[Originally posted on 08/13/18]
For SIGGRAPH 2018, AMD is updating Radeon™ ProRender with some significant new features, announcing updates to its integration in Maxon Cinema 4D™ and Modo® by Foundry, and releasing new plug-ins for PTC Creo® and Pixar’s USD viewport.
Fast, easy, and incredible, Radeon ProRender is AMD’s physically-based rendering engine with free plug-ins available for popular digital content-creation applications like Autodesk 3ds Max®, Autodesk Maya®, Blender™, and Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS®. It is also integrated into Maxon Cinema 4D™ R19.
At this year’s SIGGRAPH 2018 event, AMD is releasing quite a few updates to Radeon ProRender, including new features, new plug-ins, and updated integrations. Read on for more details about everything that’s new.
Continuing to Accelerate Artists’ Workflows
Earlier in the year, the plug-ins for 3ds Max, Maya 1, and Blender were updated to include an improved Uber Shader for better physically-based rendering workflows, and this shader continues to be developed in the latest plug-in releases. The enhanced Uber Shader now supports diffuse backscattering, has a simplified caustics option, and an improved clearcoat appearance.
AMD Radeon ProRender Diffuse Backscattering
Additionally, an Ambient Occlusion node has been added for enhanced procedural texture workflows, such as making textures look dirty, and Camera Motion Blur has been added to accurately recreate a moving camera when rendering animations. Adaptive Subdivision, previously only available in the plug-in for Blender, has been added to the 3ds Max and Maya 1 plug-ins, allowing artists to easily render complex shapes from simple meshes.
Lastly, optimizations to exporting in all three plug-ins accelerate multi-app workflows when working with large and complex scenes, and the plug-in for 3ds Max has been updated to support 3ds Max 2019.
Updated Integrations
The first content-creation application to natively integrate AMD Radeon ProRender was Maxon Cinema 4D R19, released in 2017, and Maxon recently announced that R20 is scheduled to be released this September with a host of new ProRender features. Some of those include Subsurface Scattering (SSS) for rendering realistic-looking skin, motion blur for animations and deformations, and multi-pass rendering for compositing.
The next application to natively integrate AMD Radeon ProRender will be Modo® by Foundry. AMD and Foundry showed a very early preview of this integration at SIGGRAPH 2017, and now Foundry is excited to announce that the AMD Radeon ProRender public beta is available for Modo Maintenance and Subscription licensees.
Pixar USD and PTC Creo plug-ins
Pixar’s open-source Universal Scene Description (USD) seeks to transform content creation pipelines with “software that addresses the need to robustly and scalably interchange and augment arbitrary 3D scenes that may be composed from many elemental assets.”
Part of the USD toolset is the USDView interactive viewport designed to preview complex scenes. For developers looking to integrate this modern viewport into their application (as Foundry has done in Katana 3.0) AMD is planning to release the code for an open-source Radeon ProRender USD Hydra render delegate plug-in on GitHub that adds path-traced rendering designed for more accurate previews when compared to the default OpenGL® renderer. You can also test drive the USD Hydra plug-in using the pre-built example on our AMD Radeon ProRender download page linked below.
The new PTC Creo plug-in (available now as a beta) enables designers and engineers to quickly and easily create incredibly rendered visualizations of their products. Just like the AMD Radeon ProRender add-in for SOLIDWORKS, the plug-in easily enables exporting to Unreal® Engine for VR visualization when used with the AMD Radeon™ ProRender Game Engine Importer and also has the same feature set as the SOLIDWORKS add-in, including decal support.
Available Today
The updated and new AMD Radeon ProRender plug-ins for 3ds Max, Maya 1, Blender, PTC Creo (beta), and USD are available now and you can get them from our AMD Radeon ProRender download page linked below.
To provide feedback or report any issues please join our AMD Radeon ProRender Community.
To discuss AMD Radeon ProRender with other users you can also join the AMD Radeon ProRender Discord.
Title image created by Yan Ge (IHDT) using MAXON Cinema 4D™ R20.
Alexander Blake-Davies, Software Product Marketing Specialist for Professional Graphics at AMD’s Radeon Technology Group. Links to third party sites and references to third party trademarks are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only. Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third-party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied. Use of third party names or marks is for informational purposes only and no endorsement of or by AMD is intended or implied.
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