To ensure Autodesk VRED products runs to their potential, please ensure your hardware meets the minimum recommended system requirements.

• Requirement for VRED 2023

• New Features and Enhancements

• Fixed Issues

• Known Issues and Workarounds

These are the requirements, new features, improvements, and known issues found in VRED 2023 products:

Requirement for VRED 2023

The following is required for VRED 2023:

• Nvidia v.496.49 (or higher) driver - Due to the introduction of GPU Raytracing, we recommend the use of the Nvidia driver version 496.49 (or higher).

• Linux dependency for Render Node - If working on a Linux machine, set your local directory to /var/opt/Autodesk with write access on the Linux machine that is running the VRED 2020 Render Node.

New Features and Enhancements

For the new features and enhancements in Autodesk VRED 2023 products, see What's New in VRED 2023.

Fixed Issues

These are the issues we fixed in VRED 2023 products:

Asset Manager

• A newly added material switch is reported as new, not different.

Environment

• GPU raytracing an empty environment material no longer crashes VRED.
• Environments can now only be dragged into an environment switch material. They cannot be added to any other materials, including other multi materials, such as multi-pass, layered, or switch.
• Empty Environment Switch - Choosing to merge environments when importing a .vpb removes any empty environment switches.
• The parameters of skylights that are duplicates are not affected by changes to the original's parameters.
• The speed of the environment viewport manipulator has improved.
• A photon map is now created when displacement is enabled for a Substance material with GPU raytracing.
• Fixed the loading of LDR environment maps.

FileIO

• Implemented a change to make fixShellNodes significantly faster.
• Fixed the crash when loading a VPB containing a Tire material with non-inlined bump textures.

General

• Opening a VRED shader in Alias no longer initiates the crashing of VREDAnalysis.

• Importing an ATF file into VRED, using the JT Open Toolkit, no longer corrupts the geometry.

• Fixed the loading of PNG images with an ICC color profile.

• For a Japanaese UI, the ICC file list is displayed in the file explore when Load is selected for either color profile preference.

  

• Decoring tessellated geometry with coarse quality settings no longer leads to a crash.

• Online stores are no longer available when the variable VRED_DISABLE_ONLINE_STORES is set to 1.

GPU Raytracing

• Bump Map now works in GPU raytracing with the Planar mapping type.
• Ignore Photonmap now works and path tracing is used, instead of photon mapping, for the specified material.
• Flake perturbation on Metallic Carpaint materials in GPU raytracing is now consistent to other render modes.

GUI

• When using the texture save button in Light Editor, Sceneplate Editor, or for lightmaps in Bake module, the filename automatically appears in the Save dialog.
• Roughness Texture - The Chrome Roughness Texture section options are now aligned.

Material Editor

• Velvet materials no longer ignore per texture Repeat UV, Offset UV, and Rotate when in Triplanar mode.

• Merge Duplicate Materials - Using Merge Duplicate Materials in the Material Editor no longer merges materials with different name, breaking name-based variant sets.

• Sub Materials - The removal of sub materials from an X-Rite measured material can be undone.-

• Pasting the texture size from one X-Rite material to another no longer crashes VRED.

• Optimize material doesn't merge duplicate materials.

• BrushMetal - The Brushed Metal material updates clearcoat values set in the NodeEditor Python functions.

• Override Material - When the material assigned to a render layer is converted to another type or renamed in the Material Editor, the OverrideMaterial connection is no longer broken, so the render layer overrides are properly updated.

• Multi Pass Materials - For a multi pass material, selecting the first non-transparent material with the Transparency > Mapping Type set to Triplanar works correctly in OpenGL.

• Copy/Paste - Copy and paste between VRED instances merges equal materials.

• Material attributes are copied and pasted correctly for all materials.

• Dome - The material for a newly created dome appears in the Material Editor.

• Remove Unused Materials and Optimize Materials - Using Edit > Remove Unused Materials or Optimize Materials no longer deletes materials still in use.

  • After using Remove Unused Materials, undoing once restores materials and twice restores meshes.

  • When Remove Unused Materials is used, the connection to the material is no longer broken. If a material name is changed in the Material Editor, the name is also updated in the Render Layers module. Materials unassigned to an object in the Scenegraph are assigned to individual layers in a render layer and renamed as overrite materials.

• Optimize Scene - VRED doesn't crash after opening an optimized scene.

• Animated Materials - When animated materials are deleted, their curves are deleted from the Curve Editor.

• Undo Duplicate - In the Material Editor, Duplicate is undoable.

• Merge Duplicate Materials - Material switches are no longer deleted when Merge Duplicate Materials is used.

• Merge Duplicate Materials only merges duplicated materials, and no longer deletes all unused materials.

• Missing Error Message - An error message appears when an object needs to be selected before a triplanar texture projection can be performed.

• Manipulate - After Manipulate is pressed and the projection method is switched, Manipulate does not remain enabled.

• The Manipulate button in various texture properties sections now toggles its visibility in the scene on or off.

• Material Preview - Material previews in the Preview pane behave consistently across localized version.

• Frame Offset - The frame offset of an image sequence is no longer shared across duplicated materials.

• Shadow - The shadow plane and shadow material link remains intact when a VPB containing a shadow material is imported into VRED.

• Image Sharing - Added this option to Edit > Preferences > FileIO > Options (tab) for setting when images with the same contents will be shared. Select one of the following options:

  • Always - Images are always shared.

  • Same File Name - Images are shared if they have the same file name (i.e., base name + extension).

  • Same Absolute Path - Images are only shared if they have the same absolute file path (i.e., path + base name + extension).

    Tip:

    The following Python functions were added:

    • vrImageService.setShareMode to set the current project state.
    • vrImageService.getShareMode to get the current project state.

Python

• setMergeMaterials() - When materials are initially imported, using setMergeMaterials(), they appear in Material Editor.

• vrImageService.setShareMode - Used for setting the current project state. See the FileIO preference, Image Sharing.

• vrImageService.getShareMode - Used for getting the current project state. See the FileIO preference, Image Sharing.

Raytracing

• Fixed the incorrect reflections on Shadow materials, making GPU and CPU raytracing results more consistent.

• Bump Map Mipmapping - Added mipmapping to the bump texture evaluation in GPU raytracing to control if filtering is done bilinearly or anisotropically. Previously, it only worked correctly in CPU RT and OpenGL and for texture types other than bump.

• Transparency - Fixed the transparency calculation issue that caused objects to be more opaque than they should.

• Enable Photometric Parameters - Switching from raytracing to OpenGL mode when using Enable Photometric Parameters and clusters no longer causes VRED renders to produce overexposed images.

  Before	2023

• The screen no longer turns white when using Enable Photometric Parameters and cluster OpenGL and Antialiasing.

• DLSS options (Visualization > Realtime Antialiasing > Deep Learning Supersampling) are not greyed out on laptops with Nvidia 496.49 driver installed.

  

  • Precomputed glass is once again affected by fog in GPU raytracing.

Rendering

• Layered materials containing X-Rite materials now render properly when CPU raytraced.

• Fixed EPSVBRDF measurement.

• Fixed a potential memory leak and crash when using light textures.

• Fixed the slowdown that occurred when changing from realistic rendering to any other render mode.

Substances

• Changing Substance color values and pressing Reset displays the intended color, not black, in the color input field.

• Resetting a Substance material changes the color values to the default color.

• The new Adobe Substance 3D assets (.sbsar) now work with the VRED Substance Panorama material and display correctly.

• Substance materials rendered in GPU raytracing with GPU clusters no longer crash VRED.

• The Substance material Attributes doesn't jump to the top section, once raytracing is turned on or off.

• CPU and GPU raytracing results are now consistent for a color corrected Substance environment.

• Duplicated Substance environments no longer behave like clones.

Variant Sets

• Alphabetic Order - Variant Sets in the Stream App are now listed in alphabetic order, following these conventions: "aAbB", "AaBb", "aAbBcC", "AaBbCc".

VR

• The VR Menu, Hands, and Collaboration UI elements are no longer too dark when using a physical camera and photometric properties are enabled.

• Varjo - Updated the SDK for improved hand tracking.

• Added a blocked devices list to the OpenVR tab of the Virtual Reality preferences.

VRED Core

• On Linux, filenames with spaces work when using the command line. The following example will now work:

   ./VREDCore "thisIsAFile NameWithSpaces.vpb"
   ./VREDCore -preferencesOverride="thisIsAFile NameWithSpaces.xml"

Known Issues and Workarounds

• Slow hand-tracking for XR-3 users - In 2023, the initialization of the tracked hands took up to 10 seconds when starting VRED for the first time. This workaround manually fixes this issue. After making these adjustments, hand initialization will work immediately.

  Option 1

  1. In C:\Program Files\Autodesk\VREDPro-15.0\bin\WIN64, delete LeapC.dll dated as last modified 09/27/2021.
  2. Replace it with LeapC.dll that has a date last modified of 02/17/2022.

  Option 2

  1. Go to https://developer.varjo.com/downloads and download Varjo XR-3 & VR-3 Ultraleap SDK for Custom Engines.
  2. Install LeapC-SDK-relwithdebinfo-v5.4.3-ab422fa1-CI506955.
  3. Go to C:\Program Files\Ultraleap\LeapSDK\lib\x64.
  4. Copy and paste LeapC.dll to :\Program Files\Autodesk\VREDPro-15.0\bin\WIN64 to overwrite it.

• Cluster Failure - A cluster will fail to start, if the last node is localhost in the cluster list.

  Explanation: A pipeline and PCs at the beginning of the list need to reach PCs later in the list by the given Name or IP Address. If localhost is used, VRED tries to use the hostname of the master PC; however, PC 10.148.241.230 doesn't know GRED-P710 by name.

• Internet Explorer dependency - If installing VRED 2020 on a machine running Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 10 is needed to display the Let's get started screen.

  A workaround for this is to create a deployment installer. When creating deployment installer images, VRED starts up fine for all license types. In the VRED user control popup menu,

  • Sign In works
  • Sign Out And Quit (user license) won't work
  • Manage License won't work
  • Explore Purchase Options sort of works, but the web page looks strange due to the older version of Internet Explorer