What´s New - VRED 2020.2 Design & Professional

[seiferp]

Dear VRED Users,

We´d like to inform you that VRED 2020.2 Design & Professional has just been released. It is ready for installation through the Autodesk Desktop App and is available in your Autodesk Account. Here is a quick overview of what´s new and has changed:

Asset Content - Circular HTML5 Overlay Menu

We have added a new circular HTML5 menu as an example to the Asset Manager/Asset Installer. Simply drag & drop the HTML5 menu from the Asset Manager into the viewport of your empty VRED Scene. The menu is compatible with the Genesis.vpb file from the example folder, which is loaded by pressing “Load example scene” from the bottom right corner. Ensure you have downloaded and installed the VRED Asset Installer for 2020.2.

QtQuick, WebGL Stream Support

With the introduction of Qt 5.12, it is possible to stream QtQuick applications in a WebGL stream that can be rendered in an HTML5 canvas. What this means is you can have any QtQuick application running in the background or on a remote host and render its GUI in a local web browser. For more information about QtQuick WebGL streaming, please visit the official Qt Blog. With VRED´s Media Editor module, it is possible to connect to the port of the application and stream QtQuick GUI´s onto a texture. This is very similar to what can be achieved with HTML5 GUI´s in VRED, already.

With VRED 2020.2 Professional, we deliver a Python Script Plugin in the main menu bar that makes it possible to arrange, start, and stop multiple Qt Quick Applications in the background from within VRED. Those configurations can be saved in a .cfg file and loaded automatically the next time the user opens the configuration. In addition, the plugin shows the communication port for each web stream, which can be easily copied into the Media Editor.

This requires VRED Professional, since the Media Editor is used for streaming QtQuick applications onto a texture and the Script Plugin menu entry is not available in VRED Design or Presenter.

Foveated Rendering & Eye Tracking for HTC Vive Pro Eye

With VRED Professional & Design 2020.2, you can use the HTC VIVE Pro Eye headset for eye-tracked foveated rendering, using Nvidia´s Variable Rate Shading in OpenGL. Foveated rendering can improve performance in scenes that use compute-intense materials, as well as when using Real-time Antialiasing. It increases rendering performance and quality by applying varying amounts of processing power to different areas of the image. VRS works by varying the number of pixels processed by a single pixel shader operation. For more information, please visit the official NVIDIA Developer Blog.

Dynamic foveated rendering

The gaze direction of the VIVE Pro Eye user is tracked. The currently focused area of the image is rendered with higher shading quality than the periphery. Depending on the quality settings, which can be changed in the Preferences, this can speed up rendering and/or increase visual quality. If you don't have a VIVE Pro Eye, you can still enable the Foveated Rendering option for VR. The foveal region then remains in the center of the image.

Hardware requirement
A graphics card supporting the OpenGL shading rate image extension is required (NVIDIA graphics cards with Turing architecture (RTX)).

Smart References

We are pleased to introduce our first iteration of Smart References with VRED 2020.2. Smart References will change the CAD preparation and visualization workflow, significantly. User now have much better control when working with large CAD assemblies and a monitoring/update mechanism to keep CAD files in sync with the current VRED scene. It is also possible to import structure files, without geometry, and load or unload sub-assembly files on demand, so users can work through large CAD assemblies step-by-step in the data preparation process. This new reference behavior works for the import of all common CAD assembly formats, such as CatiaProducts+Parts, InventorAssemblies+Parts, NX structure files + parts, JT structure + JT´s, PLMXML + JT´s/FBX, etc.

We have introduced a new Reference Node and context menu entries to the Scene Graph. In addition, there is a new module, the Reference Editor, for handling source and smart references. Use the Reference Editor for real-time monitoring of your files and immediate feedback on the current scene, such as whether it is in sync with the CAD source.

We also re-designed our VRED file handling, so visualization users can create non-monolithic VRED files that can be split. This enables work to be distributed inside the department and monitoring of changes for both, CAD and VRED files, referenced in the master project file. In addition, it is possible to create your own VPB file reference structures and assemble multiple sub-VPB files in one master project. This allows the common usage of sub-files used in multiple projects.

General Improvements

• We have updated the Oculus SDK to version 1.39

• We have updated the Substance Engine to v7

• API command for Substance Preset caching. Substance materials provide the concept of storing presets with different values to create multiple variations of one Substance source material. Whenever such a preset is executed in VRED, the Substance engine runs through the Node Graph in the backend to create new texture output for different material channels. With VRED 2020.2, we introduce the possibility to store already-generated textures and save them in the VRED file. Therefore, we have added two Python commands in our API, enableSubstancePresetCache(enabled) and removeSubstancePresetCache().
  With this command enabled, the texture is written into memory when the preset is executed the next time. This will also result in bigger file sizes when saving the VRED project. It is still necessary to upload the textures to the graphic card when switching presets, but due the fact the Substance engine is no longer used when switching cached presets, the process itself is much faster, especially when working with large texture outputs or switching multiple presets at the same time.

• The Layered Material got a new icon in VRED 2020.2. In previous releases, the Multipass Material and the Layered Material shared the same icon in the Material Editor and it was difficult to differentiate between these two material container types after renaming them.

• We have added a new toolkit for importing JT files. This is currently in an experimental state, but user can now choose between Parasolid (old) and JTOpen in the FileIO dialog when import JT files. The JTOpen toolkit is now part of ATF (Autodesk Translation Framework) and allows us to import XTBrep face material names correctly.

Sincerely,

Your Autodesk VRED Team