The following video (no sound) previews some of the improvements made in Frost 2.0 since the last time we released a beta build. We hope to have the new build posted in the coming days.
- Frost’s V-Ray Instances now prepare about two orders of magnitude faster (but preparation is still single-threaded). This is at the cost of some render time performance, but it is great so see something within a few seconds.
- Frost’s V-Ray Instances now use an order of magnitude less memory (with or without materials).
- Particle channels like Color and Mapping Coordinates now propagate to the meshes like in the regular non-V-Ray Frost Custom Geometry mode.
- Frost Material and texture maps are supported. In the video, an RGB Multiply is used to colorize the texture baked from Sequoia by a random color generated using Krakatoa Magma on the particles
- XMesh Loaders now work correctly as source for V-Ray instancing.
- (Not seen in the video): Animation Offset is now supported via Random Offset or the Magma GeomTime channel.
- (Not seen in the video): Multi-Sub Materials and other Material modes are now supported.
Current Limitations:
- Network rendering does not support V-Ray Instancing yet (looking into fixing this for the next Beta drop)
- If the same channel is found in the distribution particles and the mesh, the particle’s channel will be used. This will be fixed soon, in the mean time one can use MappingN channels to pass data around without collisions. For example, in the above video the TextureCoord channel (Mapping 1) was copied into Mapping2 using Genome to avoid collision with the TextureCoord in the PRT Source inherited from the Plane primitive.
- V-Ray Cache is currently not supported as a mesh source.