DirectViz activation is now done under Preferences in the popup menu.
Support of Windows 64 bits platforms.
Native Open Inventor mipmapping texture support.
True wireframe support
New features added :
- Native Soft shadows (now built into RTX shader package)
- Adaptive oversampling (oversampling only near aliased pixels)
- Fuzzy light effects (deflected light sources)
- Glossy surfaces (deflected reflections and refractions)
- 1 unique DirectVizGeneralShader to handle bump mapping, alpha mapping and diffuse mapping.
Client / Server mode optimisations :
- Connection mechanism.
- Loading time.
- Profiling.
OpenRTRT RTX shader package now contains all of the features provided by DTX.
OpenRTRT DTX shader is no longer needed.
No more support for Linux RHEL3 platforms.
Control dialog enhanced.
Please see the newly updated Chapter 27 in the Open Inventor User's Guide for more information about the new features of DirectViz.
No new features were added. See the fixed bugs section.
A new shortcut key has been added to bring up the DirectViz control menu.
By default the shortcut key is: SHIFT+F8. The shortcut key can be defined using the OIV_DIRECTVIZ_SHORTCUT environment variable.
No new feature was added. See the fixed bugs section.
DirectViz caching is now also done by SoVRMLGroup nodes.
A separate OpenRTRT license is no longer required to use DirectViz.
DirectViz is a new extension that adds support for ray-traced rendering to Open Inventor.
DirectViz allows Open Inventor applications to render 3D scenes with very high realism and scalability by using the Real-Time Ray-tracing engine OpenRTRT™ as an alternative to OpenGL. DirectViz addresses the demanding needs of styling and conceptual design, virtual prototyping, and visual simulation that are not currently satisfied by graphics processors and OpenGL.
Ray tracing is a rendering technique that uses principles of optics to model the path taken by light by following rays of light as they interact with surfaces. This approach allows visual effects that are too complex or impossible to achieve with OpenGL or GPU shaders, such as accurate reflections, refractions and shadows even on highly complex models.
The DirectViz ray-tracing engine is extremely optimized to enable interactive use even on commodity hardware, while it can also take advantage of multi-processor/multi-core systems and clusters for performance scalability.
DirectViz is designed to allow you to quickly add enhanced rendering in existing Open Inventor application. DirectViz also provides with Open Inventor a high-level framework for creating or extending other applications with real time ray-tracing.
Here are highlights of the DirectViz 6.1 features:
- Ray-traced rendering enabling accurate reflections, refractions, and shadows.
- High-performance ray-tracer engine optimized for Intel and AMD CPUs
- Transparent integration with scene graph and viewers
- Control of quality/interaction tradeoffs: resolution subsampling, progressive resolution, oversampling, recursion depth limit
- Flexible shader sets - Phong, Glass, Environment, Bump, Car Paint...
- Distribution ray-tracing supporting glossy effects, soft shadows, etc.
- Extensible with custom shader classes (requires OpenRTRT SDK option provided separately)
- Fast spatial indexing, with automatic or manual caching on file for large scenes
- Handles dynamic scenes with animation and interaction
- Cluster support for performance scalability
- Takes advantage of multi-processor/multi-core systems
- Support for offscreen rendering
- Support for stereoscopy (raw OpenGL stereo and anaglyph stereo in current release)
- Support for tiled displays or immersive VR display configurations with ScaleViz.
- Support for fast ScaleViz remote rendering for building visualization servers
See the User's Guide and the reference manual for complete details, including limitations of this release.
NOTE: Like other extensions, DirectViz requires a separate license. One of its fields specifies the maximum number of ray-tracing clients in cluster mode. If this field is set to zero, DirectViz runs in stand-alone mode and the rendering cannot be distributed on a cluster. You may also need to install a license for OpenRTRT. Please check your license document.