Light Tracer Render 2.5.0 has been released featuring improved animating models, animating camera, automation capabilities and ground projection of environment map.
The new release should include an HDRI ground projection feature, for more realistic renders, and real-life illumination and reflection.
Light Tracer Render explained that the HDRI environment is the easiest way to achieve real-life illumination and reflections, and thus is widely used in product visualisation. However, if users need to animate the camera or depth-of-field for realistic bokeh, the HDRI map might not work because it’s normally represented as a sphere of infinite radius.
The new release should, therefore, include an HDRI ground projection feature, which was developed to allow reprojecting the lower hemisphere of the spherical panorama onto the ground plane so that users can place their models on the ground instead of having them float in the middle of an environment map.
This way the background should still look plausible after the rotation of the camera.
New settings for this feature should be in the environment tab, where users can select sky dome mode to reproject their environment on the upper hemisphere.
Light Tracer Render 2.5.0 should also offer new automation capabilities, allowing users to avoid repetitive tasks including rendering multiple static views of the same scene, rendering different models in the same environment, and rendering all animations of a single character.
The animation tab has also been reworked, in order to provide users with a more convenient model of animation management. A list of all animation takes of the selected object should now appear in the model animation section, and for each take the duration should be indicated as recorded in the file imported into Light Tracer Render.
The timeline widget should allow users to create video tracks and arrange them by setting a time offset and playback mode for each of them. Tracks can be time-stretched with stretch mode to fit the video length, or looped to play it repeatedly with the loop mode.
The new release should also offer an animating camera feature, which should allow users to animate their cameras smoothly and easily by following a path, defined by keyframes, created from view slots. View slots should be able to capture view angles, lens settings, and visibility states of scene objects.
To define a path, users should be able to fly around your scene along the desired trajectory and capture view slots at the points where the trajectory changes. They should then be able to set duration and select ease in/ease out mode for each keyframe.
Light Tracer Render 2.5.0 should allow users to save videos to GIF format, lock camera movements, and have an improved object context menu and current colour in the viewport on macOS.
