Isotropix - What's new in 5

What's New?

Clarisse 5 is a major release with over 100 new features and enhancements! Layout and set-dressing is greatly improved with new orthographic views, a fully revamped graph editor and a new USD exporter! Clarisse 5 also greatly improves rendering. It comes with a whole new standard material based on the Autodesk Standard Surface, whole new SSS engine and many big improvements that speed up both render times and quality. Clarisse 5 also introduces a whole new lighting engine allowing you to seamlessly turn any geometries and emissive surfaces to lights! In addition, Clarisse 5 simplifies even further pipeline integration thanks to Python 3 support and VFX platform 2020 compliance! As always this new release comes with many new tutorials as well as an updated Personal Learning Edition allowing you to learn Clarisse iFX or Clarisse BUiLDER for free!

Orthographic Views

Set-dress your scenes using the all new orthographic projections while working with bazillions of polygons! Using a single shortcut, switch between the current view to the closest orthographic one. Press the same key to toggle back to the previous or closest perspective view. Set view clipping planes to isolate what you see in your scenes. You guessed it right. It has never been easier to navigate and set dress scenes than in Clarisse 5!

Camera Overlays

Clarisse 5 offers camera overlays to help you with the composition of your shots. Using the 3D View or Image View, you can now display any composition guides from a range of predefined presets such as rule of thirds, golden spiral and more! You can also enable multiple configurable safe frames overlays to make it even easier to set-dress shots within the context of the final framing!

New Graph Editor

Clarisse 5 comes with a whole new Graph Editor! It offers many new features and enhancements such as mass editing of keys, new set of tools to insert, warp or stretch keys as well as bake curves. It is now also super easy to create animation cycles thanks to the new pre and post behaviors defining how curves are interpolated outside their boundaries. It has never been easier to animate than in Clarisse 5!

New USD Exporter

Thanks to the new USD exporter in Clarisse 5, it has never been easier to export scenes out of Clarisse! Easily export scenes, geometries along with render displacements, scatterers, combiners, animations and cameras in a super optimized way to import them in other DCCs! Even better, the exporter is also aware of Alembic and USD assets in your scenes to give you the choice to keep them as USD references for maximum flexibility.

USD Variants and Purposes

Clarisse 5 improves its USD importer and now supports variants and purposes which respectively offer a way to define multiple asset variations and scene representations in a single USD file. They can be used for many different things such as defining alternate sets of properties, geometries or even new hierarchies artists can freely switch to when managing and visualizing assets in their scenes.

Improved Global VariableS

Clarisse 5 greatly improves the support of custom global variables. They can now define types, units or even lists of preset values! Custom variables can then be promoted to the main user interface for quick access and editing and combined with expressions, they become a super powerful scene assembly tool. They can drive any item attributes transforming your projects as true and easy to use smart templates!

Render Speed Improvements

Clarisse 5 brings many improvements to rendering performance. It introduces a whole new ray tracing core that can speed up general ray tracing up to 1.5x on actual scenes! The new core is particularly faster on challenging lighting scene configurations and volumes. The path tracer has also been further optimized to increase speed. In general, you can expect about 15 to 30% speed ups and up to 3.5x faster rendering on scenes with lots of specular paths and multiple scattering in volumes!

Adaptive Anti Aliasing Improvements

Clarisse 5 extends adaptive anti aliasing (AAA) to offer enhanced controls to increase both image quality and render speed. Variance threshold can now be driven using sub-sample standard deviation to offer more predictable results. Custom kernel filters can also be specified to control neighbor sub samples contribution to reduce the number of rays needed to estimate pixel variance and speed up rendering.

Denoiser Friendly Rendering

Instead of splatting neighbor pixels contribution to perform anti aliasing filtering, Clarisse 5 can now importance sample camera samples according to the anti aliasing filter. This ensures that rays contributing the most according are the ones favored when launched by the renderer. As a result, not only are images about 15% faster to render but also offer much better results when denoised!

Emission Importance Sampling

Clarisse 5 path tracer introduces a novel sampling method going beyond what's traditionally available in renderers. By enabling emission importance sampling any scene geometries defining surface emission are automatically identified as light sources. They become efficiently sampled according to their material and geometric properties! As a result, challenging scene configurations illuminated by many indirect emissive sources are orders of magnitude faster to resolve!

Geometry Lights

Turn any surface-based geometries, scatterers and combiners into lights using Clarisse 5! Not only can you now define lights with arbitrary shapes but also the renderer can efficiently sample lights made of bazillions of primitives! Geometry lights also support texturing and are importance sampled to render with minimal noise. And as always, Clarisse keeps their memory footprint super low while offering unrivaled interactivity and fast render times!

More Light Improvements

Clarisse 5 brings further improvements to lights! Volume rendering of IES lights and sampling of area lights have both been improved to greatly reduce noise. Light intensity and saturation can be defined using new attributes and controlled artistically using per ray type intensity multipliers for both direct or indirect paths! Lights can also be excluded from beauty to only be rendered in specific AOVs using Light Path Expressions (LPE): super handy when rendering multiple light sets!

Autodesk Standard Surface

Clarisse 5 offers a new standard material compatible with the Autodesk Standard Surface Material specification. Largely inspired from the workflow of the popular Disney principled material, this material, already available in Autodesk Arnold, allows you to accurately mimic most real world materials like plastics, metals, liquids, fabric, glass or skin from a reduced set of parameters! It's just fast, easy, powerful and forward-looking!

New SSS Engine

Clarisse 5 introduces a new SSS engine offering even more photorealistic renders! Thanks to the new random walk, Clarisse can now accurately simulate subsurface scattering occurring on thin and irregular surfaces! The previous diffusion based technique has also been greatly improved to match very closely the new random walk making it very easy to switch between the two techniques to let you freely manage the tradeoff between speed and accuracy!

Faster Hair/Fur Rendering

Curve geometry rendering pipeline has been completely revamped from ground up. As a result, Clarisse 5 can render hair and fur up to 4 times faster compared to Clarisse 4! Even better, the number of knots in curves has now minimal impact on render times improving speed and memory usage on long hair! And wait that's not all! Clarisse now renders curves adaptively whatever the mode you've selected. No need to fiddle with any tessellation attributes anymore! They are just gone!

Transmission Improvements

Transmission has been greatly improved in Clarisse 5! Transmissive surfaces like glass don't need the modelling of both inner and outer surfaces anymore. Transmission scattering can now be simulated for greater realism when rendering thick and viscous liquids. Transmitted shadows have also more controls to be either artistically driven, approximated using fake caustics or physically based on accurate and expensive caustics simulation.

Custom LPE Constants

Clarisse 5 allows you to declare custom constants on materials to output parts of shading graphs using Light Path Expressions (LPE). Using LPE constants, you can output the result of any texture operators in your expressions to retrieve results in custom AOVs. This is just great for compositing when you need to output specific textures, generate masks or extract depth information through reflection or transmission bounces.

Enhanced Attribute Editor

Clarisse 5 greatly improves the Attribute Editor to speed up workflow and reduce learning curve even further! Along with the many new tweaks and enhancements, attributes are now sorted out into whole new hierarchical categories favoring the display of meaningful attributes. It also provides new ways to display modified or overridden attributes as well as new options to quickly filter out display of categories.

Image History Improvements

Clarisse 5 allows you to control how render snapshots are stored. Instead of being automatically generated each time a render ends, render snapshots can now be fully managed! Just switch Image History Mode from Automatic to Manual and click on the snapshot button each time you want to store the current render in the global history. It's really that simple!

Evaluation
Controls

Clarisse 5 gives you total control over its evaluation engine which can be paused to prevent Clarisse from automatically evaluating and pulling data after arbitrary edits. This way you can freely inspect items, make changes without waiting for any updates or data to load or and refresh the view when you'd like to visualize the result. It's simple: you decide when the evaluation starts and when it ends!

Global Output
Resolution Settings

Clarisse 5 allows you to define the default output resolution of your renders directly at application or project level preferences greatly simplifying workflow and pipelines. This way renders are ensured to output with the correct resolution and framing and of course, it is always possible to override renders with custom resolutions directly at the image or render scene level.

New Unified Architecture

Clarisse 5 is based on our new architecture powering Clarisse BUiLDER which required years of R&D. Not only can Clarisse 5 run in either iFX or BUiLDER depending on license type but also it brings the many advancements of the new architecture to Clarisse iFX! It's the same package, same architecture, running the very same powerful engine! Learn more about Clarisse BUiLDER.

New Clarisse PLE

Thanks to Clarisse 5 unified architecture, Clarisse 5 Personal Learning Edition (PLE) can run in both iFX and BUiLDER mode! Anyone now can not only learn and discover the latest and greatest Clarisse iFX for free but also Clarisse BUiLDER, the most advanced node-based scene assembly and sequence lighting tool available on the market! Get started today and learn more about Clarisse PLE.

VFX Platform 2020

Clarisse 5 complies with the VFX Platform 2020 initiative. Not only do you benefit from the many improvements introduced by the open source community these past years, but also Python 3.7 becomes the new default scripting engine replacing the now deprecated Python 2.7. However, since we know the transition won't happen overnight, Clarisse 5 still supports Python 2.7 to let you run old scripts while porting them from Python 2.7 to 3.7.

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