We're happy to announce the first post-2.4 beta.
There are two changes in this release:
30-Day Trial
First off, there is now a 30 day trial that will start as soon as you install this beta. The trial allows you to render at unlimited resolution for 30 days. There will however be relatively subtle watermarks over the high resolution image. After the 30 day trial has expired, you can still render at <= 0.7 Megapixels with the single Indigo watermark in the lower right corner.
Architectural Glass Acceleration
Secondly, we have a new acceleration technique for bidirectional path tracing that helps with the rendering of light through glass. In particular, it greatly improves rendering of the 'sunlight through glass' type of lighting, where the camera is outside a building looking in through a window into an interior that is also illuminated by sunlight.
The accleration option is called 'Architectural Glass Acceleration' and can be enabled by setting
<glass_acceleration>true</glass_acceleration>
to true in your inifile.xml or renderer_settings inside your scene. Support for this option should be made availble soon by the exporter writers.
Architectural Glass Acceleration is an unbiased technique that makes no approximations.
It can slow down rendering a little bit, so for scenes with no architectural glass, it should be set to false.
Changelog:
2.6.1
* Added Architectural glass acceleration option 'glass_acceleration'
* Added 30 day trial which allows rendering at high res with watermarks for 30 days.
Results
You can see some results using Architectural Glass Acceleration below - each scene is rendered first without glass acceleration, then rendered with glass acceleration for the same period of time. Architectural Glass Acceleration allows the sunlight illuminating the interiors through glass to resolve much faster.
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