2019 has been a great year for AMD Radeon ProRender, our fast, easy, and incredible physically-based rendering engine built on industry standards that enables accelerated rendering on virtually any GPU, any CPU, and any OS in over a dozen leading digital content creation and CAD applications.

At SIGGRAPH 2019 at the end of July, we made some major announcements, including integration into ACCA Edificius BIM Architectural Design and Edificius Land BIM Landscape Design, plug-in support for Blender 2.80, upcoming integration into InstaLOD Studio XL, upcoming distributed cloud rendering services, and updates for developers.

Since then, Radeon ProRender has been gaining even more industry support, with more new integrations, more plug-ins, and more updates -- read on to see why Radeon ProRender really is everywhere!



New Application Integrations

SOLIDWORKS Visualize lets you quickly and easily create photorealistic renderings and animations from 3D CAD data, and the Standard edition is included with SOLIDWORKS Professional and Premium. However, up until now, an NVIDIA graphics card was required for GPU-accelerated rendering of your designs in Visualize. That’s all changed now with the latest update -- SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2020, released at the beginning of October, has added support for rendering on AMD graphics cards using Radeon ProRender.

Image created by AMD using Radeon ProRender for SOLIDWORKS Visualize 2020. Model courtesy of Septimatech Group Inc.

After announcing the upcoming integration at SIGGRAPH, InstaLOD has now launched Studio XL 2020 that integrates Radeon ProRender into what is one of the leading applications for optimizing 3D content for any platform. The integration enables fast and easy photorealistic GPU-accelerated visualizations from right within Studio XL and includes our AI-accelerated denoising technology.

Image created by InstaLOD using Radeon ProRender for InstaLOD Studio XL 2020 and is used with permission



Updated Application Integrations

MAXON Cinema 4D was the first content creation application to integrate Radeon ProRender, and the Release 21 update announced at SIGGRAPH 2019 launched in September. The R21 update includes a number of key improvements to Radeon ProRender, including support for the node-based materials first introduced in R20, volume rendering, and updated motion blur and multi-pass rendering options.

Image created by Yan Ge using Radeon ProRender for Cinema 4D R21 and is used with permission

Modo is Foundry’s powerful and flexible 3D modeling and rendering tool, and earlier this year at NAB 2019 we announced that Radeon ProRender is integrated into the new version, Modo 13. Since that release, there have been a few updates, with the latest being Modo 13.2. The 13.2 update includes several improvements to the integrated Radeon ProRender, including support for Film Offset, Specular, and Dissolve, and has been updated to the included AMD denoising filters.

Image created by Mike Griggs using Radeon ProRender for Modo 13 and is used with permission



New Plug-Ins

The latest Radeon ProRender update is our just-released plug-in for SideFX Houdini 18. This new version of SideFX’s groundbreaking procedural 3D modeling and animation system introduces SideFX Solaris, a USD-based set of tools for lookdev, layout, and lighting, with our Radeon ProRender plug-in being one of the first USD HYDRA-compliant renderers available for Solaris.

Image created by SideFX using Radeon ProRender for Houdini 18 and is used with permission

Our plug-in for Solaris includes many of the features of our Radeon ProRender plug-ins for other applications, such as adaptive sampling, AI-accelerated denoising, OpenVDB volumes, displacement, and our Vulkan API-based Full Spectrum Rendering technology that supports every stage of the rendering pipeline from rasterized to path-traced reality.

Updated Plug-Ins

At Autodesk University 2019 we announced our updated plug-ins for Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya , with new features including adding Full Spectrum Rendering to Maya and support for Maya MASH Instances. During the same week, we announced our updated plug-in for Blender to support the latest 2.81 version on the day of its release, adding our Full Spectrum Rendering technology and material improvements, amongst other updates.

Image created by Yohsuke Nakano using Radeon ProRender for Maya and rendered using Render Pool, used with permission

Now, as a holiday gift to the Blender community, we’re planning to release an updated plug-in for Blender 2.81 (updated plug-in expected by Dec 23, 2019), with some installer updates that make installing the plug-in easier, and accelerated geometry export with significant improvements in the time it takes to start rendering after you hit “render”.



Distributed Cloud Rendering

At SIGGRAPH 2019, we announced our collaboration with Bullet Render Farm so you can leverage the power of the cloud and the security of blockchain to get complex rendering jobs completed. Now, we're happy to reveal our second cloud-rendering partnership with Render Pool that can offer Radeon ProRender users render times that are up to “100 to 1000 times faster when compared to standard local computer rendering”.*

Image created by Yohsuke Nakano using Radeon ProRender for Maya and rendered using Render Pool, used with permission

Updated Quarterly Development Roadmap

Lastly, we’ve updated our development roadmap for Radeon ProRender for the end of the year, listing the planned features scheduled to be added in the next quarter and beyond. This roadmap both provides developers information about planned updates to our SDK and gives end-users insight into what they can expect to see in future updates to our plug-ins and application integrations.

New This Quarter Planned for Next Quarter Upcoming Features Production Release of Full Spectrum Rendering in plug-ins Production release of Full Spectrum Rendering for developers Preview release of Full Spectrum Rendering 2.0 for developers Online documentation updates Preview release of Radeon ProRender 2.0 for developers and end-users Production release of Radeon ProRender 2.0 for developers Multi-GPU adaptive sampling Updated Unreal Engine plug-in Updated material library Tapered hair and fur Support for Blender 2.82 Light baking Support for Maya 2020 ONGOING IMPROVEMENTS ON WINDOWS , mac OS , & LINUX :

Continued Open Standards Support, Implementing Developer Feedback, and Performance Improvements





New and Updated Integrations and Plug-Ins Available Now

Nearly everything you’ve read about above is available today, from the new integration into InstaLOD Studio XL 2020 and updates to the Cinema 4D and Modo 13 integrations, to the new plug-in for Houdini 18 and updated plug-ins for 3ds Max and Maya. Our latest update to our plug-in for Blender 2.81 should be available by Dec 23, 2019, as our holiday gift to the Blender community!

For more information about Radeon ProRender, please check out our web page.

To provide feedback or report any issues please join our AMD Radeon ProRender Community.

To discuss AMD Radeon ProRender with other users you can also join the AMD Radeon ProRender Discord.

Footnotes:

*Source: FAQ on https://renderpool.net/

Title image render created by InstaLOD using Radeon ProRender for InstaLOD Studio XL and is used with permission.

Alexander Blake-Davies is a Professional Graphics Software Product Marketing Specialist for AMD. His/her postings are his/her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third-party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied. GD-5