{"id":2245,"date":"2019-01-08T08:56:45","date_gmt":"2019-01-08T08:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.migenius.com\/?p=2245"},"modified":"2019-01-08T08:56:45","modified_gmt":"2019-01-08T08:56:45","slug":"whats-new-in-realityserver-5-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.migenius.com\/articles\/whats-new-in-realityserver-5-2","title":{"rendered":"What’s New in RealityServer 5.2"},"content":{"rendered":"

RealityServer 5.2 is here and adds some great functionality. Hugely expanded glTF 2.0 importer support, wireframe rendering, lightmap rendering, section plane capping, MDL 1.4 support, UDIM support and many more features have been added along with many fixes and smaller enhancements based on extensive customer feedback. In this post we will run through some of the most interesting functionality and how it can help you build your applications.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\"RealityServer\n

glTF 2.0 Importer<\/h3>\n

Previous versions of RealityServer have already supported the glTF file format<\/a> however it only imported very basic materials. In this release we have significantly expanded support for glTF 2.0 to include full support for its built in PBR material model, embedded texture data, various extensions and many other features.<\/p>\n

The image to the right has been rendered in RealityServer and the model was directly downloaded from SketchFab as a glTF 2.0 file. It uses many of the recently implemented features and in previous releases it would have basically just been a grey model. As can be seen here you can achieve very good quality results directly from glTF 2.0 assets with the new importer, making it a viable storage format for RealityServer models.<\/p>\n

A few small caveats with the new importer. We don’t currently support the KHR_texture_transform<\/em> extension, animation, the doubleSided<\/em> material property, vertex colours or orthographic cameras. We will implement additional functionality as we start to hear more from our customers on what features they would most like to see. As a side note, when we added support for embedded textures to the glTF importer this also had the nice side effect of adding it to FBX<\/em> import as well.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

\"HelmetConcept\"<\/a><\/p>\n

HelmetConcept by floor1o<\/a> used under CC BY 4.0 (Click to Zoom)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

Lightmap Rendering<\/h3>\n

We’ve had quite a few requests for lightmap baking in RealityServer from customers who are combining RealityServer with real-time rendering systems such as Unreal Engine, Unity and WebGL. Even though many of these systems have their own light baking solutions, they often lack the speed and accuracy of the Iray rendering engine built into RealityServer. Here is a quick example showing a normal rendering on the left and baked lightmap textures applied to the emission channel of the material for visualisation on the right.<\/p>\n

\"Rendering\"<\/p>\n

Conventional Image with Iray Photoreal<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>

\"Lightmap\"<\/p>\n

Lightmapped Irradiance Rendering<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

Baking to lightmaps in RealityServer is implemented as a new rendering mode. You select it just like selecting iray<\/em> or irt<\/em> rendering modes, however you provide it with additional render context options to tell it what objects in the scene need to be baked. After running a lightap render you will obtain images like this.<\/p>\n

\"Walls\"<\/p>\n

Lightmap for Walls<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>

\"Objects\"<\/p>\n

Lightmap for Objects<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

These images represent the irradiance at the given location on the surface, in other words, the light arriving at the surface (including its colour). In a real-time rendering engine these images can then replace the diffuse lighting that would normally need to be computed at runtime. Here is a small example application created with PlayCanvas<\/a> to make use of the above lightmaps in WebGL. You can orbit around by clicking and dragging.<\/p>\n\n\n