Review: Shaderlight Plug-in

(Originally published in 3D Artist Magazine)

To travel may be better than to arrive, but when rendering you’ll want to make the journey as short as possible.

Shaderlight plug-in

For: SketchUp Pro $199

For: 3dsMax $450

http://www.artvps.com/

If you’ve been ray-tracing so long you have a pet name for every pixel on your screen, try Shaderlight.

Waiting for a render to finish is comparable to watching paint dry. Rendering can be a laboriously time-consuming process of producing and then fine-tuning multiple low-res preview renders until you ultimately reach the desired high-res result. This workflow eats away at time allocated for post-production work and can impede creativity in the rush to deadline. But what if you could make changes while the paint is still wet?

ArtVPS recognised this need for efficiency and developed the Shaderlight plug-in for windows platforms, which is now updated to version 1.3 for 3ds Max and newly released for SketchUP. Essentially it's a physically based ray-tracer that lets you see the render develop - via its own Shaderlight render window - and enables you to interactively change key attributes on the fly, even at production ready settings, without having to re-render the frame. These key attributes are abbreviated as MELT (Materials, Elements, Lights and Textures). This provides the user with fast render-time feedback making fine tuning easier and decreases the tendency to compromise on quality in favour of speed.

These key attributes are abbreviated as MELT (Materials, Elements, Lights and Textures) however when rendering you'll soon discover that not everything will MELT and a full re-render will be needed. MELT uses intelligent pixels that have information embedded in them that's used to automatically update the render when changes are made. Memory is used for storing the intelligent pixel data so 8 GB of RAM is recommended with 3ds Max and 2 GB for SketchUp to keep everything running effectively. It’s possible to work with less but you’re more likely to experience crashes. Reducing the polycount makes little difference as speed and memory usage depend more on the 2D render complexity than the 3D scene. There is currently no GPU support to assist with rendering.

The new SketchUp release cements Shaderlight as a tool created for photorealistic arch-vis and design work. It’s very easy to use with no complicated settings and is accessed by a four button toolbar in SketchUP. In 3ds Max you’ll use the Utilities Tab. Being a renderer in its own right, it's incompatible with other 3rd party renders, and does not use mental ray or V-Ray materials. The 3ds Max update is focused on performance optimisations for faster rendering and enhanced interactivity when making MELT changes, and the addition of partial scene retracing and lower memory requirements along with a price reduction make Shaderlight a competitive, professional rendering solution.

Summary

A capable ray-tracer in both formats designed to meet the needs of architects and designers on a schedule.

Test rendering interiors with high-res feedback makes its possible to see the end result more clearly for arch-vis artists.

Sample scene files like this, and tutorials, are available at artvps.com to help you get ray-tracing.