FStorm 1.3.6

FStormRender v1.3.6 for 3ds Max is ready.

Changes since version 1.3.3:

Parallax bump:

Parallax bump combines displacement quality, bump mapping speed and interactivity. It is a 3d effect on flat surface like a hologram. Parallax bump can use any kind of textures, works on shader level, doesn't require geometry recompilation and has almost the same speed as normal bump. It is great addition to achieve more details and realism for almost no cost.

Improved Glossy BRDF:
A new glossiness BRDF function has been discovered producing more natural glossy highlights and extra flexibility such as anisotropic glossiness and different glossiness distributions. Anisotropic glossiness generates different blur strength along different directions to simulate brushed metalls or any scratched surfaces. Different glossiness distributions produce different hightlight shapes without need of mixing several materials with different glossiness.

Texture baking:
Texture baking allows to use any geomtry as a camera for rays start positions and directions. It can be used for lighting baking, displacement/normal baking and other things.

Bitmap random tiling:
Bitmaps repetition is known problem in large scale scenes requiring textures with huge resolution. Such textures are rare, take a lot of resources and don't solve the problem in 100%. Random tiling allows to eliminate any visible bitmap repetition for unlimited areas without any extra memory use or speed drop.

Improved tonemapping:
Digital cameras manufacturers constantly improve colors processing for their devices to get perfect result in most lighting scenarios. FStorm follows the progress. New improved tone mapping gives natural colors even for heavily overexposed images.

Material projections:
Material projection can project any material with mask on any surface with automatic uvw coordinates. It doesn't require any uvw coordinates changes and complex mix materials. Material projection is an effective and comfortable way of adding details to an existing geometry with materials.

Environment projection on matte geometry:
This function allows to reconstruct an environment with matte geometry and projects the environment texture to this geometry. It gives very accurate environment reflections, shadows, GI and ability to move user camera around like the whole environment is 3d geometry.

Shadows Pass:
Shadow pass allows to render shadows filter for selected objects or entire scene for futher compositing. In case of selected objects rendering, it produces shadows only from such objects on entire scene to generate accurate shadows mask.

Distance Texture:
Distance texture generates colors based on distance to specified geometry. It can be used in any complex scenarios for masks, bump mapping and other things.