobe applications.