Rayscaper New Releases

[pixelcruncher]

Hey, Rayscaper users!

Rayscaper 0.9.96 Beta is available. You can get it via:

• The SketchUcation store.
• Direct download: Rayscaper_Win_0.9.96_Beta.rbz.

I recommend upgrading to the latest version. This release is all about water and light

New: Water Material

Rayscaper now has a dedicated Water material for pools, ponds, lakes and spas. Assign it to a single face or a closed box, pick a preset, and you're done.

• Realistic waves: layered swell and fine ripples, with direction, size and strength controls.
• Depth you can see: water gets darker and more tinted as it gets deeper, so a pool's deep end actually looks deep.
• Controllable reflections: from crisp mirror-like water at sunset to soft, choppy reflections.

Clarity controls how far you can see into the water:

It ships with presets to get you started, including the new Tropical, Reflecting Pool and Spa.

New: IES Light Profiles for Spotlights

Spotlights can now use IES profiles for realistic, architectural light patterns: batwing, wall wash, narrow and medium spot, wide flood and elliptical beam. The light editor shows a preview of each distribution so you can see what you're picking.

Other Improvements

• Add procedural material previews, so material thumbnails render faster and no longer hang.
• Select newly placed lights automatically and show the active light tool in the toolbar.
• Refresh the user interface with a consistent set of toolbar icons, sharper icon scaling, clearer list selection, and a tidier settings layout.

Fixes

• Fix textures rendering cyan after editing a texture image in an external editor, saving, and reopening the model.
• Fix vignette falloff at high strength.

Full release notes: rayscaper.com/manual/release-notes

Help Me Build the Community

If you like Rayscaper, please share your renders (final or work-in-progress, it doesn't matter)! This is motivating
and helps me showcase its capabilities to new users.

Follow me on X.

Happy Rendering!
Thomas

[Krass]

Great, thanks Thomas. I needed water materials this morning and you granted my wish tonight...!

[pixelcruncher]

@Krass I will be waiting for those awesome renders!

[Krass]

rayscayper pool with water material

[pixelcruncher]

@Krass Nice!

[Krass]

I really like the two buttons for hiding the settings and assets—you can quickly switch to a large-scale view of the render—and the minimalist icon design.
And this time, it successfully loaded the HDRI map at full resolution
for this render, which features actual waves in the geometry.

[Mike Amos]

Sharp, I am missing the splash where my ex jumped in to create the waves though.......

[Krass]

yes, but 3D splash is very hy skill !
The pool on the screen is an "infinity pool"; I wouldn't have the patience right now to model that in SketchUp... then again, maybe I would? But AI does it in a couple of quick moves.
And if you send me a photo of your ex, she (he) will be in the image!

[Mike Amos]

I tried but the camera broke, or I had a tree in the way. Not sure which.
Either way fangs for the memories is about as far as I go these days. It is a fine Mr Kipling image tho'.

[pixelcruncher]

@Mike-Amos, I'm working on that feature. Exes are tricky, though...

[Mike Amos]

Thankfully, exes are his tory. I know, a laboured joke.

[Krass]

here same rayscaper render and Qwen image AI model to generate vegetation outside the property. I used ZPIX, a free and simple AI image tool for computer desktop (no need to be connected after downloading the models) Link to zpix https://github.com/SamuelTallet/ZPix
before:

after:

[Krass]

but we will soon be able to scatter vegetation in Rayscaper...

[pixelcruncher]

@Krass

Sorry this took so long. I finally figured out the black spots in your loft scene (with the help of AI).

The cause: several materials use their color image as the normal map. A normal map is the purple-blue image that tells the renderer which way the surface faces at each pixel. When you use a color photo like wood instead, the dark parts of the image make the surface face into the floor, and those spots go black. That's why they follow the wood grain and show up mostly in the darker areas.

These are the materials where I found it, with the textures from your TEX folder:

• Floor ([Cinder Block]): uses WoodFloor032_2K-JPG_Color.jpg as the normal map. It should be WoodFloor032_2K-JPG_NormalDX.jpg.
• Underside of the mezzanine ([Cladding Stucco White]): uses Material-588-S_BaseColor.jpg. It should be Material-588-S_NormalDirectX.jpg.
• Kitchen island countertop (*16): uses 014chataignier.jpg. This one has no matching normal map, so just switch the normal map off.
• Sofa (leather): very likely the same thing, worth checking.

Here is the same view before and after, with only the floor and mezzanine normal maps switched off:

The kitchen island was just reflecting the black floor, so it cleans up too. With this fixed, you shouldn't need the Photoshop cleanup anymore.

Thanks again for sending the scene; it made this much easier to track down! (1 year later).

Cheers,
Thomas

[Krass]

Anyway, thanks for your research. I'm going to do a lot of testing. And I'm impressed by the program's progress. Indeed, using "fake" normal maps is still a bit of a hack. I'll be more careful in the future.

[Krass]

Thomas,
The manual is excellent, the presentation is perfect—great work.
Is it possible to save a preset of the settings?

[pixelcruncher]

@Krass Not yet, but it's already on the list. This was requested before already.

[Krass]

It's flawless—not my 3D work, but the program itself.

[Krass]

[pixelcruncher]

Hey, Rayscaper users!

Rayscaper 0.9.99 Beta is available. It's a big one: scatter, a material library, a new sky and a simpler editor, and one of the last steps before Rayscaper 1.0. You can get it via:

• The SketchUcation store.
• Direct download: Rayscaper_Win_0.9.99_Beta.rbz.

I recommend upgrading to the latest version.

Scatter

Fill a terrain with trees, plants, rocks or grass straight from SketchUp. Pick the surfaces and the components to scatter, and Rayscaper renders thousands of instances with a preview in the SketchUp viewport. Material filters and a Weight control decide where things grow, and the Projection and Wrap modes place objects on curved surfaces and walls. The render stays responsive while you drag sliders, even with a lawn of 170,000 instances.

Rayscaper Material Library

The asset library now has about 80 ready-made Rayscaper materials: glass, gems, metals, car paints, lacquers, ceramics, plastics, fabrics, leathers, liquids, water and lights.

A Simpler Material Editor

The material editor has four types: Standard, Glass, Metal and Water. Standard gets a Finish preset (Matte, Satin, Glossy, Lacquered, Fabric, Mirror), Metal offers ten real metals with a Tint, and the settings most people never touch move into the presets. Older Coated, Diffuse, Mirror and Plastic materials open as Standard materials.

A New Sky

The Sky is one physically based sky now: a clear blue sky with a pale horizon, and a ground that's lit the same way. Pick a preset (Clear, Hazy, Overcast, Soft Light, Golden Hour, Sunset or Blue Hour) and tune it with a single Haze slider. Older skies open as the new one.

Quality Presets and Simpler Render Settings

Choose Draft, Preview, Final or High instead of tuning bounces and clamps, and set the resolution with Aspect Ratio and Size presets. Rayscaper now renders on the GPU by default and falls back to the CPU when the GPU fails. Bloom and glare look the same in every scene, so lamps glow instead of washing out the image.

Textured Emission

Light-emitting materials can use a texture, for screens and signs.

Also New

• A review and repair window for image files that are missing when a scene loads.

Bug Fixes

• Fix the render no longer following orbiting and scene changes in SketchUp after the first start.
• Fix Start Render doing nothing on models with stored Rayscaper settings.
• Fix animation frames saving before denoising finishes.
• Fix a bright flash at the start of renders with auto exposure.
• Fix crashes when the scene changes during rendering and when a render finishes right before the engine stops.
• Fix mouse position offsets on desktops with display scaling.
• Fix normal map rotation, and keep normal maps and emission when changing the material type.
• Fix scatter orientation and height offsets on the underside of spheres and thin surfaces.
• Remove stale instances from emptied Skatter compositions.

Full release notes: rayscaper.com/manual/release-notes

On the Way to 1.0

This is the last stretch of the beta. Rayscaper will leave the beta soon, and the next big milestone is the first 1.0 release. The simplified editor, the material library and scatter in this version are a big step towards it. If anything still bothers you, now is the best time to let me know.

About the Free Version

Rayscaper remains free to try, with a few more limits than before:

• Renders inside SketchUp, including saved images and animation frames, are limited to 1280 pixels on the longest edge.
• Renders carry a watermark, now with a faint logo pattern over the whole image.
• Free renders can't be used commercially.

Scene editing and animation stay fully available, and your scenes keep the resolution you set, so a license ($99, once) restores full size right away.

Help Me Build the Community

If you like Rayscaper, please share your renders (final or work-in-progress, it doesn't matter)! This is motivating and helps me showcase its capabilities to new users.

Follow me on X.

Happy Rendering!
Thomas