AMD Releases ProRender 2.1, Supports Blender 2.81

After announcing Vulkan support in AMD open source 3D rendering engine called Radeon ProRender, the final version is officially out with version naming of 2.1.

Radeon Pro render aims at professional users for using GPU to render lifelike objects using unbiased rendering engine, available for free, runs on any GPU as this supports industry standards like OpenCL and Vulkan. This is in stark contrast to Nvidia’s tactics which uses its proprietary codes called CUDA and Optix to accelerate rendering process for professionals.

New Rendering Modes in Action:

Latest Changes Include:

1. Added support for the latest release of Blender 2.81
2. Full Spectral rendering now arrives on Linux. So now all major platforms are supported i.e. Windows, Linux & MacOS using OpenCL, Vulkan & Metal.
3. Multiple acceleration modes: For acceleration purposes, the rendering can now be broken down in four modes as below. The hybrid rendering could result in realtime rendering by using a raster engine (this is used to render graphics in games) and then using some parts of ray tracing engine for reflection, shadows etc.
   • Full — Normal path traced OpenCL rendering
   • High — Vulkan ray traced rendering
   • Medium — Vulkan rendering with biased GI
   • Low — Vulkan rasterization.
4. Better Documentation: AMD has invested significantly in updating the documentation for our Radeon ProRender plug-ins to help users out with plugins and their parameters. Link to the documents are here.
5. Easy Volumes and Fog: Added a simple button in the Blender World panel to quickly create a fog effect
6. Layered Textures and Shaders: Added two new nodes, Layered Textures, which can blend up to 8 textures in a single node. Layered Shader which can blend multiple Uber or Principled nodes to create complex materials with masks.
7. Other Improvements related to material:
   • Glass materials, roughness for glass, and glossy BSDFs
   • Better matching Cycles in the Principled BSDF
   • Close matching of Blender displacement
   • Better light intensity matching
   • Many more which is out of the scope of this article.

Complete changes can be looked at here.

Download the latest version from here.

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Abhishek

Abhishek is a Finance Professional and has worked in multiple MNCs. However, he is also an avid tech reader and tinkerer with over 20 years of experience. His passions include 3D animation and drawing Illustrations. His creations can be viewed at www.artstation.com/abhifx

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