{"id":2290,"date":"2019-02-28T02:43:34","date_gmt":"2019-02-28T02:43:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.migenius.com\/?p=2290"},"modified":"2019-02-28T02:43:34","modified_gmt":"2019-02-28T02:43:34","slug":"whats-new-in-realityserver-5-2-update-259","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.migenius.com\/articles\/whats-new-in-realityserver-5-2-update-259","title":{"rendered":"What’s New in RealityServer 5.2 Update 259"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our first update for RealityServer 5.2 is here. It includes an Iray version bump and some nice convenience features. The most significant feature however is support for queuing renders with Iray Server<\/a>. This will be of interest to those building internal rendering automation tools with RealityServer.<\/p>\n

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

Data-Driven Rendering Automation<\/h3>\n

RealityServer is great for rendering automation. If you want to take a bunch of 3D data, geometry, lighting, materials, textures and throw them together into a scene based on some input data, then RealityServer makes this easy to do with some basic JavaScript (server-side V8 in particular is really useful for this).<\/p>\n

What kind of data would drive the rendering? A common example from our customers would be a floor plan. This might have information about where furniture is positioned, the dimensions of the walls, locations of windows, materials assigned to the walls, floor and ceiling and position of light sources.<\/p>\n

Using RealityServer APIs you can easily create tools that automatically assemble your scenes from this type of data. This probably warrants its own article, for now though we just want to use this as context for talking about our new Iray Server integration.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>

\"Sneaker<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div>\n

Many of our customers are moving to RealityServer from manual processes where a human would literally change a scene setting, like a material colour and then re-render the scene and save the image, totally manually. This is fine for half a dozen changes but many of our customers deal in change numbers on the order of tens of thousands or more.<\/p>\n

What Is (And Isn’t) Iray Server<\/h3>\n

Iray Server is an end-user product available from the Iray Plugins Store<\/a> or migenius directly. Unlike RealityServer it is not customisable and is not a development platform. You connect to it from an Iray enabled application (for example plugins like Iray for Rhino<\/a>, Iray for 3ds max<\/a> and Iray for Maya<\/a>) using the Iray Bridge<\/em> API. You can then submit jobs to a render queue which is managed by Iray Server. It has a nice web interface for managing your queue and getting your results.<\/p>\n\"Iray\n

Just a quick note on licensing. RealityServer is explicitly licensed for running as a service where you provide 3rd parties access to your applications. Iray Server however is licensed for use within your own business and not for external access. So it is primarily useful for offline rendering for your business.<\/p>\n

Iray Server Queuing<\/h3>\n

So, automation is great, however how about queuing up a bunch of renders. You can of course program such a system in RealityServer if you want something specific, however since Iray Server provides an off the shelf queuing system why not utilise it?<\/p>\n

Commands<\/h4>\n

In this update we are adding new commands to let you queue up jobs on Iray Server directly from RealityServer. Iray Server works with the concept of snapshots<\/em> which represent the state of a given scene at any time. So the usual process for submitting a job is to first create a snapshot, then queue the job. We provide the following commands to facilitate working with Iray Server.<\/p>\n