www.kraytracing.com

NewTek just released a press article that showed some of the features planned for the free 9.5 update. One of the sections of the features pertain heavily to lighting. So my question is how will this effect/improve Kray? Very promising.

Lighting, Rendering and Surfacing Enhancements All New Lighting System

* New Light API
* IES Lights
* New Spherical Light
* Area and Linear Lights Enhanced

SDK and LScript Improvements

* New Light Plug-in Class for third Party Lights and Light Plug-ins
* SDK Support for New GI Functions and Disk Cache

That would be hard to tell, since nobody will know until the Beta comes out at the beginning of march.

I don't think any of the dev.team/internal testers has newtek insight nor do i think G. has seen or heard anything specific about the insights or code.

But then again, it doesn't really matter, since Lw will stay backwards compatible. So, even if any new functions is really an addon instead of a workaround it will eventually end up in Kray.

BTW: Great new update by Newtek. More then i hoped for. Except instances are still lacking. But they will get in the LW 9.x cycle, so it's just a matter of time (approx. another 6 months, i guess).

I guess it will mean that Kray can take advantage of these great new features. I hope NewTek also brings some needed SDK changes so Kray can become even better.

Florian

I believe SDK changes were listed also that full press release, which were lights stuff etc, so It should be good for Kray also...

Looks like LW9.5 is going to bring some heat, GI-wise...

http://newtek.com/forums/showpost.php?p ... tcount=281
http://newtek.com/forums/showpost.php?p ... tcount=306

There are some other renders that have been posted that look great, but without render times they're worthless for making comparisons to Kray.

http://newtek.com/forums/attachment.php ... 1203640430

Unless he's using old hardware, over three minutes for that is very unimpressive. It's better than Lightwave's ever managed to do before, yeah, but compared to Kray, or modo, or even mental ray? Not so much. Feh. Unless they made it temporally stable enough for animation use, I'll stick to being unimpressed. If it's usable for animations, even without caching, then I think it's pretty cool.

Don't worry, its not breaking in to Kray territory anytime soon.

It is faster then LW ever has been before and the quality is better for the amount of rays used vs the older LW but.... its not dangering Kray's speed/quality niche.

Its good for people who don't have Kray though since they can utilze a nice/faster GI engine then LW is used to.

Well, despite Captain Obvious' apparent difficult-to-impress nature (;)), in particular the T-Rex and the sci-fi greebles scenes seem pretty quick to me. The T-Rex is lit by one of the more contrasty HDR environments, and the sci-fi scene...well, I've been trying to render a somewhat similar scene on my comp in Kray and getting times quite a bit longer...and my comp is no slouch (granted, current ones can be over 3x as fast).

I get the feeling Kray will still be the king of blurry reflections for a good while though.

Weepul wrote:Well, despite Captain Obvious' apparent difficult-to-impress nature (;)), in particular the T-Rex and the sci-fi greebles scenes seem pretty quick to me. The T-Rex is lit by one of the more contrasty HDR environments, and the sci-fi scene...well, I've been trying to render a somewhat similar scene on my comp in Kray and getting times quite a bit longer...and my comp is no slouch (granted, current ones can be over 3x as fast).

I get the feeling Kray will still be the king of blurry reflections for a good while though.

I agree, I think the AA setting is pretty good too, so 3mins is not "that" bad..

would be nice to know what hardware it was rendered on, to have a good reference.

Kray won't be threatened by LW's improved GI speed. I have to say that LW is about as fast as Kray is now in terms of speed vs quality in many circumstances, but it is very sensitive to certain things, and Kray is much more robust and has a much larger sweet spot, not to mention Kray works in 99% of all cases really well while Lw's render engine can still trip over certain scenes.

It is normal raytracing speed that Kray excels in. If G can speed up / enhance the AA in Kray, it'll be hard to beat.

The disk caching in the new LW is very well executed though. Really well done.

I never meant that Kray would be threatened by the new 9.5 features, though I do believe it closes that gap a bit. Three minutes for clean GI on that dino. was pretty impressive to me. Then again, what was the hardware specs.

My intent on "what does this mean for Kray" was how would the new enhancements play a part in the development of Kray. I believe because G.'s primary focus of development is lighting/rendering, where as NT is more well rounded (i.e. lighting, modeling, character animation, etc.), Kray will more than likely always have that edge.

I think the more important aspect of 9.5 for kray would be the sdk changes. Depending on what they did change, it could help or hinder kray development.

Everything that's in Lw SDK now is mostly unchanged for 9.5. All there are is additions, so no matter what, Kray will function the way it is now.

The Light API is very powerful. It will allow Kray to make specific Kray lights if necessary. Also, the radiosity settings hould be more accessible now so Kray can perhaps read out some more values, but I'm not sure how useful that would be.

New light types like the spherical light and the IES lights should be accessible to Kray. If they are not, and you're reading this, G, please let me know ASAP (and I mean soon!) so I can make sure they are.