AMD has confirmed the release of a new update to its professional Radeon ProRender platform. This update leaves us a list of important changes, and very interestingLet it all be said, that we are going to review with you in the next few lines so that you have all their keys at hand.
The AMD Radeon ProRender update is primarily focused on improving collaborative workflows, and making it easier for more users to enter the world of 3D content creation. To achieve this, AMD has opted for improve support for Open-Source rendering materials, such as USD and MaterialX.
That is the starting point on which the update of the AMD Radeon ProRender revolves, and leaves us, as we anticipated, important news that will make our lives easier. One of them is the introduction of Blender USD plug-in, which comes in version 1.0 and allows us to assemble USD materials using a node-based workflow in Blender 3.0.
We also have the Maya USD plug-in, which comes in beta version and allows rendering, directly in Maya, with USD Hydra materials from Radeon ProRender. The Houdini USD plug-in It has also received a bit of a “love” with this update, as support has been received for MaterialX, and it has raised its version number to 19.
The MaterialX online library, which is still completely free, is now 100% compatible with all standard MaterialX nodes. This enables GPUOpen.com to offer one of the first MaterialX-based material libraries that is not only free and licensed, but also accessible from both the web and plug-ins, and offers full compatibility.
Last but not least, we have the Radeon ProRender SDK 2.02.10, an update that introduces a new backend to the rendering process, which has been dubbed Baikal. It is a path-traced renderer written in Vulkan It uses the ray tracing API of this (Vulkan), which means that it can take advantage of the hardware dedicated to the acceleration of ray tracing present in graphics cards based on the RDNA 2 architecture. It is compatible with MaterialX.
