Cloud rendering solution

REDWAY3D put significant efforts in developing a rendering solution for clouds with REDsdk 4.3. Indeed, REDsdk could already simulate all types of skies, but clouds were missing. The possibility to get a true physically realistic cloudy sky with no effort (as the environment is completely generated by REDsdk), makes a huge difference in terms of realism. Obviously, this is a prerequisite for all outdoor renderings, but it also adds a lot of realism for indoor renderings specially when the model contains many reflective objects. REDsdk offers two different algorithms:

• True volumetric clouds: for a top-level realism where you need cloud to interact with your geometries
• Background clouds: based on artistic textures plates, ideal for environments as faster to process than the previous solution.

New ray-tracing algorithms

REDsdk 4.3 integrates new versions of three key algorithms used in ray-tracing, which are the “multiple importance sampling”, the “probabilistic light sampling” and the “adaptive ray-tracing”. All these algorithms target a unique goal, send fewer rays but sample directions in space which matter the most for a chosen rendering point of view. The result is quite astonishing, as the speed increase, while scene dependent, can easily reach a 300% gain or more for an equivalent quality.

New post-processing features

The set of post-processing effects available in REDsdk has been increased to include a new set of post-effects with sharpen, glow, blur and depth of field. Color manipulation controls have been added too like brightness / contrast,  hue / saturation / lightness and input / output levels. The goal is to provide new tools to REDsdk based applications end-users  that will enable them to retouch images completely without living their software, thus saving time and money.

Real-time improvements

A few enhancements were made in REDsdk 4.3 to enhance the lighting capabilities of the GPU:

• Portals are now visible and rendered by the GPU. Portals are considered as physical lights and are converted to the GPU as any other physical light.
• IES profiles are now visible and rendered, with no associated performance cost.

Other miscellaneous enhancements:

• Improvements have been made to optimize the management of huge dynamic scene graphs in REDsdk.
• Support for the HTC Vive VR helmet has been added.

Better debug output

A new Error tracking feature has been added to REDsdk to provide a better feedback on errors. Practically, the hosting application must declare a callback to gather errors at the time they happen. Depending on the kind of error that may occur in REDsdk, extra information is available to facilitate the debugging. At the same time, a REDsdk error log file is dumped in the binary folder of the application.

Stereoscopic panoramas

A new tutorial (creating stereoscopic panorama) has been added to show how REDsdk can be used to create stereoscopic panoramas images that can be then loaded to the Oculus or HTC Vive.

Global illumination and light baking solution

REDsdk has been offering 2D & 3D features for real-time visualization and photo-realistic rendering for many years, but the visual quality gap has continuously increased between these two rendering modes over time. REDsdk 4.2 enables to add some preprocessed photo-realistic rendering effects to a real-time visualization in order to reduce this quality difference. These effects include a very high quality Global Illumination, as well as all the lights and shadows which may be contained in your 3D scene.
On the right-side picture, you can see a scene where the user can navigate freely in real-time after a very short preprocessing time (between 1 to 3 minutes depending on the visual quality expected).
This functionality enables REDsdk users to benefit from the “unified graphics” feature, even if they are mainly focused on real-time visualization.

Animation framework

REDsdk 4.2 improves its support in terms of animations. While PSK (rotation, translation & scale) and key-framed animations have been supported for many releases already, mesh skinning, skeletal animations and animation clips are now supported with blending and new animation controllers are exposed in REDsdk.
These animations can be loaded from / saved to files, which can have the RED or FBX format at the user’s convenience.

Complete day & night sky model

REDsdk expands its sky model by adding the night as well, with the support of the sun, the moon and stars. The simulation of the turbidity (i.e. haziness) has been improved and works from all altitudes.
The simulation is as realistic as possible, by implementing a multiple scattering physical model.
Users can render the sky / night through a composite texture in order to refine it simultaneously with their 3D scene.

Enhance realistic material

REDsdk has been offering the realistic material to its users for many releases already. This material ensures a physically correct conservation of the light energy between the parts absorbed, reflected and transmitted by the material and thus the realism of the rendering.
Many new controls have been added to the realistic material in order to add visual effects (like the textures for the reflection glossiness and the refraction glossiness below) or improve the realism (like the transmission scattering and reflection fog on the right-side picture).

New hardware support for GPUs and VR

As for each release, REDsdk has been tested and validated on the latest GPUs (i.e. graphic card or graphic chipsets) from Amd, Intel and Nvidia in order to offer a robust and reliable set of functionalities to its users.
Also, our engineers synchronized REDsdk with the latest version of the Oculus SDK.

Import of the FBX, OBJ, DAE files formats

REDsdk 4.1 enables the direct import and export of the FBX, OBJ, DAE and DXF file formats. This feature opens the integration of many models which will complement yours to increase the level of realism of your real-time or photo-realistic scenes.

World class documentation: reduce the integration time of REDsdk and boost your programmation productivity

New REDsdk documentation system uses an innovative paradigm based on books, workflows and tasks for a breakdown of any programming problem making the overall much easier and faster to integrate.

Addition of a material with conservation of the light energy: produce realistic images and animations

To produce realistic images and animations more easily, REDsdk 4.1 proposes a “realistic material”. This material ensures a conservation of the light energy, between the light transmitted, reflected and absorbed … as in reality!
Combined to the tone-mapping and physical lighting features, this material definitely avoids unrealistic bright or dark images and animation.

Windows 10 ready!

REDsdk 4.1 adds the support of Windows 10, while previous operating systems are still supported. Hence REDsdk 4.1 runs from Windows 2000 to Windows 10 with a native 32bit and 64bit support, Linux 32/64bit and MacOS X 64bit.

Unbiased rendering: increase quality and accuracy of previsualization

The new unbiased path tracing feedback can provide a quick preview of the final rendering. It adds more accuracy to preview photo-realistic effects than standard real time display techniques.

Support of the Embree API from Intel©: reduce your rendering time by 15% to 30%

Embree is a popular API developed by Intel© to accelerate the processing of ray-tracing images. REDsdk embeds Embree as a rendering option. It leverages Embree acceleration while keeping all REDsdk value added features such as double precision meshes, displacement, rendering of lines and points or the support of operating systems anterior to Windows 7.

Support of multiple cutting planes: get rid of GPU limitations about multiple cutting planes

Multiple cutting planes enable users to cut geometries by multiple independent planes to get closed surfaces or contours in order to apply hatches for 2D industrial views of a 3D model. REDsdk combines the use of the GPU (i.e. graphic card) and a pure software approach to provide a fast and very flexible method. No more limitation of the GPU where cutting planes equations cannot be freely chosen and cut section meshes with contours cannot be extracted.

Volumetric lighting

Volumetric lighting is a technique used in 3D computers graphics imagery to add lighting effects to a rendering. It enables the viewer to see beams of light shining through the environment. In volumetric lighting, the light cone emitted by a light source is modeled as a transparent object and considered as a container of a “volume”: as a result, light has the capability to give the effect of passing through an actual three-dimensional medium (such as fog, dust, smoke, or steam) that is inside its volume, just like in the real world.

REDsdk 3.5 now defines a complete API that can be used to implement any type of volumetric effect to improve even more the level of realism of your renderings. In a few words, volumetric effects are inserted using a new kind of shape and then lighting effects are specified using a shaders. Programmers also get some more options at the rendering level to fine tune volumetric effects is they wish to do so.

New anti-aliasing filter

REDsdk 3.5 now offers a new anti-aliasing method based on the most recent progresses on this topic. This new filter works on an image and is only a 2D based processing that can be used to remove aliasing. This new anti-aliasing filter will not catch original 3D details which may have been missed by the rendering as it is only a post-processing effect.

This image at the right illustrates the pros and cons of using an image based anti-aliasing technique:

• First, it’s fast. The overall cost of applying the filter to a large image is below 1 milliseconds.
• Second, it does a good job at anti-aliasing edges of the geometry.
• Finally, it does … what it can for the anti-aliasing of high frequency regions of the image where many details are concentrated. In these regions such as the left engine radiator in the picture above, we can see that the filter can’t take in more details that those that are present in the original image.

Improved physical sky model

The sky model in Redsdk 3.4 had limitations and could not properly handle the sky color with a sun below the horizon line. Redsdk’s 3.5 new sky model fixes that and also add a bit more realism to the result thanks to an improved mathematical model. The image at the right illustrates the differences between the old (top) and the new (bottom) sky models for different times of the day and night.

New REDsdk add-on: Rednet

REDsdk has been supporting GPUs and CPUs for rendering since its creation. This unique feature enables REDsdk users to deploy their software on any Cloud service provider, both on servers equipped with graphics cards (minority of Cloud services providers) and servers equipped with processors only (huge majority of Cloud services providers). REDsdk based applications can process real-time and photo-realistic graphics directly on remote/Cloud servers, users being free to control their software with any third-party remote management application (Microsoft remote desktop, etc.).

REDWAY3D pushed the integration further by developing its own API to encode/decode data transfers between the client and the remote/Cloud servers, in order to get rid-off third-party remote management software. The Rednet API enables any HTML 5 compatible client (i.e. in practice any tablet, smartphone, laptop or workstation) to use a remote/Cloud based software, as if the software was running locally on the client, with many benefits.

First no software installation is required, not even a browser plugin. Second, models of any size and complexity can be virtualized and edited on the remote device, even if they do not fit in the remote device memory, as only images/videos are broadcasted in a bidirectional way between the remote/Cloud servers and the local client. Third, the protection of the digital mock-up is guaranteed, as only images/videos are transferred to the client and the 3D data always remains on the remote/Cloud server. Fourth, ISVs save a lot of time and money developing their remote apps, as they can deploy the same software to iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows mobile devices for example.

More info about Rednet

Sketch rendering

Sketch rendering has always been a popular way of processing images and animations, in order to let more space to creativity and imagination. In this new release, REDsdk enables programmers to define their custom parameters to simulate pens strokes, hatches as well as the flatness of colors.

This rendering mode can be applied as a post-processing effect too, in order to generate a variety of different renderings without spending the time in a new image/animation processing.

Rendering layers

Post processing becomes more and more popular, as it enables users to completely modify the look of a still image or animation, without running the processing of new renderings. To do so, REDsdk extracts the different parts of a still image or animation into layers, which will be later on composited inside another software in real-time.

Currently, REDsdk isolates more than a dozen of rendering layers among which the color, depth, mask, object ID, material ID, normal, reflection and refraction components.

Support of new GPUs

REDsdk 3.4 adds the support for new hardware devices.

The total number of supported graphics cards has been raised from 1251 to 1311, so there are 60 new chipsets that have been recorded into the drivers database. Among them:New AMD/ATI graphics, with a lot of AMD Radeon R5, R7 and R9 desktop & mobile references.

New NVIDIA GeForce GTX 700 desktop and mobility models, Tesla K40 references and Quadro K mobile series.
Enhanced INTEL GMA GEN7 capabilities

Geometry shaders

Until now, the configuration of a shader in a material was using the vertex shader and the pixel shader stages of the OpenGL rendering pipeline. REDsdk 3.3 adds the support for the geometry shader stage. REDsdk programmers can therefore add a geometry processing stage to every shader, written in GLSL or in ARB, two standard programming languages for shaders.

As a reminder, a geometry shader enables programmers to generate geometries “on-the-fly”, without the need for a geometric modeler to manage some extra topology that will require a tesselation. It is thus a perfect tool to refine some geometries locally to increase the realism of some real-time visualization or photo-realistic rendering.

New GPU area shadows

The latest release of REDsdk features a new implementation of area shadows by the GPU ray-tracer. Area shadows are generated on the GPU from any rectangular area light source or from any rectangular physical light source (which is implicitly translated into an area light when rendered on the GPU).

The image on the side shows GPU area shadows, rendered on the left part of the image, running in real-time. The right side of the image shows the same image generated with CPU area shadows.

This new implementation of GPU area shadows enhances the will of REDWAY3D to cover all the rendering modes with REDsdk, i.e. real-time visualization, fast photo-realistic previsualization and high quality photo-realistic rendering.

New GPU Skylight & Sunlight with area shadows

REDsdk 3.3 also brings a new visualization of the skylight and sunlight to the GPU. The GPU skylight is displayed in real-time with an accurate representation of the sky dome surrounding the geometry. In addition, the skylight can display ray-traced area shadows using the GPU and the same rendering options as the other area light do on the GPU. The sunlight is also visualized on the GPU with improved shadows

Auto sampling

While API providers usually like to expose many options and parameters, REDWAY3D prefers to simplify REDsdk as much as possible. The auto sampling feature aims at simplifying the entire scene setup for the production of photo-realistic images. Among the different effects that need a setup, it can be somewhat difficult to determine the number of samples to use for the rendering of a physical light or the number of samples to use to process a reflection glossiness for instance.

Thanks to the automatic sampling, all samples count are automatically and dynamically chosen by the engine. This means that if auto-sampling is enabled, there’s no more need to setup any number of samples in the REDsdk API.

REDsdk 3.3 adds the support for new hardware devices.

• Intel® HD Graphics, Intel® HD Graphics 4400, 4600, 5000, Iris™ 5100, 5200 Series
• Many new references in the AMD Radeon HD 7000 and 8000 Series have been added
• new NVIDIA hardware has been added to the database: New references in the NVIDIA GTX 500, 600 and 700 Series, desktop and mobile, and a few Quadro K references.

Physical lights

Physical lights are meant to make your designer’s life easier. By using REDsdk, you can directly enter light intensities in lumens and watts, thus avoiding any mistake and incorrect image. The final rendering image or animation immediately becomes a lot more realistic.

Furthermore, any geometry can become a light source, leaving a complete freedom to your creativity. You can now easily design any neon sign you can imagine or even render your preferred Jedi light saber. This feature will also save you a lot of time when importing models from 3rd parties, as you will just have to indicate which geometries are light sources, instead of adding new objects to your scene.

For the most demanding users, REDWAY3D added the support of IES profiles to REDsdk. IES profiles are files that describe the overall spread of light in space for a specific light source. Most of manufacturers provides IES profiles for their lighting appliances, which can be downloaded freely from their websites. You can now design a physically correct 3D scene, without any knowledge about lighting and still produce a great image!

Physical sky & sun model

It would have been a poisoned gift to enable REDsdk users to use physically correct light sources of any shape, if REDWAY3D would not have offered the same feature for the most popular light sources which are the sun and the sky. This is why REDsdk users can now visualize their models at different times of the day and under different skies by using a few function calls of the REDsdk API.

Vectorized HLR (Hidden Line Removal)

REDsdk has already offered to programmers the ability to display HLR in real-time for many years. This feature proved to be particularly useful to select a point of view, build a specific layout or simply validate a model before printing. However, as the output was based on rasterization, it produced pixels and was mainly useful for a displays, not for printing.

REDWAY3D enhanced the HLR capabilities, by producing a vectorized output. Lines can now be considered as real lines entities to enable programmers to apply thicknesses, dashes with a correct continuity all along the lines. This output can easily be redirected to a printer or a PDF file, to produce a high quality paper or electronic version of a drawing or assembly plan.

New driver base editor tool

Since the release 2.1, REDsdk has detected the hardware configuration (GPU, OS, driver versions) of the host platform. Based on this unique configuration, REDsdk could make a recommendation to end-users about the best driver to install for their machines, thanks to the intensive and rigourous test procedures run at REDWAY3D. End-users could then directly download and install the correct drivers directly from the displayed internet link, removing more than 95% of the technical support team’s work related to graphic issues.

As REDsdk is fully modular and customizable, so is the driver recommendation database. REDsdk integrators can overwrite the default recommendation, if they find a better driver match for their software. This happens usually when the REDsdk based software is installed on the same machine as a 3rd party software which requires a specific driver version to run.

Windows 8 support

REDsdk 3.2 adds the support for Windows 8 in 32bit and 64bit versions. This makes REDsdk supports all the operating systems indicated below at this date:

• Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows X64, Windows Vista 32bit & 64bit, Windows 7 32bit & 64bit, Windows 8 32bit & 64bit
• Linux 32bit & 64bit
• MacOS X 64bit

Together with this new operating system, REDWAY3D tested, validated and makes drivers recommendations for the following new hardware cards

• Intel GMA 7 series
• Nvidia Kepler series

Full viewer example included

REDsdk Bridge for Parasolid comes with a cross-platform viewer, which enables the opening, visualization and the picking and selection of all Parasolid models in an interactive way. The viewer also enables users to save a Parasolid model as a “.red” file, which is the native file format of REDsdk.

Use of the “.red” file format is not required to benefit from REDsdk, but since the format enables both high compression and multi-threaded loading of data, many REDsdk customers choose to integrate it as their application’s native file format, or as a subset of the format.

The “.red” file format also enables REDsdk programmers to interact with Parasolid data through the REDsdk utilities, in order to set up materials and photo-realistic renderings, as shown in the video opposite.

Introduction of the REDsdk customer

Founded in 1987, 20-20 Technologies has been leading the world in computer-aided design, business and manufacturing software for the interior design and furniture industries for more than 20 years. 20-20 Technologies’ solutions cover the entire supply chain, from plant floor to point of sale. They have become the industry standard for their breadth of functionality and catalog content as well as their cutting-edge 3D rendering. 20-20 Technologies owes its unrivalled expertise and longevity in the industry to the calibre of its more than 500 employees and extensive network of partners worldwide.

20-20 Technologies Inc was acquired on September 13, 2012 by an affiliate of Vector Capital Corporation (“Vector”) pursuant to a plan of arrangement under the Business Corporations Act (Québec).

Moving from a “nice” rendering to a true photo …

“20-20 Technologies developed in-house and also purchased from 3rd parties different photo-realistic solutions in its history, so several engineers at 20-20 have a deep knowledge of photo-realistic rendering and also strong expectations about what they would like to achieve from a rendering solution. For 20-20, moving to REDsdk simply meant moving from the “nice” rendering delivered by our former solution to an image that could be mistaken for a true photo”, said Stéphan Dagenais, Platform Manager and 20-20 Design R&D Manager at 2020 Technologies Inc.

… Without impacting our legacy

“When you switch technologies, the big question is what you are going to do with the legacy content that’s been created over many years. At 20-20 we had strong processes to help our customers, like kitchen and bathroom manufacturers, generate their product catalogues so they can be used interactively within 20-20 Design. The change of our rendering solution seriously impacted our catalog generation workflow. Fortunately, REDWAY3D could offer a migration solution for our catalogue of materials, thanks to their material editor. In a few days, we could repurpose our legacy materials and render them using the RED engine technology”, said Jean-Claude Perraux, Team leader Design Services Platform.

Making the decision

“When Stéphan and Jean-Claude returned from REDWAY3D after a week of integration workshops, the 20-20 board of directors could immediately see the existing objects, materials and models rendered with this new technology. The 20-20 Executive Committee unanimously agreed that our original goals had been realised and that 20-20 Design had achieved the “WOW” effect”, said André Chartier, Senior Vice President Product Development

Meeting end users’ expectations

“After improving our photo-realistic rendering, we realized it would be hugely beneficial to upgrade our real-time visualization as well. Indeed, our customers have been asking us for the ability to place more objects, get more detailed and realistic results, in as quickly as possible!”

“We therefore started to research the real-time aspect of REDsdk and realized the substantial benefits of an all-in-one 2D/3D graphics engine. We could handle more objects in our scenes, give almost instant feedback to our customers with far more interactivity than ever before … In short, we could improve the complete customer experience using our software.”

“After the release of 20-20 Design using REDsdk, we received a huge amount of feedback from our users via the 20-20 Technologies forum. Much of the time, forums contain many posts about what users don’t like instead of what they do. I was however delighted to see many posts criticizing photos created from other software when compared to those that can now be achieved using 20-20 Design.” added Stéphan Dagenais..

The customer’s final word

“When you develop software you need to remain focused on your core business values and objectives. I am therefore delighted that the 20-20 Design engineers never chose to “re-invent the wheel” when investigating the development of a rendering solution. They took a very pragmatic approach by selecting, testing and validating the best software component on the market”, concluded André Chartier.

REDsdk now runs on Windows, Linux and MacOS X !

If you look at the history of the RED technology, you will realize that REDsdk has been available on Windows for more than 8 years and on Linux for more than 4 years. It was a natural move for REDWAY3D to port its graphics kernel to MacOS X, in response to the growing installed base of Apple products.

A REDsdk customer can now decide to deploy its software on all these operating systems, just by recompiling his source code, without making any change to his graphics code, as all operating systems differences are managed by REDsdk.

“The more Operating Systems REDsdk supports, the more value for money it will bring to its users” said Lionel SCHMITT, REDWAY3D CEO. “It is our strategy to add new platforms to REDsdk in a near future and particularly mobiles ones, to become the essential graphics kernel available on the market”

On the right picture, you can see a screenshot of the Turbine demo running on MacOS X, that you can download for Windows, Linux and MacOS X from our download section.

High performance software rendering mode

REDsdk supports different rendering modes (rasterization & ray tracing) and different processing devices (3D graphics card acceleration, CPU processing, or a combination of both) in order to benefit from any hardware power users have at their disposal in their laptops or workstations. The emergence of virtualized environments (see below) and multi-cores CPU architecture made CPUs competitive against GPUs for some simple usages, like the display of 2D drawings or plain 3D meshes.

At the end of 2009, REDWAY3D started working on a full CPU rendering mode that you can see on the top part of the picture on the right. This proof of concept caught all the attention of the REDsdk customers, who asked for improvements in order to use this mode as a generic fall-back rendering mode in case of drivers issues, lack of 3D hardware accelerated card or for running in environments which poorly support graphics layers (like the Web or virtualized environments).

On the bottom part of the picture on the right, you can see the real-time display offered by REDsdk using the CPU only. The graphics processing has been improved a lot by leveraging the multi-cores architectures and the complete algorithm as well. Both images were taken after a few milliseconds of processing.

Integrated CPU / GPU tone mapping

What bothers new users when they start playing with photo realistic rendering is the requirement to use right model scales and units. While the model geometry units are usually mastered by designers, users have a lot less knowledge about the setup of lights and materials. For this reason, photo realistic renderings are very often over exposed (burnt) or under exposed (dark), requiring to spend time on modifying the photo realistic setup of the model and generating frustration while waiting for a new image to be processed.

REDsdk 3.1 is offering a new and unique feature which will ensure users to get the correct image the first time, without any requirement for new trials. You can see CPU / GPU tone mapping as including your favorite retouching software directly inside your application, through REDsdk. Furthermore, while your retouching software usually works on a low definition image (jpeg, tiff or other format), REDsdk works on the native processed image, with the full HDR (High Dynamic Range) resolution. Thanks to this, users can access much wider ranges of retouching and without any loss of quality.

These changes can be applied at any stage of the processing (before, during or after) and even in real-time if you have a GPU inside your machine as it is a processing GPUs can do very quickly compared to CPUs. So you will not have to run a rendering a second time!

Detection and support of virtualized environments

One of the benefits of the CPU only rendering mode, is the ability to support easily the deployment of your software on other platforms, without taking care of the hardware available. This includes a usage of your application on the web where the majority of people do not have 3D GPU, on rendering farms where blade servers do not have any graphics card at all and on virtualized environment where 3D hardware layers are very poorly supported.

REDsdk automatically detects and setups itself in CPU rendering mode for virtual environments like VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Virtual server, Microsoft terminal server, Virtual Box, etc. This way the setup of a REDsdk based software can be automatically programmed to offer the best experience to the end-user.

Improved software ray tracer performances

REDWAY3D is continuously investing time and R&D on the improvement of its graphics toolkit performance. A new step was achieved recently, by increasing the software rendering speed by 10% to 15% according to models. Meanwhile, the memory footprint of the kernel was also reduced by a similar amount.

As many REDWAY3D customers target the industrial market where laptops and workstations are generally purchased for a long period of time, its is key for the RED graphics kernel to enable end users with an entry range hardware configuration to still benefit from productivity gains using RED.

New hardware certifications

REDWAY3D extended its range of GPUs in order to test, validate and enhance REDsdk while running on these platforms:

• AMD Radeon HD 6000 & 7000 Series
• New references in the AMD Mobility Radeon HD 4000 Series
• NVIDIA GeForce GTS 300M Series
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 500 & 600 Series
• New references in Quadro / Tesla product lines

A 100% free API to bridge REDsdk and Parasolid

REDWAY3D is pleased to announce Redparasolid, a new API which can be used to connect REDsdk and Parasolid, the well known 3D solid modeling component software used as the foundation of Siemens PLM’s NX and Solid Edge products. It is the second bridge REDWAY3D offers to its REDsdk customers, considering the one already available for the Teigha API from the Open Design Alliance.

Redparasolid is composed of a complete API delivered with its full source code and a ready-to-use viewer to directly load and display Parasolid models with the REDsdk graphics engine. This way, Parasolid users can quickly see the performance increase they can get by using REDsdk inside their own software.

Redparasolid is offered 100% free of charge. For further information, you can contact either REDWAY3D or Siemens Plm.

Faster anti-aliasing with a better quality

The REDWAY3D engineers worked a lot on the rendering quality vs. processing time ratio, to raise it by 20% in average. This improvement was realized by a better sampling efficiency and also several modifications of the anti-aliasing algorithms.

As a consequence, REDsdk users can now raise even more the number of samples for area lighting, material glossiness and anti-aliasing. Then, they can precisely tune the performance vs. noise balance through the adaptation amount and threshold ray-tracer parameters.

Printing and high resolution renderings are now within reach of anybody!

More built-in shaders

REDsdk 3.0 offers two new built-in shaders, as shown on the picture to the right.

At the top, you can see the “viewport shader”. This shader is primarily used for the display of a software application viewport in “basic” mode. This mode provides the best drawing speed possible for a given hardware configuration and is used when the frame rate is the key graphic factor, as when working on geometries and or animations for example.

At the bottom, there is an illustration of the logo shader. While REDsdk support shading trees (where you combine materials together), it can be tricky to add a simple logo to an existing material, specially when programmers re-use materials designed by other people. This shader solves this problem, by controlling directly the look of the logo, without applying the effects of the materials which may exist underneath.

Like the other REDsdk built-in shaders, these two new shaders work both with the 3D hardware acceleration if there is one available in the end-user machine or in pure CPU mode (case of the top part), as it is often the case for software deployed on the web or running in virtualized environments.

Support of stereoscopy improved

Previously with REDsdk, programmers were doing stereoscopy by compositing layers, one for the left eye and another one for the right eye. This layering mechanism could appear a bit complex, specially when layers were simultaneously used for other purposes, as hiding / showing geometries or setting different rendering options.

REDsdk 3.0 now offers extensions to directly manage the stereoscopy (both in and out). The REDWAY3D engineers also validated the latest stereoscopic hardware available (like the NVIDIA 3D Vision Wireless Glasses Kit)

New materials added to Redmaterials

Together with the release of REDsdk 3.0, the ready-to-use library of materials developed by REDWAY3D is extended with:

A new category of materials for fabrics
Tens of more wood materials

New hardware and custom certifications

As always, REDWAY3D is continuously updating REDsdk to benefit from the latest GPU models and features and thus driver recommendations are updated from one release to the next one.

• With REDsdk 3.0, around 100 new GPUs were added to the hardware list:AMD FirePro v3900, v4900, v5900, v7900 and their corresponding Mobility & Radeon versions
• NVIDIA Quadro 600, 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000 and their corresponding M & GeForce versions
• AMD switchable graphics
• NVIDIA Optimus graphics

Clever sampling

The role of the GI (Global Illumination) is of course to increase the final realism of a 3D scene, but without blowing up the rendering time! To do so, GI samples must be positioned in a very smart way inside the model. Too many samples and you will slow down your rendering time, too few and your rendering quality will become so low that you will have to start generating a new image or animation that will make you loose even more time.

In their latest REDsdk release, the REDWAY3D engineers improved a lot the generation of GI samples as illustrated on the picture on the right, showing a teapot in the corner of a box. As you can see the density of the samples raises where it is required to catch details (the handle, lid, spout of the teapot) and also where the light occlusion is more important (base of the teapot and edges of the box).

New shadows

To make compositions of scenes easier, Redmaterials offers a new material called “Matte Shadows”. This new material ensures a good coherence of shadows when a 3D model is integrated inside an environment (can even be HDR) which is just a picture mapped on a spherical background. The picture on the right shows a car modelized in 3D, while the background is just a bitmap stuck to an hemisphere. This technique, enables 3D designers to show their models quickly in different environments without having to modelize them.

Also, to increase the rendering speed when possible, software shadow maps are now supported by the REDsdk ray tracer.

Improved accuracy

The REDsdk 2.4 accuracy has been extended in many ways. The quality of texts has been improved significantly, as shown on the picture on the right, together with their DXT compression algorithm, for the benefits of all the industrial users of REDsdk. This feature is as always available both for GPU and CPU rendering modes, which were introduced in 18 months ago (see the REDsdk 2.1 press release for more details).

The ray tracer part of REDsdk, now supports simple and double precision databases, which is a “must-have” feature for all people who design 2D and 3D models where small objects are adjacent to large ones (e.g. Civil engineering with lights along a road).

Material editor

To help REDsdk users in deploying their own custom materials, REDWAY3D developed a material editor. With a simple GUI (Graphic User Interface), anyone can load its own textures and define its rendering parameters (reflection, transparency, etc.). All the materials parameters (textures included) are then packaged in a single “.red” file, that users can directly import inside their own 2D/3D model.

The material editor can be used to produce complete catalogs of predefined materials, thanks to its command line and batch working modes. Designers of the catalog can also decide to expose some parameters to let users change them and then increase the possible rendering options (as the color of a golden metal which can have various taints of yellow or even white) or hide some material parameters to force users to render their models based on pre-calibrated elements.

New hardware and custom certifications

As always, REDWAY3D is continuously updating REDsdk to benefit from the latest GPU models and features and thus driver recommendations are updated from one release to the next one. REDsdk 2.4 comes with the support of the NVIDIA® G400 chipset, that users will find on the Quadro 6000 card for example.

If for any reason, an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) wants to overwrite the default REDsdk driver recommendation, it is now very easy to do so by editing the database of the recommended drivers with the new SCU (System Check Utility) management tool.

Introduction of the REDsdk customer

Configura Sverige is a globally operating company with headquarters in Linköping, Sweden, and commercial operations in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. Founded in 1990, the company is privately owned with more than 80 employees worldwide and annual sales of more than $9 million USD. Configura creates Parametric Graphical Configuration (PGC) software solutions for leading international companies. The software’s origin stems from the office furniture industry but the technology is perfectly suited for other industries that deal in configurable, complex products requiring space planning.

Configura software solutions include CET Designer® and manufacturer Extensions, Configura® (original software platform) and InstantPlanner®, see www.configura.com for more details.

Configura AB wanted to offer its customers better graphics performance to be able to handle large and complex graphics models, while increasing the visualization speed and realism at the same time.

The challenge

“Configura integrated several software components, among which the most popular one is probably the DWG/DXF file format library from the Open Design Alliance, which is a key component for architectural 2D drawings and 3D models in particular. Of course, modifying existing components structure to add a new software graphics component was not an option” said Johan Lyreborn, CEO for Configura. “Furthermore, Configura wanted to enable its PGC users to manipulate extremely large models and get rid of performance issues related to scalability.

The evaluation

“Our products already had real-time and photo-realistic visualization tools, so it was not as if any visualization package could have made the job for our customers. I expected it to be faster, with a nicer rendering quality and a better scalability than our existing libraries”, commented Göran Rydqvist, CTO for Configura. “A short evaluation of REDsdk quickly proved our R&D team could benefit from an excellent graphics speed and scalability, while getting access to advanced rendering options for the same engineering investment. We realized the graphics cards were used in a more effective way, offering more performance for the same hardware configuration and REDsdk could offer more than 50% performance increase at each new graphics cards generation”.

The integration

“Considering our unique technical requirements, when users can create, edit, delete dynamically thousands and thousands of different objects made of thousands of polygons each, I did not expect to get a turnkey software package to solve my problem” added Göran Rydqvist. “I wanted to use a graphics toolkit delivering a brute force 2D/3D graphics power that the Configura R&D team could customize and optimize in a clever way, according to its application requirements. REDsdk offered all the primitives in its API to integrate our specific needs and deliver this graphics acceleration I was looking for”.

The end user’s benefits

“Offering advanced graphics capacities to its customers, at a similar product price was really a challenge for Configura. While all our customers will benefit from an increased scalability, all of them will get a better visualization quality simultaneously”, precised Johan Bengtsson, Vice President, Marketing & Sales at Configura.

“While the designers primarily want to be able to work efficiently on their 2D/3D models, I know our better rendering realism will be a key weapon for our customers sales forces, especially in the kitchen, bathroom and furniture areas”.

The customer’s final word

“Developing a PGC product like CET Designer® would be too long technically and not price-wise competitive without partners. Indeed, when your software manages all the steps from the 2D/3D design drawing to the order, you need to rely on software components to be cost effective “.

“Configura has this partnership culture from its creation date. I am glad REDWAY3D offered a model that fitted in to our existing business situation” concluded Johan Lyreborn.

CPU performance enhancements

REDsdk offers real-time (rasterization based) and photo-realistic (ray tracing based) rendering features, while running on the CPUs (Central Processing Unit, i.e. processors cores) and/or the GPUs (Graphics Processing Units, i.e. graphics cards). These alternate or combined running modes, offers the best of each world.

GPUs are used where they perform better than CPUs, mainly for real-time visualization, while CPUs remain the best choice for photo-realism. Furthermore, the CPU visualization mode provides an interesting rendering fallback when the GPU is not present (e.g. rendering farms made of blade servers), not present everywhere (e.g. web deployed application), not supported (e.g. virtualized environments) or incorrectly configured (e.g. wrong driver installed).

Each time REDWAY3D improve the CPU performance of its graphics middleware, almost all the REDsdk rendering modes benefit from this performance gain. On REDsdk 2.3, the CPU performance raise was measured to 20% at least, compared to previous releases.

Better Global Illumination quality

Global Illumination (GI) algorithms in REDsdk are continuously improved to provide better results for equivalent or better performances over the time.

Indeed, while REDWAY3D continues to imagine particular cases or REDsdk customers create them, even without being consious of them, the REDsdk 2.3 GI algorithms will require fewer samples, and thus less rendering time, to reach the rendering quality of the previous REDsdk GI versions.

New CPU software API

REDsdk came with buit-in materials for the most popular lighting equations (Lambert, Blinn, Phong, BRDF, etc.) from its first release, back in 2006. Also, REDsdk customers could implement their own lighting models based on GPU shaders, to solve their own rendering needs, as real-time HLR (Hidden Line Removal) in the industry, or real-time cartoon shading for entertainment studios.

Considering the different running modes of REDsdk, it was natural for REDWAY3D to offer the same kind of customization API for the CPU running mode of REDsdk.

REDsdk programers can thus use all the built-in lighting equations on the GPU or CPU indifferently, or program their own for GPUs, CPUs or both.

100 new materials delivered

Part of the latest Redmaterials release, 100 new materials representing exotic woods and veeners are proposed. As a reminder, Redmaterials is not mandatory to use and customize materials in REDsdk. Redmaterials integrates third parties textures with a high quality and a very high resolution that REDsdk customers who purchased the Redmaterials add-on can distribute without run-time nor royalty.

The global illumination (GI)

The global illumination (GI) describes a set of algorithms which simulates light

bounces on every object in a 3D model. Thus, each object (wall, door, seat, etc.) becomes a light by itself, exactly as it happens in reality, when every object absorbs, transmits, reflects a part of the original light sources, which can be either natural or artificial.

The GI is a key step in enhancing the level of realism of all the images & animations you will create using REDsdk. For this purpose, REDWAY3D has developed an industrial and robust GI solution. Furthermore, REDsdk’s GI creates high quality renderings without noise in a limited computation time; unlike other solutions that suffer from scalability and convergence problems when facing the need for the rendering of high quality pictures or animations.

The skylight

The skylight is another key step required to produce realistic images and animations. The skylight is a new kind of light source inside REDsdk that simulates the lighting contribution that come from every direction. The skylight is for example perfectly suited for the rendering of outdoor scenes that gather the smooth diffuse lighting contribution coming from cloudy environments. REDsdk users can easily supply their own HDR environment images to integrate their 3D scenes into their own environments with an increased level of realism.

REDsdk based software enable their users to load custom 2D pictures of skies, to simulate the views of the same 2D/3D model in different environments, or at different seasons, dates and times of a same environment, in a very easy way.

Support for Windows 7

Windows 7 is now supported by REDsdk v2.2, in both 32bit and native 64bit versions. The System Check Utility (SCU), which enables end-users of REDsdk based applications to automatically download a certified driver for their software has been updated accordingly.

REDsdk v2.2 graphics toolkit offers 2D/3D real-time and photo-realistic functions from W2000 to Win7, Linux, in 32bit and native 64bit releases when available by the Operating System.

A new “CPU only” visualization mode

By default REDsdk runs in “hybrid” mode, i.e. using all the CPU cores and GPU cards available in the user machine, to offer the maximum visualization performance possible with a given hardware. The requirement of a 3D hardware card was problematic in some cases:

• Deployment of an application on the web, where 3D cards equip less than 20% of the machines worldwide
• Use of blade servers render farms which do not have any graphics chipsets
• Virtualization environments (VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, etc.) for which 3D graphics layers are supported at best at a very basic level

The CPU visualization mode version 1.0 produces renderings which exactly match the GPU for both real-time and final rendering, even when the digital hardware precision may differ between the GPU and the CPU. REDsdk detects and manages these differences automatically (see picture on the right).

The hybrid mode remains available as well and can run in parallel. This enables ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and REDsdk programmers to apply different strategies for their software according to the hardware base platform, in a totally transparent way. A few examples are

• Legacy laptops and workstations can run in “CPU only” mode for both real-time and final rendering
• Rather recent machines can run in “hybrid” (CPU + GPU) mode for both real-time and final rendering
• Latest hardware can use “hybrid” + “CPU only” modes simultaneously, where the real-time viewport is managed by the GPU and 2 CPU cores, the CPU cores left running in “CPU only” mode to provide offline and background rendering services to the REDsdk programmer or the application end-user.

The picture on the right illustrates the visualization obtained in the “CPU only” mode at 10 frames per second on a 5 years old hardware platform. When not updated, the visualization “refines” itself until it reaches the quality set by the REDsdk programmer

A new “realistic” material ensures a correct conservation of the light energy

A new RED material called “realistic” is delivered as part of the Redmaterials 2.1 additional module. This new material ensures a correct management of the light energy depending on three fundamental parameters, diffusion, reflection and transmission of the light.

In practice this “realistic” material prevents REDsdk based applications to produce unrealistic pictures by reflecting more light than received, while increasing the overall realism of renderings.

The System Check Utility

REDsdk programmers and end-users of software based on REDsdk do not have to take care of driver versions anymore! Starting with REDsdk 2.1, an API automatically checks the end-user hardware configuration and recommend a tested & validated driver based on the REDsdk version used. Recommended drivers are hosted at REDWAY3D and thus can always be accessed, even when deprecated. REDsdk programmers can clone the SCU integration example (picture on the right side) or integrate their own design natively inside their software through the REDsdk API.

To get an overview of the SCU (System Check Utility) services, you can download the REDsdk demos here, they all integrate this new REDsdk component.

Wide library of materials for photo-realism and real-time

Redmaterials is a new add-on for REDsdk, offering pre-configured materials for the RED engine SDK. Through the use of Redmaterials, users get access to more than 300 materials setups of multiple categories (stones, woods, metals, etc.). Each material has some simple parameters (size, tile, taint) which can be tuned by the user.

To benefit from the unified graphics architecture of REDsdk (same code for real-time 2D, 3D and photo-realism), materials are shipped with an approximated real-time setting when the photo-realistic one cannot be processed in real-time.

Better ray tracer recursion performances

Recursion is involved many times in photo-realism rendering, for indirect lighting (reflections, refractions, etc.) and for glossy materials. REDsdk integrates new optimizations which speed up the processing of all recursive rays.

These optimizations can provide 100% acceleration and more to REDsdk users compared to the previous REDsdk release, depending on the recursion level used on the 3D models and the number of indirect rays which must be processed.

Preliminary support of the INTEL® GMA chipsets
In order to expand the range of its hardware supported platforms, REDWAY3D started working with INTEL® on the Graphics Media Accelerators chipsets. These components equipped more than 80% of the Portable Computers shipped worldwide and represent the minimum graphics hardware configuration for people using Microsoft® Windows Vista.

REDsdk 2.0 offers the support of basic 2D and 3D visualization options while future REDsdk versions will enable programmers to get the same feature coverage with GMA components as NVIDIA® or AMD graphics chipsets.

Hardware support of new AMD and NVIDIA® graphics chipsets
AMD-ATI released the R700 component while NVIDIA® launched the GT200 a few weeks ago. These two new hardware graphics components are now part of the REDsdk test and certification process.

Each new graphics chipset is the occasion to double check the scaling capacities of the RED engine. Indeed, while many engines suffer from design or CPU bottlenecks, the RED engine almost reaches the theoretical performance gain announced by the hardware GPU manufacturers each time they launch a new component.

Introduction of the REDsdk customer

Missler Software, a leading global supplier of CAD, CAM and ERP solutions, is ranked the number 2 CAD/CAM supplier in France and in the Top 10 worldwide. The company provides an integrated software solution for product design, manufacturing and data management.

Missler Software wanted to provide its customers with top performance 2D/3D speed, rendering quality and scalability for its main product line called TopSolid.

A demanding customer

“Missler Software always considered it should focus on added value research & development for its customers, this is why we already offered real-time 2D/3D as well as ray tracing solutions in the past. When REDWAY3D came up with the RED engine middleware, the Missler Software expectations were very high in terms of performance, quality and scalability, due to our past experience”, said Dominique Laffret, Missler Software, Vice President of Strategic Relationships .

The fast and secure integration path

“When such an important improvement occurs in your application, you worry about the integration time and the possible impact on the way customers use TopSolid”, noted Dominique Laffret. “I was surprised to see the first in-viewport integration samples of REDsdk in TopSolid after a few days of work of our engineers. I received a beta version of TopSolid with RED running inside, as well as the confirmation it was a riskless technical path before the free evaluation period of REDsdk ended (4 weeks)! Nothing changed in our GUI or manipulators, the RED integration was transparent “.

The OpenGL bi-directional compatibility offered by Redsdk

“By using Redsdk, we could get the best of the current 2D/3D hardware performance while keeping all our TopSolid 2D & 3D graphics assets” said Jean-Luc Rolland, Missler Software CTO .

Indeed, by retrieving the OpenGL context of the application, REDsdk draws inside the same screen, window, viewport as the host application, before giving it back to the application in the same state it received it. The host application can then draw 2D & 3D data or call REDsdk at any time to do it instead. REDsdk can on its side manage any viewport or call some existing OpenGL code (- REDWAY3D note).

“It is a full bi-directional compatibility, TopSolid can call REDsdk and REDsdk can call TopSolid”, outlined Jean-Luc Rolland.

The right partner you want to help you in 2D/3D

“I always heard the REDWAY3D engineers were present and responsive” mentioned Christian Arber, Missler Software CEO . “For any professional company, especially in the industrial business, it is essential to rely on people who understand the challenges and adapt themselves to your needs and requirements. From my point of view, the RED engine middleware does not mean Missler Software should use the REDWAY3D package as-is, but more the REDWAY3D people are ready to tune and optimize it with our constraints. For TopSolid, REDWAY3D made some optimizations to ensure a seamless use of their software package with the other middleware packages we could use in our software, and the modeler in particular”.

The customer’s final word

“Selecting a 2D/3D middleware is obviously a long term business strategy. The decision to go for REDsdk was driven by 3 main factors: the current product capabilities, the risk less integration path and moreover the confidence we had in the REDWAY3D team to achieve an ambitious road map that guarantees us to stay on the top of the 2D/3D market in the future”.

“Missler Software entered a long term partnership with REDWAY3D and I already know TopSolid meets our 2D/3D customers expectations! ” concluded Christian Arber.