Reality 2.2 has been released

Posted by Pret-A-3D on Mar 29, 2012 in News, Reality, Reality updates | 6 comments

Reality 2.2, a free update for all Reality 2.x user,  has been released. Version 2.2 provides a numerous important fixes and a few improvements. This update is strongly suggested for all users of Reality 2.

Of importance is the refining of the materials conversion from Studio to Reality/Lux. The specular and bump map channels have been improved so that it’s easier now to have great renders with little or no adjustment. The following render was obtained by loading Victoria 4, and adding the “Charlie-Neve” texture. No adjustments to the skin materials have ben done whatsoever. This is a render “straight out of the box”. The image is un-retouched, click it for full size:

Of course the materials can be improved using Reality’s built-in material editor, the above image is just a demonstration of the program’s defaults.
Following there is the detailed list of changes:

• Fixed Depth Of Field (DOF) calculation. It is now accurate and produces a very nice blur for objects out of focus.
• Extended f/stop range for DOF up to f/256.
• Now Reality reads all the DOF information from Studio and converts them. If you enable DOF in Studio then the DOF will be enabled in Reality as well. The Studio f/stop is read and converted to Reality’s setting. Please note that Studio’s f/stop is not realistic. The value is a continuos slider that can produce values that are not found on any camera lens. Reality keeps f/stop values that are in credible increments as commonly found on camera lenses. This increases your ability to produce realistic renders because the f/stop values match the ones that the eye experiences normally. This means that a Studio f/stop value of 16.23, for example, which doesn’t exist in real life, will be converted to Reality’s f16.0. Something like f5.67 will be converted to f5.6 and so on.
• Fixed bug that stopped Reality from showing some ACSEL shaders as available to be shared. Those shaders where the ones saved as “default” (instead of “customization”). Also fixed some other internal bugs in the handling of the local ACSEL database.
• Now ACSEL shaders created with DS3 can also be used with DS4. Some ACSEL shaders created with DS3, and shared via ACSEL Share, where not triggered when using the corresponding model/figure in DS4. This now works. Shaders created and shared with DS4 also work with DS3.
• Fixed ACSEL for metal. Previously a metal preset or the flag for “Custom metal” would not be restored correctly from the ACSEL shader.
• Enabled use of Alpha (transparency) and Bump maps for triggering ACSEL. This means that if a Studio material doesn’t have a diffuse texture, just the diffuse color, it can still set an automatic ACSEL shader if the material has either an alpha map or a bump map.
• Adjusted default value for Specular color from being pure white, which is excessively high, to be a medium-dark grey. This is particularly useful when converting from one material type to another, like when converting from Metal to Glossy. When using that kind of conversion the source material didn’t have a specular color Reality was setting that value to white, which reflected 100% of light away from the object. This new default will lead to better results.
• Improved calculation of specular color. Specular colors for Lux needs often to be set at a much lower brightness than what Studio uses. For this reason Reality generally clips the brightness of the specular color at one third of the level used in Studio. This has changed in 2.2. Now that adjustment is done only if a specular map is not present. In addition Reality checks if the specular color gets set to pure black (RGB 0,0,0) because of the adjustments. If that happens then specular color is then set to 5,5,5 to provide a minimum of reflection.
• Adjusted default Bump mapvalues to be:
  • Negative at –0.001 instead of –0.0001
  • Positive at 0.001 instead of 0.0001
    This makes for a more visible bump map while not being excessive.
• Fixed bugs that cause bump map values from ACSEL shaders to not be used.
• Removed spurious Reality data from the Diffuser prop. Previously, when adding the diffuser to the scene it would overwrite some file path with wrong values.
• Improved Mac OS installer to report clearly the error condition when trying to install Reality into a directory that doesn’t contain DAZ Studio.
• Fixed ACSEL Share retrieval of product description. Now the product name is shown for the products in the “Sharable” list.

To obtain the update simply restart DAZ Studio from a computer connected to the Internet. Alternatively you can download any current version of Reality from the download page.

Here is an example of the new DOF effect: