Rayscaper New Releases

[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

[Rich O Brien]

Looks killer!

[pixelcruncher]

@Rich-O-Brien That's because I spent a shit ton of time on this release post. It's all marketing and window dressing Just kidding, I hope this release brings some much needed features.

Cheers,
Thomas

[ntxdave]

@pixelcruncher This looks like some really good updates. I wish I could afford SketchUp so I could try this new release, but they have/are pricing me out of the market.

There is one item that I would like to see you also add/consider for a future release. It is something I have seen/used in Blender. If you look at the image below (the snowman) your will see that they also have the ability to make materials very "rough". I think it is a very neat feature (especially for something like the snowman). If you take a close look at the snowballs that form the body, you will see how rough the texture is. It also plays a role in the arms for the snowman and the pieces of coal that are used for the eyes and mouth. Again, just something you might want to consider for your product (which as I said before), I think is a great rendering tool.

[Krass]

C'est extra, bravo!
Right now, I'm learning how to work with Scatter. You have to remember to restart SketchUp sometimes after moving the hierarchy, groups, and so on. However, I can't get RS to recognize my texture changes when I edit them using the "edit in graphic editor" tool—it's as if a cached version is taking precedence...

[Krass]

I can trim my lawn down to the last blade of grass.
Now I need color variations.

[Krass]

I've reached the limits of my graphics card, but I have a more powerful laptop—I'm going to test it out.

[Krass]

no, it's not my graphic card. On the RTX laptop 4090? issue is still there

[Krass]

if i hide the last scatter It's returning to normal.