New features introduced within this release:
- Simplified Global Illumination
- Improved Final Gather
- Shadow Map Efficiency
- Re-engineered Real-time Plus
- New Shaders
- New PNG driver
LightWork Design is committed to providing customers with maximum performance, quality and cost-efficiency.
The main focus of the release of LightWorks 7.8 is to improve the accuracy, performance and the ease-of-use of lighting, global illumination, tone mapping and gamma correction making the creation of photorealistic imagery even easier.
The main new developments in this release are outlined below but for more detailed information, please contact us.
Lighting
As part of our continued customer enhancement program, a new simplified user interface has been introduced for Global Illumination. New controllers make Advanced Lighting easier to use and provide improved usability and performance for both experts and non-experts alike whilst also speeding up integration within customers’ applications so that the finished product is more user friendly and dynamic.
Final Gather has been made more intuitive as the speed/quality tradeoff has been improved making this simpler to use. LightWorks now includes both diffuse and specular shaders for Final Gather, to allow a wider range of photorealistic effects to be created. There is also extra flexibility in the way that dome lights can be used with Final Gather, again offering improved speed and ease-of-use.
The efficiency of LightWorks shadow map generation code has been improved so that shadow map generation now no longer performs complete material initialisation for the scene as the material data is not needed for the shadow maps. This will result in performance improvements and lower memory usage for some scenes during shadow map creation. Improvements will be particularly noticeable for scenes containing large textures.
Real-time Plus
The Real-time Plus technology has been re-engineered to provide better performance as well as improved control over prioritised rendering. Also, LightWorks Real-time now includes better support for gamma correction so that real-time renders more closely match software renders in terms of colour.
Other improvements
- New Architectural Toolbox features
- Lit Appearance reflectance shaders
- Tone Mapping improvements
In addition to these features, there are also a range of other improvements which have been made in LightWorks 7.8 to ensure that customers have the most cost-effective route to creating advanced rendering applications for their users. Please contact us for futher information.