AMD has rolled out Radeon ProRender Blender Beta Builds with handful of new features And supports. Some important are Baking Nodes and utilities that support this tool.
Many users have been giving feedback that the Blender installers are simply a ZIP file. To load them, launch blender, navigate to the addon preferences and Install from Zip file, which you indicate to the zip file of course.
Table of Contents
Radeon ProRender Blender Beta Builds changelog
Here is the changelog of Radeon ProRender Blender Beta Builds –
Volume object support for Blender 2.83
Blender includes a new object type Volume that is useful for importing an OpenVDB volume file.
Baking Nodes
This release provides node baking option for the shader nodes that Radeon ProRender cannot translate or for faster renders with complex materials. This feature works by taking a node and turning the node and its inputs into a texture that can be used at render time. For better usability you will find a couple of caveats: If you change the shader after, you need to rebake. And currently, the feature only works for materials assigned to one object.
This can be used in two ways:
- In the Quality field of render settings, there is a panel to bake all unknown nodes.
- And a button to bake selected nodes is available in the shader editor.
Radeon ProRender Blender Beta builds Features
Baking nodes – The release added utilities for baking nodes. These are useful with nodes, for example, noise texture nodes that RPR doesn’t translate natively. The utilities are also pretty useful with complex node networks so they run faster at render time. 2 options are available here
- Select an object and material. Choose the nodes you prefer to bake In the Shader Editor and press the Bake Selected Nodes button. The nodes will be simply baked to textures furthermore texture read nodes created.
- Press the buttons saying Bake all Unknown Nodes within the render settings. Entire nodes that RPR is unable to translate will be easily baked to textures.
Kindly note, that after changing node setups, they will need to be rebaked –
- Expose GL_Interop setting below Viewport Sampling settings. The one who is using external GPUs (eGPUs) for viewport rendering may require to disable this.
- Improved speed of export of Images.
- Installers now give simply a zip package. To install, load the addon via the blender addon preferences menu and point at the zip file.
- Included support for reading openvdb files through Blender 2.83 Volume objects.
- Activated Volume Temperature settings on Principled Volume nodes.
Bug Fixes
- Radeon ProRender Blender Beta Builds fix errors that are possible when exporting images with complex scenes.
- Using the Transparent Background option with the denoiser could lead to a black image.
- The number of aperture blades for Depth of Field was applied incorrectly.
- Enabled Transparent Background in the viewport.
- Fixed issues with shadow and reflection catchers.
- Bug when enabling and disabling while viewport rendering.
- Hairs would not show up on a linked model.
- Fixed Smoke rendering with noise enabled.
- Fixed an issue with curve object with empty materials.
- Registering the plugin and scanning for devices is faster.
- Hair bsdf is now closer to Cycles’ renders.
- Hairs with different root and tip radius match Cycles better including closed tip option.
Use the following download links to download Beta Builds of Radeon ProRender Blender –
Windows – VersionRadeonProRenderForBlender_2.3.35_Windows.zip
Linux – VersionRadeonProRenderForBlender_2.3.35_Ubuntu18.zip
macOS – VersionRadeonProRenderForBlender_2.3.35_OSX.zip
Source – AMD Release note.