ArtVPS launches Shaderlight heralding new age in interactive rendering

New Shaderlight rendering plug-in for 3ds Max enables fundamental changes to be made to key image attributes at any stage in the rendering process.

ArtVPS has made Shaderlight, its revolutionary new interactive rendering technology, available for free download. Shaderlight promises to deliver massive productivity and creativity improvements over traditional ray-trace rendering engines. Shaderlight 0.1 is a plug-in for 3ds Max, the leading 3D modelling tool from Autodesk, and is free to download. Early adopters of the technology will be encouraged to help shape the software by becoming part of the Shaderlight online community and providing valuable feedback during the key final phase of product development.

Shaderlight is a physically based ray-trace renderer that for the first time enables 3D artists and visualisation specialists to make changes to key image attributes at any stage of the rendering process – even on production quality images – without having to restart the render. Providing a greater level of creative freedom than traditional rendering techniques, Shaderlight enables users to not only see the progressive refinement of a scene when objects or camera angles are altered but also allows them to make interactive changes to materials, environments, lights and textures (the MELT elements) on full quality 3D images. Shaderlight also includes a new approach to global illumination (GI), which enables light, colour and intensity to be updated on screen without the need to re-render.

"As a CG artist I often have to work with clients who have no real idea of how long even the slightest change to an image can take to re-render,” says Olaf Finkbeiner, CGI operator at Mainworks GmbH Germany and a member of the Shaderlight Product Steering Committee. “The ability to make changes to materials or environments on a final image would save us days of re-rendering and in this industry time is money."

Michael Lawson, CTO at ArtVPS adds: “This is an exciting time for everyone at ArtVPS. After 18 months of hard work we are delighted to launch Shaderlight 0.1. Shaderlight stands to fundamentally change the way 3D artists and visualisation specialists go about generating images. At the heart of the development has been the user’s experience and we believe that the time and cost savings that Shaderlight will bring are invaluable in terms of improving efficiency and project turnaround. CG professionals need never compromise on the quality of their final output again.”