Thank you for your support and your feedback! I am happy to announce the next beta for Project Lavina! Our team has added some important features that enable even more possibilities. Here are the highlights:
Added support for Opacity in clip mode
Project Lavina will now load bitmaps used in the opacity input. The opacity currently works in clip mode, i. e. there will be no semi-transparency but either fully opaque or fully transparent. This will help greatly rendering of vegetation. Please note that this will affect performance, and that is the reason the option is disabled by default. Since Project Lavina works great with high polygon count, consider using cut-out leaves in favor of opacity maps. That would provide better performance.
Improved animation support
We have expanded the animation support with three separate modes and animation preview. The “Scene” mode shows the existing vrscene animation of the camera and the objects. In “Cameras” mode, Project Lavina will loop through the user defined camera slots drop-down (side note - the camera transition time can be adjusted in the preferences). The “Walkthrough” mode extends the existing animation from beta 1 by allowing you to preview your recorded walkthrough (if present) and render it out. Additionally, the timeline has “In” and “Out” markers, which allow for trimming the animation before rendering.
In the preferences window, you will find a drop-down with navigation presets for “3ds Max”, “Maya” and “Sketchup”. These affect the mouse and modifier keys behavior. The selection style is still a separate drop-down in the preferences window.
Improved silhouette denoising
The denoiser was improved to handle outlines of objects much better.
Improved status bar
The status bar is streamlined for ease of use with color coded stats and tool tips for more advanced stats.
Added separate background support
Users can now change the color/image that is used for the background. The “Environment” input still controls what is the color/image for GI, Reflections and Refractions.
The Dome light texture is now automatically set as “Environment” image.
Pressing the “Shift” key in Free look mode increases movement speed (activates “running”).
Added auto-pause rendering functionality when Lavina is out of focus. This only works in interactive mode. It will not affect “High Quality” rendering, which has its own pause button.
There will be a lot coming in this next one that should explain why it’s taking us a bit longer than usual.
We also had these little things called V-Ray 5 and V-Ray Collection to ship today
Hi to all
I’m an atypical tester for Lavina. Since i don’t use it exclusively for arch&Design but just for testing real-time capabilities of this promising software. I think it’s awesome to have real time feedback of a complex scene just because raytracing. i’ve made two “serious” tests you can check on my Behance.
The first one is very simple but the second one is made of all kind of sources, Scanned content, Substance materials and some hand painted.
One click and everything was in. Only the SSS couldn’t Make it but the other stuff was there.
Hope to have more time left for a coulple of tests more before the beta closes.
Can’t wait to see!!!
The numbers of polygons it can handle is out of this world, even a scene that Lumion couldn’t handle imported from sketch-up did just fine (over 30fps) in Lavina. It’s almost magic .
And our last scene with 48 forest and railclone clusters hit de 1200 billion and still worked.
I have a GTX1070 and two GTX1080s. Can I tell Lavina to only use my 1080s? The interface now reminds me of the early days of Vray RT when everything spluttered. Or is the GTX1XXX series way to old to be useful?
Right, obviously recommended, but besides the mouse freezing it seems usable. Can I exclude one of the cards like I use to in Vray RT, ie. keep one card for the UI?
What frame rate is it running on your scenes and the 1070/1080 ?
Right now we are engaging the GPU way too much, we are using 100% of it, so you will get these freezes in other software when the frame rate is low.
For me it seems to be the other way around, the Lavina interface is barely usable while other software windows do not appear as affected. This could be due to the Lavina window being static once I leave it and click in another window though. I will try the command line trick.
At this point I’m mostly testing, I’m waiting for a live link to use it in my workflow, and I don’t want to invest in a new GPU at the brink of the 3XXX announcement.
Basically the same way Enscape does, as an IPR style window, but if you can adjust lights in Lavina and somehow save it back to the 3ds Max file it would be great. I would not expect this return way to be live.
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