Supercharge Your Renderings: FluidRay Recent Release Features

FluidRay’s latest releases are chock-full of new features and improvements that will supercharge your renderings and enable you to create designs more efficiently. The FluidRay engineering team has been focused on usability, speed, and rendering quality so you can focus on what you do best – design! 

Try FluidRay for free!

New FluidRay Features

Lightning fast lighting

FluidRay offers many lighting options to make your rendering come to life. Lighting is an important part of rendering as it helps bring the image to life. Now, in complex lighting situations, FluidRay rendering is up 10x faster than in earlier releases!

Improved indirect lighting

Lighting interior spaces can be particularly tricky because the designer must account for both direct light inside (lamps and overhead lighting) as well as indirect sun or moonlight through the windows. FluidRay offers improved speed and quality for your scenes that include indirect lighting. 

Fast rendering modes

Now even faster rendering modes will allow you to quickly preview materials and textures and to adjust the camera as needed. 

Efficient handling of caustics

FluidRay exterior render with pool

Caustics, particularly those created in an image that contains water, can be difficult to perfect in a rendering. FluidRay now handles caustics much more efficiently. If you render images with pools or other water, FluidRay should be your go-to rendering tool! 

Camera positioning

You want your rendering to be viewed from an exact angle or point of view. Perhaps you want your image to be viewed from above or from an angle. In FluidRay’s recent releases, you can now do this with ease with more precise positioning of the camera. 

Improved preview speed

FluidRay creates renderings in real-time and now you can see the real-time results of your adjustments even more quickly. 

Emissive material texture

Emissive materials can now have a texture that modulates the intensity you set in a rendering. Now it is possible in FluidRay to simulate, for instance, the light emission of a television screen.

Transparent emissive materials

FluidRay has added the ability to make emissive materials transparent. Think of a surface that emits light and is transparent or see through. One typical scenario would be the rendering of flames.

Memory efficient textures

Our textures are now much more memory efficient allowing you to use thousands of high resolution textures without needing more memory on your computer.

If you want to experience how FluidRay can help you supercharge your renderings, download our software for a free trial. Our pricing is inexpensive so anyone can experience the good side of rendering!

FluidRay RT 1.2.0 with Modo integration released

We just released FluidRay RT 1.2.0, you can download it here.

This release has a series of bug fixes and speed improvements, and most of all, includes an integration plugin for Luxology Modo, both Windows and Mac.

 

FluidRay RT 1.1.6 has SketchUp Mac integration

We just released FluidRay RT 1.1.6. You can get it here.

Here’s what’s new:

  • Integration with SketchUp Mac
  • Possibility to smooth meshes
  • Improved entities selection
  • Better handling of transformation hierarchies
  • Speed improvements and bug fixes

FluidRay RT 1.1.5 Released

We just released FluidRay RT 1.1.5, you can try it here.

This version brings a ton of exciting new features, focusing both on usability and performance:

  • Updated ray-tracing engine to Embree 2.5.1, resulting in much improved performance
  • .STL format support, widely used in jewellery design and product design
  • Camera import
  • Objects are imported as separate entities when importing scenes (possibility to move or delete them individually)
  • Instance importing
  • Much improved .FBX import, greately enhancing the process of exporting from 3dsmax / Maya and importing in FluidRay
  • Bigger and much faster material/texture preview in the Browser
  • Background image opacity
  • Objects can emit light also non-uniformly, based on a texture
  • Much easier normal map import as regular textures
  • Vertical/Horizontal shift/tilt for cameras
  • Mixing different environments together
  • Increased responsiveness of Outliner and Graph Editor, especially when loading complex scenes
  • Shade 15 integration support
  • Increased available memory
  • Bug fixes

Introducing the New FluidRay.com

You might have noticed that things have been quiet on the site for the last few weeks. That’s because we’ve been working around the clock to get the new FluidRay.com up and running.

We’re proud to introduce to the new, more visual, mobile-friendly site. It’s taken the team several weeks (with a lot of long nights) to get it live.

Why Build a New Site?

We built the original site with a focus on delivering the software. Things like design and user-experience weren’t top of mind, and we didn’t spend a lot of time on how the site looked or how people would navigate. Yes, that was a big mistake.

Having had the site up for about a year, we were able to look at our site analytics and see some issues. We also realized that the site didn’t really match up to the software we’d built: 3D rendering is all about the visuals, so we need a site with the same emphasis.

We also thought about things like file management, caching, publishing tools, checkout and ease of maintenance — all the things that go into a keeping a site fresh, secure and growing.

What You’ll See on The New Site?

We’re still adding content and improving the visuals, but you’ll notice a few things right away:

  1. More visual: The old site had a lot of links and a lot text, but you only saw renders in the Gallery. With the new site, we’ve integrated beautiful renders, and video into every page. The design is meant to showcase what you can down with FluidRay RT.
  2. More organized: We’d compiled a lot of information (specs, tutorials, videos), but hadn’t done a good job of making it accessible. With the new site, we’ve made it easier to navigate through the information and to understand it. One of my personal favorites is the new layout for the Technical Specs page:
    Technical Specs
    We took a lot of information, grouped it logically and then created a better way to navigate through instead of scrolling. This is something we’ll continue to work on, so that people don’t get distracted or dissuaded by the site content.
  3. More interactive: You’ll notice more actions and animations throughout the site. We’ve tried to find a balance between useful actions and flare, but across the board you’ll find that navigating and learning takes advantage of motion and click actions.
  4. Less Linear: This one is a little tricky. We know that people don’t just start on the homepage of a site and follow every link. They jump around based on their interest and needs. But the old site was really only designed for top-down navigating. With the new site, you’ll notice that the top navigation stays with you as you scroll and that there are links to the trial version and other points of interest sprinkled through the pages. Our goal is to let you keep moving intuitively through the site, and not end up feeling like you hit a deadend.

What’s Next for The Site?

We don’t plan to ever be “done” with the new site. In the next few weeks, you’ll see new content including updated/upgraded renderings, improved videos and articles written by experience designers. We’re also working on a new shopping cart…and a few goodies that I can’t talk about yet.

Our goal is to keep making the site more useful to existing customers, demo users , designers, enthusiasts and anyone else visiting us.

It’s Always a Work in Progress

We think the new site is a HUGE leap forward from what we had before. And we’re confident that we’re on the right track. But there is still a lot to do and we have to make sure we aren’t falling behind the needs of our customers or the opportunities of web tech.

We hope you like the new site and that you’ll tell us if you don’t. Please leave a comment or visit the forums to tell us what you think about the new design and functionality.

Happy Rendering!

FluidRay RT 1.1.3 Released

We just released FluidRay RT 1.1.3. You can get it here.

  • Reduced noise and faster convergence
  • Removed fireflies on Obj Materials
  • Improved interface
  • Faster loading times
  • Progress dialogs when importing texture & environments
  • Improved drag & drop
  • Solved installation problems with integration plugins
  • General speed improvements & bug fixes

FluidRay RT interior rendering of a living room by Roberto Pittaluga
Image Rendered in FluidRay RT by Roberto Pittaluga

FluidRay RT 1.1.2 Released

Today we’re releasing v1.1.2 of of FluidRay RT. The new version improves FluidRay’s interface, fixes bugs, makes using our integrations easier. You can get it here

In this version:

  • Integration plugins are automatically installed when installing Fluidray
  • Improved interactivity of Sun & Sky Environment
  • Cameras are now exported while in integration mode
  • Better window layout while in integration mode
  • Better Drag & Drop
  • Clearer interface in the Attribute Editor
  • Speed improvements and bug fixes
  • Color input is now in the range 0-255
  • Added SketchUp import on Mac
  • Improved interface in integration mode

We’ve also rebuilt our framework to speed up development. Expect new features and enhancements to come more quickly now.

Download the latest version here, or visit our forums to get questions answered and see what FluidRay can do.

SketchUp integration plugin released

FluidRay RT SketchUp integration

We are glad to announce the release of FluidRay RT integration plugin for SketchUp,
you can now render using FluidRay RT directly from inside SketchUp!

Get the integration plugin here.

The integration plugin is for now available for SketchUp 2013/2014 Windows version.

Kitchen real-time interior rendering

FluidRay RT 1.1.1 released

We just released FluidRay RT 1.1.1. You can find it here.
In this version:

  • Improved convergence speed and reduced fireflies
  • Fixed a bug causing some freezes in the Rhino integration plugin
  • Possibility to import multiple textures to the library at once
  • Possibility to import multiple HDRI environment maps to the library at once