ArtVPS announced the immediate availability of version 0.3 of Shaderlight, its flagship interactive rendering plug-in for 3ds Max. Shaderlight 0.3 boasts a number of enhancements over previous versions. Overall speed has been increased by 100 percent for complex production scenes, and early image quality of glossy materials and area lights has been significantly improved. Other benefits include increased image resolution and the addition of a message window to track log messages during interactive rendering.

Shaderlight delivers dramatic productivity and creativity improvements over traditional ray-trace engines. Intelligent pixels understand where they fit in a 3D image and what to do if something changes, enabling users to change materials, environments, lights or textures the MELT elements of a full resolution image at any stage of the rendering process without having to re-render.

"Shaderlight has received some great feedback from early adopters and many of the improvements in version 0.3 have been added in direct response to this. Prior to v0.3 the Art Professional Material was a test bed for new ideas. We have now redesigned it to create a flexible, physically accurate material that's even easier to understand and use," says Kate Marshall, Marketing Director at ArtVPS. "The user's experience is at the core of our development programme and we ask that Shaderlight users continue to share their thoughts on the Shaderlight forum and file bug-reports on any problems they encounter."

New features in Shaderlight 0.3 include:

• Redesigned Art Professional Material: Significant changes have been made to the ArtMaterial to create a flexible, physically accurate material that is easy to understand and use.
• Improved Resolution: Shaderlight can now render interactively to any custom resolution up to 1920x1920.
• Improved Performance: Speed has been increased by up to 100 percent for complex production scenes with notable improved performance for skylight, area lights and glossy materials.
• Improved Image Quality: Progressive image refinement has been improved, with particular reference to the early image quality of glossy materials and area lights.
• New Message Window: A message window has been added to track log messages during interactive rendering.
• Bug Fixes: Several bugs have been fixed to improve overall stability as well as feature-related bugs such as invisible objects not rendering.

Shaderlight 0.3 is free to existing Shaderlight users and is available to download in ArtVPS site. New customers will pay $75 for version 0.3 but will receive a significant discount on the purchase of Shaderlight 1.0, which will be released at the end of the year.

More Information at www.artvps.com. Image and Video Courtesy of ArtVPS Ltd.