Slim 3.5 Release Notes

New Features
Enhancements
Bug Fixes

New Features

• Support has been added for Deep Shadows
• New Templates:
  
  • Swiss Army: supports ray traced blurry reflections and refractions, environment maps, caustics and indirect diffuse illumination
    
  • Glass: glass shader using Ray Tracing to simulate reflection and refraction.
    
  • light Indirect: delivers indirect illumination to standard shading models via the diffuse() function.
    
  • color Indirect Illumination: lower level access to indirect illumination.
    
  • float Occlusion: lower level access to ambient occlusion.
    
  • color PhotonMapCaustic, PhotonMapGlobal: lower level access to photon maps.
    
  • color Ray Trace: Causes a surface to emit ray probes.
     
  • color Ray Traced Shadows: collects shadows via ray tracing.  Supports shadowmap-based acceleration.
    
  • float RayTraceHitTest: collects nearby coverage information.
    
  • vector ReflectionDirection / RefractionDirect: calculates these directions using snell and fresnel.
    
  • color,float,etc Ray Traced Messaging : uses ray tracing to lookup up arbitrary values on the nearest intersecting surfaces.
    
  • Mapgen Photon Map: controls the creation of photon maps.
    
  • vector Arbitrary Direction: allows you to specify an arbitrary direction in a named coordinate system.
    
  • float Facing Direction: measures the degree to which a surface is facing a particular direction.
    
  • color ColorInvert: allows you to invert colors in various color spaces.
    
• Improved Templates:
  
  • Ensemble: now contains the "Rays Collection": attributes and parameters controlling ray tracing.
    
  • A improved Shadow Map color (similar to the old Shadow Map float) allows the generation of Deep Shadows.
     
  • float Fractal, float Worely,and float Brownian : now feature interactive noise visualizers.
    
  • light Spot: now supports generation and use of caustics photon maps.
   
  • IBI: enhanced to support Ray Traced occlusion.
    
  • shadingmodel Image File: now supports a stained glass opacity modifier.
    
  • templates involving environment maps have been simplified to remove various up corrections.  New named coordinate systems are provided by Slim and MTOR to account for Up Axis corrections.  The special coordinate systems, "_environment" and "_world_lefthanded" should solve the most common corrections.

Enhancements

• Ability to cancel preview swatch rendering by pressing the 'esc' key.
• Faster loading times for Palettes.
• Improved performance of graph drawing and editing.
• Color Picker now supports direct input of color values.
• Additional .ini settings for controlling default preview swatch rendering settings.
• Templates can now more elegantly express pre-processor requirements via the RSLInclude/include and RSLDefine/define keywords.
• A new prefs directory is used - RAT 5.5.  Prefs files from the previous directory (RAT4.1) will be copied on first launch.
• You can now control the preview up axis via the Preferences dialog.
• Added display level "expert" to Slim parameters.  Displays parameters only when Slim has "Expert Menus" enabled.

Bug Fixes

• On unix platforms slim would freeze when certain mel commands were issued from slim to maya via the scripting command, "slim ClientCmd".
• External renderers now return error information and render in similar fashion to internal preview renderer.
• artifacts associated with forward facing illuminance calculations for polygon primitives have been reduced.

New in Slim 3.5.1 (for RAT 5.5.1) 

Bug Fixes

• Custom templates of types not defined by Slim can now be used without incident.