Clarisse iFX Integrates NVIDIA RTX Acceleration for Real-time Interactivity
Clarisse iFX 4.0 SP2, the most recent update for 3D computer graphics software Isotropix Clarisse iFX, supports interactive NVIDIA RTX ray tracing in Clarisse’s 3D viewport at game engine speeds. Users of Clarisse iFX, made for interactive set-dressing, lookdev, lighting and rendering, can now work with NVIDIA RTX ray-tracing hardware to speed up manipulation and display of production scenes.
As a result, artists can now create, interact with and display assets made of hundreds of billions of polygons in real-time at speeds up to 50 to 100 times faster than the software’s earlier CPU-based viewport, according to Isotropix.
The company’s co-founder and CEO Sam Assadian said, “NVIDIA RTX has major implications for our industry. The display performance is fast enough that it is now possible for filmmakers and VFX supervisors to visualise and edit actual, unmodified production scenes in real-time for set dressing and for virtual cinematography. They no longer need to convert product assets to play in game engines to display an approximation of the scenes.”
Apart from RTX support, Clarisse iFX 4.0 SP2 includes updates to its multiple importance sampling function – that is, combining values generated by several different sampling techniques in order to reduce total variance - that improve final render quality. Compared to previous versions, the new sampling set-up resolves faster and produce less visual noise for the same number of samples.
GPU Acceleration R&D
Isotropix and NVIDIA have collaborated for the last three years on the use of GPUs to speed up Clarisse. In March 2018, Isotropix introduced Clarisse iFX 3.6 SP1, which was among the first commercial VFX and animation applications to make use of the NVIDIA OptiX AI-accelerated denoiser.
Current hardware limitations prevent the team at Isotropix from porting Clarisse’s production renderer to GPU without giving up several critical tools. Therefore, Isotropix is working with NVIDIA to support volumes, render-time displacements, direct ray tracing of Catmull Clark implicit surfaces without tessellation and time instance in scatterers in future updates of hardware-accelerated 3D View in the future.
Hardware acceleration runs exclusively on NVIDIA Turing, Volta, Pascal or Maxwell GPUs, except for work in the Previz and Progressive Rendering modes. If no compatible hardware is found or if an unsupported mode or geometry is displayed, the 3D View automatically falls back to CPU rendering. It is still possible to force the viewport to use the GPU, in which case it will display what it can.
Clarisse iFX 4.0 SP2 is available now to download for free to existing customers with active maintenance. www.isotropix.com
