Today, we are providing a beta preview of Radeon ProRender with Full Spectrum Rendering in our Blender 2.80 addon. This gives artists a viewport that can be scaled from super-fast rasterized to fully ray traced, all with physically accurate materials and lighting. You can download the add-on from Here.

What is Full Spectrum Rendering?

In essence, Full Spectrum Rendering is an extension of Radeon ProRender beyond "just" a path traced renderer using OpenCL. We use the same Radeon ProRender SDK, but have a different rendering backend for Full Spectrum Rendering. This new rendering backend uses rasterization to render the scene like many game engines or the EEVEE viewport renderer in Blender. However, it uses Vulkan for faster rendering, and then can add ray traced effects such as reflection, refraction, and ambient occlusion. These effects are achieved using compute shaders and smart denoising. The end effect of the renderer is to harness all the power of the GPU, including taking advantage of GPU ray tracing acceleration where available. Dialing up or down these effects is what allows Full Spectrum Rendering to scale for speed and quality.

The other great part here is for developers. Minimal changes to the Blender plug-in were made to take advantage of this. And using the universal Radeon ProRender SDK allows the developer and user to change the quality and speed of rendering in only a few lines of code.

Why do I need Full Spectrum Rendering?

There are two huge benefits for artists with this implementation of Radeon ProRender: it is an all-in-one solution, and it helps to fill a wide gap between OpenGL viewports (such as EEVEE) and full path-tracers (like Cycles). Most of these benefits are realized in the viewport, for lookdev: setting up scenes, and changing lighting, shaders, etc. Now users can get a more interactive experience like EEVEE with more physically correct soft shadows and reflections and refractions. Furthermore, these are done without the user having to set up light probes or do any other manual tasks. Finally, the quality/speed settings can be changed for more interactive or physically correct lighting and shading based on the user's needs.

How to use it.

For now, we only support Windows 10 with Full Spectrum Rendering (Linux is supported in the SDK). Download and install the add-on, and select Radeon ProRender as your default renderer in Blender. Switch your viewport to rendered mode, and the rendering will start. Try the different rendering modes (low, medium, high, full) and see the lighting differences as well as interactivity.

For best results, use Blender's Principled material on your models. A few interesting things to try are:

Interacting with the scene, moving, scaling objects around

Changing shaders

Changing lighting

Changing the RPR quality settings and observing differences in interactivity and in lighting quality.

Thanks for trying it out, and as this is a new product, we look forward to your feedback!

Release notes:

2.0.132 9/23/19



Glass shader uses reflection + refraction (previously used just refraction)

Fixed issue with material previews being too bright

Denoiser works in viewport renders

IES profiles can be added to point lights, also fixed an issue if they were rotated 90 degrees

Lookdev viewport mode is supported

Fix issue with outline around shadow catcher objects

Removed "mesh" type area light. Use objects with emissive material instead.

Fixed issue with packed images not exporting correctly

Add button in material properties to "upgrade" Principled Shader to Uber

Uber shader in node graph uses a dropdown menu to enable layers

Add Diffuse Albedo AOV to UI

Add support for a reflection catcher (next to the shadow catcher in the UI)

Support Second UV set. Select the second UV to export in the mesh properties

Change Anisotropy Rotation to match Cycles

Fixed .rpr file export

Fixed issue with Displacement shader if normal was not connected.

Expose Anti-Aliasing filter settings in UI

Fixed an issue where viewport rendering could crash in Linux

Lights use the built in blender intensity when in "default" power units. Otherwise use a separate power level. This better matches Blender.

Added Full Spectrum viewport modes (windows only). These can be selected in the "RPR" menu in the viewport. Lower quality gives better interactivity.

2.0.150 10/11/2019

Fixed a memory leak when rendering a memory leak with the ML Denoiser

Displacement now matches the Cycles method. Set the method in the material properties to bump or displacement (or both). Note: If displacement is jaggy, increase the subdivision of the object in modifiers

Roughness of Glossy, Glass nodes matches better (cycles squares them)

Add a layered texture and shader node for doing complex material or texture layering

Scenes with many instances clean up faster after rendering

HSV node is improved and faster

Add compression settings and single file option to RPR export

Viewport rendering no longer freezes blender UI when starting by exporting in a separate thread

ML Denoiser is improved

Fireflies when using an emissive material with high values is improved

Shading artifacts inside shadow of lights are improved

An issue with curves on macOS is improved

Passthrough shaders now show up in the Emission AOV

Windows installer allows installing if only CPU is available for rendering

Installer allows installing directly to Blender 2.81



2.0.153 10/25/2019

A config JSON file is exported with .rpr file to help rendering with RPRSRender64.exe

Support collection settings for indirect only visibility

CPU is disabled for hybrid

Support for meshes with PrincipledVolume Shader attached to render as Volumes. Use this to create a fog box for example.

2.0.162 11/08/2019

Add setting for Transparent Background in render settings. (Under Film section)

Denoiser is available for hybrid (except ML denoiser)

Fixed error when using "Halo" type particles

Updated to support Blender 2.81 Mapping node

Add a button to create an environment Fog in world settings

Fixed an error when enabling denoiser while viewport is running.

Enabled Hybrid modes for Linux

Added an option to override materials for a view layer

Fixed a few hybrid mode issues: Fixed a bug when changing viewport quality from high to low while rendering could produce crash Made objects with volume shaders transparent instead of pink Fixed warnings with emissive or passthrough materials Disabled tiled rendering for hybrid CPU is disabled for hybrid

Updated ML denoiser. Potentially fixed issues on macOS (please test)

Selected final render devices are added to config json when exporting .rpr files

Improved RPR Principled shader to be closer to Cycles

Emission amount is tweaked Diffuse weight with semi-transparent objects is better Specular input only affects non-metallic



Please download from Here