104.0

Common

Added settings to ‘Common/Geometry/Curves Settings’ and to ‘Basis Curves’ to control the Number of BVH Splits used in curves’ ray acceleration structure, which provides improved balancing capabilities of performance and memory usage by curves.
Added profiling Heat Map views to ‘Common/Debug View’ which are used to visualize frame time spent per pixel, or the number of invoked Intersection shaders or Any Hit shaders per pixel.
Added an ‘Invisible Lights Roughness Threshold’ setting to ‘Common/Lighting/Light Visibility Settings’, which defines the surface roughness treshold below which lights invisible in primary rays are also invisible in reflections and refractions.
Added a ‘Projector Light Type’ setting to ‘Rect Light’, which enables focusing a textured light like a projector. Scale the light as desired to adjust the focus area.
Added .tiff image format support.
Refactored ‘Lighting Mode’ settings for Dome Lights in ‘Common/Lighting/Dome Light Settings’, which now provide ‘Image-Based Lighting’ (simply a rename of the previous default, highest quality but can introduce artifacts in Real-Time) and ‘Limited Image-Based Lighting’ (fastest and few if any artifacts in Real-Time, but only affects reflection and refraction).

Creation time and update time for mesh geometry has been significantly improved, very dense meshes can now load up to 3x faster.
Geometry loading is now asynchronous with priority given to large-sized geometry (e.g., walls would be loaded before rivets). Loading is suspended when running out of memory, giving the user an opportunity to work with scenes that otherwise would not fit in memory.
Now honiring the ‘Normalize’ flag in UsdLight for area lights.
Various performance and memory optimizations.
Added tooltips for all render settings.

Various tangent/normal computation fixes including when geometry is animated.
Various Multi-GPU stability improvements and bug fixes.
Fixed ‘Picking is returning random prim paths when selecting in Prim mode.’
Fixed ‘Procedural AABB is sometimes incorrectly drawn in DirectX.’
Fixed ‘Multi-GPU picking and querying is failing with multiple Viewports open.’
Fixed ‘Simple Fog is still visible even if Intensity is set to 0.’
Fixed ‘Discontinuity along curves or hair fibers when the endcaps option set to open.’
Fixed ‘Setting the wrap mode to black for UDIM texture sequences results in incorrect texture lookups.’
Fixed ‘Changing resolution to 2048x1080 can cause BSOD or flickering.’

Loading around 5m instances crashes.
16k square, 16 bit RGB textures cannot be loaded.
DistantLight has no “Visible in primary rays” checkbox, unlike other light types.

Added ‘Frame Generation’ setting to ‘Real-Time/NVIDIA DLSS’: uses AI to boost frame rates by generating additional high-quality frames in real-time. This feature requires an Ada Lovelace architecture GPU. Windows version must be equal or greater than 20H1. Not yet supported on Vulkan or Linux.
Added ‘New Denoiser (experimental)’ setting to ‘Real-Time/Direct Lighting’ which can reduce ghosting or noise in some contexts.
Added ‘Distilling (experimental)’ setting in ‘Preferences/Rendering/MDL’: Enables transforming MDL materials of arbitrary complexity to predefined target material models, which can improve material rendering fidelity in RTX Real-Time mode, such as for complex materials like Clear Coat.

Improved rendering fidelity of real-time SSS when Sampled Direct Lighting is enabled.

Fixed various SSS bugs
Fixed ‘Dome Light results in outline visible on reflective surfaces when Sampled Direct Lighting is not enabled.’
Fixed ‘Real-time global volumetrics has a lot of large-scale noise if Sampled Direct Lighting is not enabled.’
Fixed ‘Reflections in glass appear jagged, shimmer.’

Distilling (experimental): Colorful noise pattern sometimes appears where the surface is reflective while Distilling is enabled.
Distilling (experimental): The translucency appears dark in some cases while Distilling is enabled, including on particles.
Distilling (experimental): Detail normal maps are not visible.
New Denoiser (experimental): Simple Fog is incorrectly rendered if Sampled Direct Lighting is also enabled while New Denoiser is enabled.
New Denoiser (experimental): Translucent materials can appear blurry when in motion while New Denoiser is enabled.
New Denoiser (experimental): Pronounced noise behind translucent materials may appear magnified by refraction while New Denoiser is enabled.
New Denoiser (experimental): Points in motion are very blurry while New Denoiser is enabled.
If XR Compositing or Matte Object is enabled, translucent materials may appear clipped by the background.
glTF material appears black.
Dark bands are visible on sky mesh when both “Global Volumetric Effects” and Translucency “Fractional Cutout Opacity” are enabled.
Textures are not supported in Rect Lights unless Sampled Direct Lighting is enabled (although is supported if Projector Light Type = true).
Dark line appears around the edge of the viewport at resolutions of 720 or less if Sampled Direct Lighting or New Denoiser is not enabled.

Added ‘Multi Matte’ settings in ‘Interactive (Path Tracing)’ which extends AOV support by enabling rendering masked mesh geometry to AOVs, providing additional opportunities to modify the final image during compositing and additional insights through 2D analysis.
Added ‘Adaptive Sampling’ settings in ‘Interactive (Path Tracing)/Path-Tracing’ which limits the number of additional samples to render for a pixel based on a user defined noise threshold. The samples are non-uniformly distributed over the image resulting in less noise for the same number of samples and also provides a more consistent noise level across multiple frames.
Added ‘Denoise AOVs’ setting in ‘Interactive (Path Tracing)/Denoising’ to apply the Optix Denoiser to AOVs.

Fixed ‘Global volumetrics (fog) causes surfaces to look transparent when rendering Matte Objects.’
Fixed ‘If Matte Object is enabled, Depth of Field will not work against the background.’
Fixed ‘A few of the AOV passes do not have a checkbox to enable them for preview.’

Multi Matte: Mesh geometry Multi Matte ID -1 is treated as 0.
Multi Matte: Changing the Multi Matte settings does not force a reset the frame.
UI responsiveness can lag when rendering complex volumes.
At low sample count, matte objects render black, until more samples have accumulated.

Added ‘Dither Strength’ setting in ‘Post Processing/Tone Mapper’ to reduce banding when rendering smooth gradients.