VRED 2022.0

Learn about new features and improvements in this release of VRED. For technical details and bug fixes, see the 2022.0 release notes and recommended system requirements to ensure Autodesk VRED products are running to their potential.

What's New in 2022

Click on the cards below for further information.

GGX BRDF Shader Model

VRED now uses a GGX BRDF model for all materials. This is THE standard for many render engines, as it improves light reflections for rough surfaces, making them look more realistic, by using GGX as this new default BRDF behavior. It allows high fidelity simulation of material reflection at both peek and shallow viewing angles, resulting in a subtle softer highlight that falls off gradually. This option has improved importance sampling and is better at energy preservation.

Stream App Improvements

The Stream App improvements you'll find in 2022 are the addition of annotations, interactive HTML annotations, a displayed frame counter, and a way to set custom quality and resolution in the URL.

XR Enhancements and Improvements

VRED 2022 added Varjo MR marker placement and preferences, hand gestures, a hand depth estimation, along with out-of-the-box object placement in XR and VR via the VR Menu. We also added functions for a Python interface for implementing a custom version of marker tracking. They can be found in the vrImmersiveInteractionService documentation.

Frosted Glass

This feature improves the look of frosted glass for BxDF models by using GGX.

Texture-based Lightmaps

VRED 2022 introduced texture-based lightmaps for ambient occlusion, shadows, and light & shadows, including direct and indirect light, as well as IES and ray light profiles. Improvements to the Bake Light and Shadows module include CPU and GPU raytracing support, cluster support, the possibility to bake Ray files and caustics, uniform and cosine weighting for ambient occlusion, and new presets. We added photon tracing for computing lighting effects for lightmaps to Render Settings.

BRDF Environment Sampling

To better match the OpenGL/Precomputed and Full Global Illumination results, we introduced a new prefiltering method. Instead of using spherical harmonics for the prefiltering, we now sample the environment HDR against the new BRDF model.

GPU Raytracing Improvements

The GPU raytracing improvements found in 2022 are photon mapping and Ray file support. The GPU raytracer now supports photon mapping with real-time feedback for caustics and indirect lighting. In addition, it is now possible to use ray lights GPU raytracing.

Ray File Improvements

Added an option for reducing noise by controlling the size of an emitter cone used to vary the direction of emitted photons from ray lights. This increases the number of photons that can be generated during tracing. You get smoother images, while only sacrificing a bit of accuracy.

Alias Reference Assembly Support

We added the importing of native CAD file assembled in the Alias Reference Manager into VRED 2022. A new Reference Manager group will be created in the Scenegraph to mimic the Alias Reference Manager and layers.

Shotgun Review with VRED

Review content from any Shotgun Version, using VRED Presenter. Review multiple designs at a time with Shotgun's playlists with VRED Presenter. This enables you to keep track of all review notes and decisions automatically within Shotgun.

2022 Additional Enhancements

• Community Link - Added a Community option with links to the VRED forum and Idea Station to the Help menu. Use it to share your knowledge, ask questions, collaborate on ideas, and explore popular VRED topics. Use the Design Studio Blog as a hub for hearing from our product teams, learning about product updates, new features, and release, as well as discussing technology trends and sharing tutorials and best practices.

  To disable access to these and online stores, use the environment variable, VRED_DISABLE_WEB_ACCESS, that disables access to web content.

  Note:

  Web engines aren't affected by this.

• Substance Engine 8 - Updated to the Substance Engine 8 to support the new Cross Section and Threshold filters, as well as the improved Tile Generator, Distance, and Curve nodes introduced with Substance Designer 2020.2 (10.2.0).

• Intel® Open Image CPU Denoiser - VRED uses the Optix GPU Denoiser, when a user has a capable graphics card. We implemented the Intel® Open Image CPU Denoiser when they don't, but the denoiser option is activated. VRED will automatically use the Intel® Open Image CPU Denoiser as a fallback.

• Evaluate Subframes - Improved our real-time rendering to now evaluate curves from the current time, independent of the animation framerate. A 24 or 25fps animation can now be played back smoothly at 60fps or more. We've also added Evaluate Subframes to the animation preferences, which is activated by default.

  Tip:

  To quickly enable Evaluate Subframes, click the Open Animation Settings icon () pin the timeline.

• Parallel import of PLMXML reference files - Parallelized the import of reference files in a PLMXML structure, when the PLMXML file is initiated by calling the load fuction in the scripting API.

• PLMXML support in VRED Design - Added support for loading PLMXML structure files into VRED Design.

• Mixed EXRs - Added support for writing more multilayer mixed format EXR files. This enables color channels and more to be written as 16bit float, while other passes like cryptomatte, depth, or position can be written as 32bit float.

  

• Split Sum IBL - Implemented a new Split Sum IBL (Image-Based Lighting) approach. Use this to precompute the single scattering BRDF essential for image-based lighting.

• Glass Shader - Fixed the glass shader, so there is no difference when rendered with GPU or CPU raytracing.

• Precomputed and Precomputed + Reflections - Added Precomputed and Precomputed + Reflections to the Interactive and Still Frame Illumination Mode options in the Render Settings > Raytracing Quality tab. This adds pre-calculated ambient occlusion shadows to the rendering, comparable to the standard OpenGL rendering mode.

• Cluster Image Compression - Provided better cluster image compression for float images, when using Glow, Glare, or Denoising.

• Web Interface Calls - All existing web interface calls can now be done by a POST method with arguments encoded in the request body. The following encodings are supported:

  • application/x-www-form-urlencoded
  • multipart/form-data

• ATF Import for Linux - Added support for ATF import on Linux. Keep in mind, NX files are not supported, as ATF doesn't currently support them; however, Parasolid files with the extension x_t and x_b are.