For this year’s NAB Show, we’re announcing updates to our AMD Radeon™ ProRender plug-ins, new integrations, and important updates for developers.
Radeon ProRender is our fast, easy, and incredible physically-based rendering engine that enables creative professionals to produce stunningly photorealistic images.
For NAB 2019, we’re releasing the Open Beta of our new Radeon™ ProRender plug-in for the Blender™ 2.80 Beta, adding significant new features to our plug-ins for Autodesk® 3ds Max® and Maya®, including AI-accelerated denoising, adaptive sampling, and hair support, and announcing integration into Foundry Modo® 13.
Additionally, for developers, our Radeon ProRender Developer Suite is now available, along with our updated feature roadmap for this quarter, and we’re also announcing our new Full Spectrum Rendering technology. Read on for more details about all the updates.
Radeon ProRender for Blender v2.0 Beta for Blender 2.80 Beta
Building on our well-received Radeon ProRender plug-in for Blender 2.79, our new v2.0 plug-in has been completely rewritten for the Blender 2.80 Beta. Commonly used Blender native shader nodes are supported out of the box, including the Blender Principled Shader node. Radeon ProRender nodes, particularly the Uber Shader node, are provided for a more “expert level” shader setup. Additionally, viewport and final rendering are more robust and optimized over the Blender 2.79 plug-in.
AI-Accelerated Denoising
Available in the Blender 2.80 Beta, Autodesk 3ds Max, and Maya plug-ins for Windows® (macOS® and Linux® support planned at a later date), our new AI-accelerated denoiser harnesses the power of machine learning to produce high-quality final and interactive renders in a fraction of the time traditional denoising takes, quickly providing artists the info they need to make creative decisions, speeding up workflows.
Adaptive Sampling
Adaptive Sampling lets you set a threshold for noise in your render and areas of the render that are fully converged and below this level of noise will no longer get samples. This accelerates render times while enabling higher-quality renders. Adaptive Sampling is available in the Blender 2.80 Beta, Autodesk 3ds Max, and Maya plug-ins.
Hair Rendering Support
We’ve added support for rendering realistic looking hair, fur, grass, and other strand-like objects to our plug-ins for Blender 2.80 Beta and Autodesk Maya. With this update, Radeon ProRender now supports Maya’s XGen interactive grooming tools and Blender 2.80’s native hair particle system, allowing artists to use Radeon ProRender for more than just hard surface modeling, opening it up to be used for organic rendering such as creature and character design.
Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya Plug-In Specific Updates
In addition to the major feature updates above, our updated plug-in for 3ds Max supports the just-released new version of 3ds Max, 2020. For Maya (for the Windows and macOS plug-ins only), we’ve added support for Maya Fluid Volumes, allowing you to render advanced effects like smoke, fog, and clouds, the ability to convert Arnold Renderer and Redshift materials to Radeon ProRender materials, and support for Maya 2019. For both plug-ins we’ve reorganized the render settings to allow for clearer user control, helping improve workflows.
Foundry Modo 13 Radeon ProRender Integration
With the latest version of Modo, our powerful physically-based hardware agnostic rendering engine is fully integrated into The Foundry’s powerful and flexible 3D modeling, sculpting, and animation tool. Using Modo 13, artists can now render stunning photorealistic images using the integrated Radeon ProRender GPU-accelerated rendering engine
Full Spectrum Rendering: From Rasterized to Reality
Radeon ProRender’s new Full Spectrum Rendering technology supports every stage of the rendering pipeline and is coming soon to the Radeon ProRender Developer Suite to enable integration of this technology into future versions of popular digital content creation (DCC) applications.
The full Full Spectrum includes rasterized rendering for standard viewport creation, hybrid rendering for advanced viewport creation, biased photorealistic rendering for look development, and path traced reality for final rendering.
By integrating this technology, developers can use Radeon ProRender Full Spectrum Rendering to optimize their application’s rendering performance for every step of the content creation workflow from the initial design stage all the way to the final render for production or executive review.
Radeon ProRender for Developers
To help make it easier for developers to get the tools they need to integrate Radeon ProRender into their application, we’ve created the new Radeon ProRender Developer Suite that includes non-commercial use SDKs for Radeon ProRender, Radeon™ Rays, and the Radeon™ Image Filter Library.
Radeon Rays is our high-performance ray intersection acceleration library, and is available in two versions, Radeon Rays 2.0 that uses OpenCL™ and Radeon Rays 3.0 that uses Vulkan®. The Radeon™ Image Filter Library includes AI-accelerated denoising and standard GPU-accelerated image filters.
The non-commercial SDKs in the Developer Suite are designed for developers prototyping integration into their applications and when they’re ready to take the next step towards integrating Radeon ProRender they can sign an AMD Commercial Software Licensing Agreement (SLA).
Updated Quarterly Development Roadmap
Lastly, we’ve updated our development roadmap for Radeon ProRender, listing the features scheduled to be added in the next quarter and beyond. This roadmap both provides developers information about features they can expect to see available in updates to our SDK and gives end-users insight into features they can expect to see in future updates to our plug-ins.
New This Quarter | Coming Next Quarter | Upcoming Features |
AMD Radeon Rays 3.0 | Performance Improvements | Performance Improvements |
AMD Radeon Image Filter Library | Out-of-Core for Heavy Geometry | Cloud Rendering Solution |
AI-Accelerated Denoising | Deformation Motion Blur | Thin Film Shader |
Adaptive Sampling | Vertex Color Mapping |
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Volumes Support | Hybrid Rendering |
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Hair Support |
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Online Developer Documentation |
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ONGOING IMPROVEMENTS ON WINDOWS, MACOS, & LINUX: | ||
Updated Plug-Ins Available Now
The updated Radeon ProRender plug-ins for 3ds Max, Maya 1, and Blender 2.8 Beta are available now, as is Modo 13 with Radeon ProRender integration. For developers, the Radeon ProRender Developer Suite is available from our developer webpage.
For more information about all our new Radeon ProRender features check out the updated web pages for the 3ds Max and Maya plug-ins, the release notes for the Blender 2.8 Beta plug-in, and our updated Modo webpage.
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.
Alexander Blake-Davies is a Software Product Marketing Specialist for Professional Graphics at AMD’s Radeon Technology Group. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied. GD-5
Footnotes
- Updates and new features not available in the AMD Radeon™ ProRender for Maya® plug-in for Linux®
Attribution
Ferrari 488 GTB header image by Mike Pan created using AMD Radeon™ ProRender for Blender™
Ferrari 488 GTB design is the property of Ferrari S.p.A.
AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, Radeon, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. Autodesk, the Autodesk logo, 3ds Max, and Maya are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or affiliates in the USA and/or other countries. Blender is a registered trademark of the Blender Foundation in EU and USA. macOS is a registered trademark of Apple Inc. Modo is a registered trademark of The Foundry, in the USA and/or other countries. OpenCL is a trademark of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos Group Inc. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. Vulkan is a registered trademark of Khronos Group Inc. Other product names used in this publication are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks of their respective companies.