The rendering solution provider ArtVPS has announced the immediate availability of Shaderlight 1.0, the first full release version of its interactive rendering plug-in for 3ds Max. Shaderlight 1.0 marks the culmination of two years of research and development and is designed to finally unlock the workflow bottlenecks faced by 3D artists, with its completely new approach to rendering.

Shaderlight is a physically based, progressive ray-tracer that enables interactive changes to be made to materials, environments, lighting and textures the key MELT attributes at any stage within the rendering process. 3D artists are able to make changes to an image and see the results in real time without compromising on image quality or restarting the render.

Shaderlight works by maintaining the relationship between the colour of the rendered pixel and the elements of the 3D scene that contribute to that pixel. When changes are made to any of the MELT elements the software uses the information embedded in the intelligent pixels to update the image without the need to re-render.

Commenting on the release of Shaderlight 1.0, ArtVPS’s chief technology officer, Michael Lawson, said: We knew when we set out to create Shaderlight that we had the potential to create a fundamental shift in the way 3D artists work by removing the bottleneck inherent in the linear render/change/re-render process. We’re delighted to have realised that goal with the launch of Shaderlight 1.0. With this kind of non-linear workflow, artists, designers and animators working in today’s competitive environment need no longer be shackled by time-consuming and inefficient rendering processes that eat into project deadlines and stifle creativity.

The launch of Shaderlight 1.0 marks the end of a highly successful pre-release programme during which a dynamic community of early adopters has provided invaluable feedback for the ArtVPS development team. Everyone who downloaded pre-release software will qualify for a 50 percent discount off the price of the full version.

New features in Shaderlight 1.0 include:

• Zoom & Scroll The Shaderlight window now has a zoom and scroll capability that allows users to render an image that is larger than the available screen size and zoom into an image to view pixel-level details.
• Super-sampling Super-sampling has been further improved with the addition of Mitchell filtering.
• Image-Based Lighting Changes to image-based lighting improve both rendering time and quality.
• GI Improvements The Active Photon Tracing algorithms have been strengthened, resulting in smoother indirect illumination.
• Texture Filtering Texture filtering has been improved, particularly with respect to environment textures.
• MELT allocation and memory usage Shaderlight MELT allocation has been improved to ensure that memory usage does not exceed available system resources while maximizing the MELT-ability of the image.
• Stability Several bugs have been fixed to improve overall stability and feature-related bugs such as the rendering of samples in the 3ds Max material editor have been addressed.

Shaderlight 1.0 is available to download for $895. ArtVPS is offering a 50 percent discount to anyone who downloaded pre release versions 0.1, 0.2 or 0.3. New users can take advantage of a free 14-day trial. During the free trial users will have access to all of the features in Shaderlight 1.0.

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