 D5 Render Version 2.3 Available Now The latest version comes with 53 updates including AO Mode, Outline Mode, Round Corner, Thickness Simulation for Transparent Materials, and Optimizations for Cloud and Fog Effect, Grass Material. At the same time, we see a huge update in D5 Asset Library, that includes landscape models and materials, crops, falling water, interior parallax, 3D Asian people, and more. Here let's break some of the updates down. One of the major updates this time, is rendering effect. We bring to you better cloud and fog effects, optimized grass material, and adjustable sun disk radius in geo and sky. Clouds are divided into two types, high and low. Go to environment, weather, to further adjust the cloud effect with thickness, density, and height parameters that are newly added. Speed and direction are also adjustable, to make better movement of clouds. Just as in real life, thickness, shape, and movement of clouds, will have an effect on lighting conditions. Optimized cloud effect usually works best for aerial view rendering or natural environment visualization, especially from a low angle perspective. Adjustable sun is now available in geo and sky. You can find it in environment, skylight, geo and sky. By adjusting radius for the sun, you'll see a remarkable change to its size, and it also affects the softness of the shadows edges. Meanwhile, lighting of the scene will stay the same. Go to environment, weather, fog, and you'll find more parameters added to the fog effect. Height. Controls the altitude at which fog forms. Falloff. Controls the height falloff speed. Greater the value, faster the falloff. If you want the fog to fade out vertically, with a more smooth transition, then bring this value down a little. Start distance. Determines how far away from camera the fog forms. You can manually enter a numeric value, with a maximum of 1000 meters. Architects tend to use fog effect to add depth and a sense of space to the scene, especially for aerial view rendering. This is something you've been waiting for. The grass material in D5 has been optimized. The polished grass is rid of the rigid, upright shape, and now has a more natural look. Height, density, and trim parameters are added. Grass material in this update is recommended for family lawns, garden landscape, and meadows. Select a material, and go to advanced round corner in material template. Switch on round corner, to achieve rounding of edges and corners for selected materials. Adjustable radius parameter is also enabled. With just one click, this feature saves you the effort to make rounded corners in modeling software yourself. Line mode rendering is added to effect, style. With this option turned on, you can easily render cartoon style scenes. Support adjustable parameters of color, transparency, and change width by distance. A, O, short for ambient occlusion, is used to calculate how exposed each point in a scene is, to ambient light. It brings a sense of space and artistic contrast to the scene. You can switch on AO mode in effect, style with adjustable AO radius. AO mode rendering export and AO channel export are all supported. AO and outline mode rendering will definitely help you a lot in making amazing architectural concept diagrams. Since single-sided transparent materials are likely to cause errors when rendering, we have added a thickness parameter under, refraction, for transparent material template to solve such problems. Select the single-sided material, which in most cases is glass, and check, thickness, to simulate thickness for it so that it renders correctly. ABC file imports are now much faster and more stable, even for complex animations. Making animations in D5 is made much easier for you. Another highlight in this version is the optimization of some interactions within the software. The current interface of D5, and some commands are adjusted, to serve as a more intuitive and logical tool for you to work with, offering you a delightful and efficient rendering experience in D5. You'll find an optimized material picker in D5 2.3. Selecting material that is located behind another material from camera is now made easy with just one click. Select tool, and press Alt, so you can go through at most two layers of materials, to select the material behind, with the picker. We have added animation control, to all the animated models, for you to customize the animation playing process, by clicking on pause at any time you like. Play mode, offset, speed, and range parameters are enabled. In addition to vegetation, characters, and vehicles, path tool now also applies to animal assets in D5. Vehicle path now supports one click, to turn on or off all the car lights. Left hand drive, random color, density, and more parameters have been added, for cars drawn with path tool. This saves a lot of time, when you need dozens of cars with lights on in the scene. Playing models in D5 is now more convenient with presets. Rotation and scale of a model can be preset, before it's placed into the scene, with shortcut keys R, and C respectively. Press R, to rotate models around Z axis. One click on R leads to 90 degree rotation. Hold R and drag the model with your mouse, so you have a better control, of the rotation degree you want. Press C to scale the model up or down. One click on C, and the model automatically scales up by 10%. Hold C and drag your mouse leftwards, or rightwards to scale objects as you want. Left, to scale down, and right, to scale up. Shortcuts in D5 can be customized as you like, in menu, preference. Changing the order of decals is supported. For overlapping decals, for example, puddles, manhole covers on crosswalk decals, you can bring up the menu, by right clicking on the object list. Bring to front, send to back options are enabled, to help you reorder the decal assets. Please note that, the puddles created by rain and snow weather, will also be part of the display order for decals. Watch on depth of field, in camera, and set a focus, which will automatically activate follow focus. Unchecking follow focus, allows you to manually set the focus distance, by entering a value. The group and multi-select actions, have been optimized. Grouped objects are seen as a whole, for following actions, while multi-select is for batch editing, on multiple selected objects. For example, when you rotate a group, the group rotates around its axis, while for multi-selected objects, each of them, rotates around its own axis. Select within a group, double click on an object in a group, and you're able to select any other objects in this group, with the following clicks. Select within a scene, press alt, to select the grouped object, directly from the scene, regardless of its group. Use material picker icon, in the upper left corner of the viewport, or go to menu, tool, or simply activate it by pressing shortcut key, I, then you're able to keep selecting materials, in the scene. Multi-editing and more features, will be supported later. Batch import PBR textures option is added, to the material inspector, to allow for importing multiple PBR materials. D5 applies the metal, roughness PBR workflow, so the maps you imported, need to have the corresponding suffixes, to be recognized. Here's how to name your PBR texture maps, or you can click on the link in description box below. To find the directory where you stored the map, simply click on the texture slot, then, file location, and that folder will open on your screen immediately. The radius of brush, has been adjusted, to scale up or down with the zooming in or out of camera. To brush on a relatively small area, you can move the camera closer, so that the brush size is also smaller. For large scale scenes, especially aerial view rendering, it's recommended to move your camera away, to draw with a larger brush. On the upper left of the viewport, you can see a newly added option to switch, between local, and world coordinate system. In previous versions, D5 uses, the world coordinate system by default. In this case, all actions will be performed, along the orientation, of x, y, z coordinates, which are aligned with the world coordinates, and will not be changed. When the local coordinate system, is active, however, the orientation of an objects x, y, z coordinates, will change, according to its rotation. World, local, coordinate system activation, is a global option, so changes to the coordinate system, will apply to every model in the scene. The sync pivot feature is added. With this feature, models in D5 can retain its, 000 point, from modeling software. Making door opening, closing animation, will get so much easier. Stay tuned, for our upcoming tutorial. Please note that, in video rendering tab, if you change the coordinates, of a model with keyframes, then its keyframe data, will be cleared. When you've installed D5 render on your computer, for the first time, it will automatically run a benchmark test, after which you'll see the results. Whether your specs, are standard, or recommended. You can also download the D5 benchmark tool, from D5 website, and run the test to see how your machine performs, when it comes to real time operating, and rendering in D5 render. You can now find, estimated time remaining info, on the rendering progress bar, so you have an idea, of approximately how long it takes to finish. We've covered a variety, of rendering scenarios, with nearly 1000 new assets, in landscapes, interior parallax, Asian people and more. In this update, 300 new landscape models, including landscape furnishings, outdoor decorations, and landscape lights are ready to use, in D5 asset library, model, landscapes. You'll find a bunch of new pavilions, benches, exterior floor lamps, tree ring edgings, landscape stones, outdoor paving textures, and more ready to use assets, in D5 2.3. More than 500 vegetation assets in nature category, high quality vines, crops, succulent plants, 9 new particles of fountain, and falling water, 45 new interior parallax, for commercial and residential projects, that support lighting parameters and more. Scanned Asian characters, will be added to D5 library soon. You're welcome to post your ideas and suggestions, for animated people, on D5 forum. Alright, that concludes the video, for some major updates in D5 2.3. To learn more about what's new in this new version, please go to D5 forum, for the complete release note. If you are curious about anything that we didn't cover here, feel free to leave a comment down below and we'll come back with more tutorials for you. See you in D5 2.4.