REDsdk 4.3: sky is the limit

Cloud rendering solution

REDWAY3D put significant efforts in developing a rendering solution for clouds with REDsdk 4.3. Indeed, REDsdk could already simulate all types of skies, but clouds were missing. The possibility to get a true physically realistic cloudy sky with no effort (as the environment is completely generated by REDsdk), makes a huge difference in terms of realism. Obviously, this is a prerequisite for all outdoor renderings, but it also adds a lot of realism for indoor renderings specially when the model contains many reflective objects. REDsdk offers two different algorithms:

• True volumetric clouds: for a top-level realism where you need cloud to interact with your geometries
• Background clouds: based on artistic textures plates, ideal for environments as faster to process than the previous solution.

New ray-tracing algorithms

REDsdk 4.3 integrates new versions of three key algorithms used in ray-tracing, which are the “multiple importance sampling”, the “probabilistic light sampling” and the “adaptive ray-tracing”. All these algorithms target a unique goal, send fewer rays but sample directions in space which matter the most for a chosen rendering point of view. The result is quite astonishing, as the speed increase, while scene dependent, can easily reach a 300% gain or more for an equivalent quality.

New post-processing features

The set of post-processing effects available in REDsdk has been increased to include a new set of post-effects with sharpen, glow, blur and depth of field. Color manipulation controls have been added too like brightness / contrast,  hue / saturation / lightness and input / output levels. The goal is to provide new tools to REDsdk based applications end-users  that will enable them to retouch images completely without living their software, thus saving time and money.

Real-time improvements

A few enhancements were made in REDsdk 4.3 to enhance the lighting capabilities of the GPU:

• Portals are now visible and rendered by the GPU. Portals are considered as physical lights and are converted to the GPU as any other physical light.
• IES profiles are now visible and rendered, with no associated performance cost.

Other miscellaneous enhancements:

• Improvements have been made to optimize the management of huge dynamic scene graphs in REDsdk.
• Support for the HTC Vive VR helmet has been added.

Better debug output

A new Error tracking feature has been added to REDsdk to provide a better feedback on errors. Practically, the hosting application must declare a callback to gather errors at the time they happen. Depending on the kind of error that may occur in REDsdk, extra information is available to facilitate the debugging. At the same time, a REDsdk error log file is dumped in the binary folder of the application.

Stereoscopic panoramas

A new tutorial (creating stereoscopic panorama) has been added to show how REDsdk can be used to create stereoscopic panoramas images that can be then loaded to the Oculus or HTC Vive.