VRED 2024.2

Video Captions: With the release of VRED 2024.2, I am happy to announce that we implemented some new groundbreaking features for rendering, data handling and new UI improvements.

When starting VRED you will notice, the new Onboarding screen, which improves the user experience. As you can see now a list of recently opened files and you have quick access directly from there.

Within VRED, we have optimized the Transform Editor, so that the x, y, and z values are now horizontally placed, which brings more consistency to other modules and a horizontal reading direction tends to be more user-friendly.

Along with other changes like adding more missing icons to some context menus, we added now a unified renaming for decoupled modules like the Light Editor. So you can select multiple nodes and rename them in one go. This can save you a lot of time when dealing with similar or the same nodes.

You can also do this using the context menu or use Ctrl + R.

For rendering, we improved the control of the depth pass, which will be a great help when you are working with post-processing effects in your visualization pipeline, like depth of field or motion blur effects.

Previously, the depth pass was controlled by the clipping values of the camera. But now you have much more options, and you can work independently of the camera settings. Just go to the render setting and choose the mode that fits best to your needs.

And also the occlusion pass has now a range that you can separately control. This gives you much more freedom in your postproduction pipeline.

I am also very excited to tell, that we can now work with volumes. That means you can now improve your visual quality of your scenes by adding volumetric effects in OpenGL and raytracing.

You can, for example, add clouds to your scene. This will look so much more realistic as they are 3D volumes, interacting with the scene much more naturally, than just a 2D effect.

You can also easily create a Scatter Volume, which is perfect for particles being in the air, like this foggy scene, for example.

Or you create light effect where you can see the cones of the light, like in this studio. The volumes rely heavily on lights; therefore, we implemented a new setting which tells how the light should affect the volumes.

For changing the appearance of the volumes, you need to change the settings of the assigned volume material. Like the color or density denisity.

As a first start, when working with VDB volumes, you can download some free examples from the internet, or use software like Maya, Houdini or EmberGen to create your effects, like the jet streams that I am creating here to use along with clouds in my scene.

But that’s not all. You also can import a complete sequence and use animated volume effects, which brings so much more life and emotions to the scene.

And last but not least, we have implemented NVIDIA's latest DLSS version 3.5. DLSS or “deep learning super sampling” is the AI driven technology that creates higher-quality raytraced images. See here a comparison between the old DLSS and the new one.

You can clearly see the better visual quality and less noise. And this can mean for you also a much higher performance and framerate at the end.

See here where I am using the same scene with and without DLSS.

This is really a game changer as I can increase my framerate and performance of the scene immensely.

So your workflow and output is much faster and you can make decisions much quicker.

Thanks for watching the video.