RandomControl is proud to announce that some deep technical work has been done on Arion’s physical sky/sun.

The changes comprise two aspects:

1- The complicated part: The match between sun integrators in the engine is perfect now, which kills some powder or fireflies that were happening before, and cleans noise faster in general as well as long as the sun is used.

2- The easy but very useful part: A new feature has been added so the sun diameter can be configured. Some users had requested the ability to fake ‘less sharp’ sun shadows, for example.
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Both improvements have their own importance by themselves. But when used together, it is possible to efficiently render proper sun caustics, even through dielectrics (like swimming pools or even windows with real glass). The use of MLT sampling shines in all its glory here by allowing to render that sort of images that used to be impractical before.
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Among the other improvements brought to the physical sky, we have added a sun power setting that allows for manual override of the natural sun power, for similar reasons (simulating less clear or cloudy skies).

Below you can see some renders done with an internal build of Arion stand-alone 2.5.0 which feature the new physical sky.

No cheats involved: all the caustics are real and seen through real dielectrics.

Scenes provided by Raphael Aguirre (Realistic Design), Johnny Butcher (Visual Impact) and the RandomControl Team.
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We are working on the release of v2.5.0, which will comprise:
- Arion stand-alone v2.5.0.
- MAX LIVE v2.5.0.
- RHINO LIVE v2.5.0.

They will be released as soon as they are ready, which we definitely hope will happen before the summer ends.

We have some more interesting announcements pending, which we will unveil in the upcoming days.

Thanks for watching!