The Speed of Light

• V2 supports 32-bit, and 64-bit for improved memory performance
• Focus on performance improvements on realistic production scenes, including complex interior GI and massive instanced data handling
• Aggressive multi-threading - Brazil r/s V2 is unaffected by the 3ds Max r7/8/9 cpu affinity issues
• New large-dataset-accelerator which effectively replaces the need for the old ray server accelerators
• New Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) Sampling Core
  • Prevents render times from spiraling out of control in scenes that combine multiple oversampled and blurry effects, such as skylight, GI, subsurface scattering, glossy/blurry reflections, DoF, etc.
  • Keeps noise amount and appearance consistent when QMC effects interact, such as skylight visible in glossy reflections
  • Controls flicker during animation, maintaining consistent noise appearance across frames and different computers.

3D Motion Blur Support

• Camera movement and rotation blur
• Object movement and rotation (transform) blur
• Deforming mesh blur
• Particle blur, including PFlow support
• Flexible shutter controls for manipulating shutter bias as well as opening/closing speed

Displacement Support

• Built in Displacement for the new implicit Brazil r/s V2 primitives (BzSphere and BzPlane)
• Rendertime displacements on any object via the Brazil r/s Displacement modifier
• Multiple displacement types supported
  • Analytic - easy to use, with very little memory overhead. Great for very shallow displacement, or distant objects
  • Heightfield - faster than analytic especially in ray tracing heavy scenes, or close to camera.

Render Features

• Unlimited number of render presets, independent of the 3ds Max preset system which was introduced in 3ds Max 6
  • All presets are accessible via trackview, making it easy to copy tracks from one preset to another
  • Entire parameter sets (for example all Luma Server settings) can be instanced (shared) between presets
  • Extensive descriptive text can be entered for each preset
• New z-depth and surface-normal adaptive antialiasing tests
• Improved antialiased image filtering and texture filtering quality
• Many additions and improvements to the render pass system -- more fine-grained control of exactly what goes into each renderpass and more customizability added to pre-defined passes
• Atmospheric visibility in camera views, reflections, refractions, GI and Sub-Surface Scattering can all be determined independent of each other
• Texture baking is now supported
• Luma Server (illumination/GI engine) changes:
  • Many new GI-adjustments added - e.g. saturation, basic black/white point, multiplier, gamma adjustment, and tinting
  • Light portals are now supported - speeds up skylit interiors by magnitudes!
  • Skylight 'Receiver' excludes - exclude objects from receiving Skylight.
  • Irradiance Render Cache - Fast. Very fast. Add Auto-Occlusion or Retracing for some fast addition of detail in nooks and crannies and/or next to bright objects. Works well with motion blur, reflection, refraction, and all other ray traced effects
  • Improvements in GI sampling -- combats the problems where objects previously had to be exploded apart to force edges to show up
• Support for 3ds Max 8's Floating Point Frame Buffer (in 3ds Max version 8 and later only)

Brand New Objects

• Implicit CSG sphere -- mathematically/visually perfect sphere, no geometry
• Implicit CSG plane -- replaces Brazil r/s V1's ground plane -- can be placed/aligned anywhere and can be finite or infinite in size.

Materials

• Glass Material - improved Dispersion shading
• Toon Material
  • All new inker - same basic concept, but higher quality -- works well with non-standard camera lenses
  • improved Gooch shading - better results when using multiple light sources
• Utility Material
  • Sub-Material overrides for different ray types - camera, reflected, refracted, shadow, and sub-surface scattering. Can be used for passes and to create special material FX.
  • New Saturation controls for GI send and receive
  • New, separate photon-affecting GI override controls, including material, tint, and saturation.
• Advanced Material
  • Area light specular highlight support
  • Sub-surface scattering (wax "deep scattering" and skin "sub-dermal scattering") code has been improved

Texture Maps

• Raytraced Reflect/Refract Map with all the controls from the Glass and Chrome material allows adding advanced reflection and refraction effects to any 3ds Max material.
• Occlusion Map - useful for Ambient and Reflection occlusion passes, dirt, and other special effects. Implements surface normal, reflection, and refraction directed occlusion, along with focus controls and attenuation.
• Subsurface Scatter Map - add subsurface scattering effects to any 3ds Max material. Includes focus controls and the option to scatter along the refracted direction for many different material looks, from marble, to soft wax, or even urethane.
• Thin Translucency Map - add translucency effects to surfaces for superb realism in paper sheets, leaves, lampshades. Includes diffusion controls extending the map's applicability to, among other, fabrics such as thick curtains without requiring sub-surface scattering.

Camera & Light

• Multipass camera effects supported
• The lens types' parameters now appear nicely in a new rollout, rather than a separate dialog.
• Depth of Field moved entirely to the cameras
  • Includes per-camera sampling values, bokeh settings, f-stop/focus distance.
  • DoF hugely improved to be super fast and cleaner, especially when combined with effects like glossy reflection and GI thanks to the new quasi-monte carlo core.
• All new viewport and controls UI
• Improved area light sampling with optional automatic quality control
• Extensive projector light controls
• Greatly simplified photon UI
• Largest support of IES libraries in any 3D product - over 30,000 files tested - many of which 3ds Max can't even support!
• Custom curve controls for focus and attenuation are now RGB based, allowing complex gradients
• New light shader driven architecture allows freely mixing light shapes with different focus shapes, and easy expansion of light capabilities
• All new viewport and controls UI - easily hide/unhide rollouts and features
• Creation modes updated - easily set hotspot/falloff for a 'spot' light while creating the light.

Photon & Shadow Maps

• Overall general improvements in speed
• Improved lighting behavior in animated scenes
• New Photon Viewport Datascope - for photon and render cache debugging, setup, and 'impress the clients during project reviews!'
• Photon precomputation - dramatically speeds up regathering of photon maps
• Storing of direct illumination - for scenes with lots of lights, or complex lights (area lights, lights with area shadows, etc.) Further improving regathering speed
• Global photon count multiplier values and methods
• Photon Map-specific energy filters (saturation, gamma, tinting, etc.)
• New native Shadow Map - supports rectangular mapping, map tiling with memory limitation options, and a host of new filtering types (avoid stair stepping with low-res shadow maps)
• Supports non-polygonal implicit objects like the BzSphere and BzPlane and render time displacement