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Roadmap

Note

We share the future roadmap for informational purposes. This road map is not set in stone. We are pragmatic and might deviate from the roadmap, dropping features from a release or adding things in some circumstances.

Version 1.0 - Upcoming Release#

Rendering#

  • Support for unbiased, biased render modes:
    • Global illumination mode: Physically correct global illumination based on path tracing. Suitable for high-quality renders.
    • Approximate Global Illumination: Ray tracing using ambient occlusion to simulate global illumination. Suitable for preview rendering
    • Multiple faux color render passes:
      • Albedo
      • Alpha
      • Ambient occlusion.
      • Geometric Normals.
      • Shading Normals.
      • Shading Incidence
      • Shading dP/dU
      • Shading dP/dV
      • Texture Coordinates.
      • World Coordinates
  • AI denoising, delivering noise-free results with fewer samples per pixel, drastically reducing render times.
  • A configurable number of render threads.
  • Highlight clamping feature to avoid bright pixels, also called fireflies or hot pixels.
  • Support for GPU rendering 1.

Interactivity#

Rayscaper provides an interactive rendering workflow, empowering creators to iterate quickly before settling on a final look at their renders:

  • WYSIWYG - Rayscaper uses the same render engine for interactive and final rendering.
  • Sub-sampling of the first frame to get quicker visual feedback.
  • Integration of the highly performant Intel Embree ray tracing kernels.

Lights#

  • Rayscaper supports several light types:
    • Sphere lights
    • Point lights.
    • Directional lights.
    • Light emitting materials.
  • Rayscaper efficiently renders scenes with many light sources.
  • Texture environment light with support for HDRI maps.

Materials#

  • Interactive preview for all your materials with user-configurable resolution.
  • Comprehensive asset library with more than PBR textures and HDRI environments. The most excellent PolyHaven provides the assets. -[x] Ability to save your materials in a library for reuse in other projects. -[x] Several easily configurable physically based rendering (PBR) materials:
    • Diffuse
    • Disney principled material.
    • Glass
    • Metal
    • Coated Material
    • Mirror
    • Plastic Material -[x] Several easy-to-use textures: -[x] Image textures. -[x] Checkerboard texture. -[x] UV texture. -[x] Procedural noise texture.
  • Every material supports an optional normal map.
  • Every material supports an optional bump (height) map (coming soon).
  • Every material can have an optional opacity map to cut out pieces of the underlying geometry.
  • Texture and blackbody emission for diffuse materials, allowing geometry to emit light in the scene.
  • Quick edit actions for a faster material workflow: -[x] Global UV edit, edits the UVs for all textures in a material in one action. -[x] Flexible image texture importer to quickly setup the textures of a PBR material.

Camera#

  • Interactive camera tracking from SketchUp.
  • Depth-of-field (DOF) camera effect.
  • Viewport sync between SketchUp and Rayscaper to get an exact 1:1 representation of the SketchUp viewport.

Tone Mapping#

  • Rayscaper supports interactive tone mapping. Changes to the tone mapping configuration don’t require a re-render.
  • Several tone map operators:
    • Linear.
    • Reinhard
  • Vignette effect.
  • Configurable exposure.

SketchUp Integrations#

  • Automatic material conversion from SketchUp to Rayscaper PBR materials.
  • Sync option for SketchUp material updates. This feature syncs the configuration of materials in SketchUp to Rayscaper.
  • Real-time tracking of the SketchUp viewport camera.
  • Optional locking of SketchUp viewport camera updates. This feature allows the user to navigate the scene in SketchUp while freezing the camera in Rayscaper.
  • Powerful light tools to create Rayscaper lights directly in SketchUp.
  • Export the *.skp file together with texture and HDRI files in a ZIP archive for easy sharing.
  • Hiding and unhiding of SketchUp objects, geometry and tags.
  • Support for SketchUp's colorized materials.

Version 1.x - Coming Soon#

Rayscaper 1.x will launch after the first 1.0 release is launched. This release will be a free upgrade for all customers who purchased a 1.0 license.

Camera Features#

  • Panoramic camera to create your own HDRI maps.
  • Orthographic camera.

Lights#

  • Physical sun and sky model.

Materials#

  • Shadow catcher material.
  • More easy-to-use textures:
    • Color correction utility texture.
    • Marble texture.

Tone Mapping#

  • Integration with OpenColorIO.
  • ACES filmic curves.
  • Interactive post-processing effects:
    • Bloom
    • Glare

SketchUp Integrations#

  • Animation support:
    • Standard SketchUp animation support.
    • Fredo Animator support.
  • Support SketchUp section cuts.

  1. Rayscaper only supports NVIDIA GPUs with compute capability 5.0 or higher. It can leverage hardware ray tracing on RTX GPUs, if available. You can check your GPU on the NVIDIA compute capability page. ↩