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GLB3D Monthly News: V-Ray for Blender, Wacom Android, Steam Censorship, AI Changes
1Article by Yuri Ilyin
As July is waning, we look back at the noteworthy news of the month. There was quite a stir in the CG world.
V-Ray Comes to Blender
Early this month, it was announced that the venerable V-Ray renderer has become officially available for Blender users, fully featured and fully integrated. It supports PBR and GI. The sizable, 6,000-piece-rich asset library called Chaos Cosmos is also made available to Blender users.
Chaos Cloud rendering and collaboration are available too, which means heavy renders can be offloaded to the cloud instead of straining the local workstation.
The integration supports both CPU- and GPU-based rendering, and hybrid modes. Offered tools include V-Ray Frame Buffer with Light Mix, compositing, and post-processing options.
As V-Ray is a commercial product, its Blender version is also offered on a subscription basis at reasonable prices. Details can be found on Chaos' website.
Corona 13 Adds Stylized Rendering and AI Tools
Chaos also introduced stylized rendering capabilities to its Corona 13 renderer.
Toon and Outline materials enable users to generate non-photorealistic, cartoonish images. Through integration with Chaos Vantage, Corona now supports animation rendering on the GPU.
As for the AI feature, it is called Chaos AI Enhancer, and its purpose is to improve visual quality of people and vegetation in rendered images, as well as to purge "fireflies" - overbright pixel artifacts.
A Thin Film layer has been added to the Corona Physical Material, while Scatter Clusters offer a new method to group and manage scattered objects in user scenes, utilizing different distribution modes - noise, color maps, or painted layers.
Corona 13 is limited to 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.
For more details, visit Chaos' website.
Wacom Tunes Up to Android Tablets
Wacom announced the release of MovinkPad 11, a standalone Android tablet for drawing "on the move." It is a fully self-contained drawing device requiring no external hardware other than the pen - Wacom Pro Pen 3 or other supported models.
With dimensions 10.5 x 7.2 x 0.3 inches, it sports a 2,200 x 1,440 px touch display (IPS) with a 170 viewing angle and is sensitive to 8,192 levels of pressure.
Aside from its drawing purposes, MovinkPad 11 is a fairly mundane tablet with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB of storage, running Android 14. It still has both front and rear cameras, 5 MP and 4.7 MP, respectively. File transferring is available via USB-C port, Bluetooth, or Wi-Fi.
It comes bundled with several drawing apps, like Wacom's own Canvas, Clip Studio Paint Debut (with a 2-year license), and others.
The Android ecosystem of drawing apps is significantly less developed than that for Windows or macOS/iOS/iPadOS environments, but the choice is not nonexistent.
For a device like this, it is reasonably priced at $449.95, as its target audience is schoolkids and art students.
More details are available at the vendor's site.
New Specifications Arrive for Vulkan
The Vulkan Working Group / The Khronos Group announced the release of Vulkan specifications version 1.4.321.
The primary news here is the addition of the Encode Intra-refresh extension, a tool for enhancing video playback robustness in the presence of network errors.
"Intra-refresh repairs data corruption by gradually replacing predicted blocks with independently coded (intra-predicted) blocks over successive frames, limiting the spread of errors and eventually restoring clean reference data," Khronos blog reads.
Blender 4.5 LTS Brings Full Vulkan Support, a Plethora of New Features
Blender Foundation released the stable version 4.5. It carries LTS status, which means that this version will be supported and receive all the critical fixes for the next two years.
Other than that, the 4.5 update is a major one, both in adding new features and deprecating some of the older ones.
One of the most important pieces of news is the full support of the Vulkan backend for rendering Blender's UI and viewport. OpenGL is still the default backend, however, but it is easy to switch to Vulkan in Preferences. The update adds support for previously missing features like subdivision, OpenXR, and USD workflows.
Developers state that the use of Vulkan speeds up everything significantly. However, it also requires that all the textures in the scene fit into GPU memory, which may limit its usability on lower-end systems when dealing with complex scenes.
Another significant update is the Set Mesh Normal node in Geometry Nodes: among other things, it allows users to visually blend different objects together so they look like they share a continuous surface. It doesn't require altering topology or materials.
The lighting system received new controls that make it possible to create both realistic and stylized lighting setups more quickly and intuitively.
New controls include Temperature (previously one had to use the Blackbody node); a Normalize option that prevents the intensity of area lights from changing when the light is scaled up or down; and Exposure - a pan-scene multiplier for the intensity of every light in the scene.
There are three new operators for manipulating curves in the modeling part, including Separate, Join, and Split, whereas the Grid Fill operator is now capable of removing tris and diamonds from existing geometry, replacing them with even quads.
Further overview of the new features can be found here.
Morality Campaigners Forced Steam and itch.io to Bust NSFW Games
A sudden crackdown on NSFW games launched by Steam and itch.io left many heads scratching. The two distribution platforms swept a significant part, if not the majority, of porn-related games and other controversy magnets from their search indices, as well as removing some titles from the platforms completely.
The crackdown appears to have started with an 'Open letter to payment processors profiting from rape, incest + child abuse games on Steam' published by Collective Shout, an Australian campaigners claiming to protect women from sexual objectifying.
Published in April and addressed to the executives of Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, Paysafe Limited, Discover and Japan Credit Bureau, the letter demanded that all the other payment processing platforms ceased to process payments 'on gaming platforms which host rape, incest and child sexual abuse-themed games.'
The highlighted object of their righteous ire is the 'rape simulator' called 'No Mercy', which is controversial on every imaginable level.
In fact, the game had been already banned in several major jurisdictions, and eventually even its developer pulled the title off the Steam - a day before the open letter was published.
However, Collective Shout just didnt settle with this. They claim their research 'documented content including violent sexual torture of women, and children including incest related abuse involving family members', the letter reads. 'These games endorsing mens sexualised abuse and torture of women and girls fly in the face of efforts to address violence against women. We do not see how facilitating payment transactions and deriving financial benefit from these violent and unethical games, is consistent with your corporate values and mission statements.'
Apparently the payment processors took heed, and pressured both Steam and itch.io to remove the unsafe content. The pressure imposed was hard enough to force Steam and itch.io act 'urgently to protect the platforms core payment infrastructure', leaving no time for advance notices to the creators.
'We know this is not ideal, and we apologize for the abruptness of this change,' itch.io creator Leaf Corcoran wrote in a blog post.
As of now, itch.io is undergoing an audit to make sure that only non-offending titles remain on the platform. So is Steam.
The problem is, neither the platforms nor the payment processors have explicitly stated what NSFW content they consider tolerable, if any. The lack of clarity, as well as the urgency of the drastic measures taken, drew quite an avalanche of anger from gamers.
Whereas No Mercy is definitely an abomination, and most of the other NSFW games delisted aren't exactly masterpieces, this situation raises concerns about a minor special interest group being capable of imposing its will upon others, and seemingly ready to move on to other targets.
Collective Shout's concerns towards 'No Mercy' are valid, yet the group itself is not controversy-free. It calls itself a 'grassroots campaign movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls', but the third parties call it a 'conservative' and 'right wing religious' group - for a reason.
Among the signees of their open letter are representatives of several other pro-censorship groups, including National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) a US-based entity which started as an openly religious conservative organization under the name 'Morality in Media'. Another signee represents Exodus Cry, that Free Speech Coalition's Mike Stabile has previously described as 'a faith-based activist group that believes all pornography and sex work should be banned.'
The Collective Shout itself is known to have a penchant for battle-axing against video games like Detroit: Become Human (which is by no means an 'adult' game), Grand Theft Auto V, which may be controversial, but doesn't come anywhere near 'No Mercy'. So the primary question for the group's opponents is just how far this group is willing to go now, emboldened by their success with NSFW games.
Already there is nothing comical about their level of influence: they proved to be capable of getting unflattering articles removed from a media outlet belonging to a major publishing entity - Waypoint by VICE. Informal communications with upstream entities seem to have been used, as the demand to remove articles came from VICE's owner, Savage Ventures. The articles' author Ana Valens, as well as some of her colleagues, resigned in response.
Later, Valens claimed that Savage Ventures' brass had previously worried about how Waypoint articles covering sexual or political topics might affect the sites performance on Google, as 'Google Overlords' had issues with certain materials on the site.
Historically, various 'conservative' groups have successfully pushed limitations upon the entertainment industries.
The best-known example is, probably, The Motion Picture Production Code, better known as Hays Code, which imposed harsh self-censorship rules on Hollywood filmmakers. The code largely originated from the religious views of its authors and their desire to make movies an avenue for promoting 'traditional values'.
It took over 30 years for US moviemakers to get liberated from those narrow creative brackets.
Now, it looks like the very same 'morality-based' limitations are being very successfully imposed upon gaming platforms, developers, and gamers, via the global corporations acting as the financial backbone of Steam and itch.io.
Both platforms are yet to release any comprehensive guidelines for 'adult' games. Nobody, however, can say how much time will pass before Collective Shout or any of their right-wing populist counterparts decry the new rules as being too 'liberal' and start targeting other games, not just sexual-themed.
Polygon, meanwhile, reports that the resistance from the gamers is mounting on many levels.
Trump Administration Frees AI Industry from Burdensome Limits, Copyright Included
US President Donald Trump has roundly dismissed the idea that the use of copyrighted materials by AI vendors should be compensated to their creators. Totally expectable from Trump and his disdain for limiting rules, this sits well with the current status quo where AI vendors help themselves to any data they deem necessary, while the creators and copyright holders hear 'and what are you going to do about it?'
Trump has literally said that common sense prevents paying for the data used to train AI models.
'You can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you've read or studied, you're supposed to pay for,' Trump said. 'We appreciate that, but just can't do it - because it's not doable.'
According to Wired, the Trump Administration released the AI Action Plan with 90 policy recommendations that set the primary goal: to beat China in the AI race. This includes a laissez-faire approach to AI development, short of total deregulation of the AI industry, even if at the expense of those who made training those AI models possible at all.
'AI is far too important to smother in bureaucracy at this early stage', the report reads. It recommends policies meant to loosen regulations and roll back Biden-era guardrails. It also recommends that federal funding be withheld from states that enact overly 'burdensome' AI legislation.
