iray dev blog

This blog is dedicated to educating iray users with tips, tutorials and latest features of the NVIDIA iray renderer - written by the iray developers at NVIDIA

[irayrender]

Inside NVIDIA HQ

Inside Nvidia HQ: What a $2T Company’s Office Looks Like | WSJ Open Office - YouTube If you remember, the light simulation software mentioned many many times in this video (and which can even be seen early in the first few seconds), which helped to iterate over/create the NV HQ as-it-is, was of course, Iray.. :)

[irayrender]

Iray 2023.1.0

..just in time for christmas, this comes with tons of updates to our toolchain and 3rdparty software, along with improvements for fibers/curves, displacement and the usual bunch of bugfixes all over the place.

[irayrender]

Iray 2023.0.6

And once more, security patches and bugfixes..

[irayrender]

Iray 2023.0.4

After an internal/OV-only release (2023.0.3), 2023.0.4 is now being shipped. :)

Includes more bugfixes and some perf improvements for volume rendering, along with security updates.

[irayrender]

Finally solving surface acne

Something technical again for a change: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/solving-self-intersection-artifacts-in-directx-raytracing/

What is this all about? Hopefully the final chapter in finally solving the infamous self intersection problem (leading to images that are too dark and harmed by small (sometimes large) artifacts) that has been plaguing ray tracing based rendering since the very beginning.

Note that Iray was the world-first product to ship with this new scheme. :)

[irayrender]

Iray 2023.0.2

Next small bugfix release is incoming today

[irayrender]

Iray 2023.0.1

.. released. "Just" a lot of bug fixes and small improvements this time. :)

[irayrender]

Iray 2023.0.0 final

..was just released.

Major improvements over the beta:

Performance, performance, performance. :)

We mostly got back all the perf loss we introduced in the beta when running the new caustic sampler 2.0 (compared to cs 1.0 in 2022.1.X), plus we optimized general performance on the Ada Lovelace GPU architecture, and Iray is now faster when using rather complicated MDL materials (i.e. MDL JIT path is triggered). Then a lot of performance optimizations all over the place, e.g. when using fibers/hair, rounded corners or cutouts.

In addition there is also one additional new major feature over the beta: Support for the new Mie phase function for volumes, introduced along with MDL 1.8.X.

On top we have dozens of important bug fixes, as usual.

The new release will also be available soon within Omniverse, of course, via the RTX Accurate rendering mode.

[irayrender]

vMaterials 2.2

vMaterials NVIDIA vMaterials is a curated collection of MDL materials and lights representing common real-world materials used in the design

..obviously fully supported with iray, as usual :)

[irayrender]

Small comparison on a tricky caustic scene (yup, swimming pools are still evil to render in 2023 ;)).

From top to bottom: Caustic sampler 2.0. Caustic sampler 1.0. No caustic sampler (but with approximate caustics).

[irayrender]

Iray 2023.0.0 beta

Main features:

Completely redone Caustic Sampler 2.0 with vastly improved precision and more complete simulation capabilities

Full MDL 1.8 support

General improvements to preprocessing and scene updates (with even more to come)

Iray Server is now part of the normal Iray SDK licensing (="for free" on top)

..and tons and tons of fixes and minor improvements all over the place.

As usual, it will also be included as RTX Accurate inside of Omniverse as the Iray 2023.0.0 final arrives.

[irayrender]

2023.0.0 beta Teaser..

[irayrender]

Any chance that Iray will add "Albedo" to its list of canvas options?

The raw unlit colour data of surfaces is often needed for compositing and post production purposes, so it seems like a quite major missing feature.

The Iray SDK itself already has that (its called BSDF weights), so the app you're using would just need to expose it.

[irayrender]

Iray 2022.1.7

..as 2023.0.0 beta took a bit more time than expected, just a small intermediate bugfix release

[irayrender]

Iray 2022.1.6

..is out. This one is mainly about bugfixes.

Next up: 2023.0.0 beta with some nice new features and a lot of substantial improvements, should be incoming directly after GTC.

[irayrender]

Hello, I have a questions regarding the latest Iray versions. Why is the latest 2022.1.1 slower than the 2022.0 version. When tested the same scene on a same rig in DAZ3D it's about 8-10% slower. Another question, why is the utilization on 4090 worse than on 3090? I feel like the performance issues weren't fixed. This is especially visible when guided sampling is enabled.

We re-designed the precision/self-intersection-handling code dramatically. Due to this, some scenes (depending on features and the HW setup) can show a ~5% slowdown. We hope that 2023.0.0 will fix this mostly again, while keeping the robust automatic handling intact.

As for the 4090 showing less utilization on the average: Optimizations on the Ada Lovelace architecture are not finished yet. These will also depend on (unreleased so far) new NVIDIA OptiX features. Stay tuned.

[irayrender]

hey there, I’ve been stuck at this issue for far too long… I’m trying to edit the .mi files exported from iview2 but each time I change/move even a character inside the file, iview2 fails to load the edited file. Why is this? can .mi files be edited or are they not supposed to be edited? any help in this regard will be hugely appreciated.

.mi files are indeed be able to be edited by design.

BUT if the .mi files also feature binary data (so mixed ASCII/binary .mi), then its important that the used editor leaves everything else of the file as-is during editing.