Smedge 2020 released!

Dynamic Products

Smedge now allows you to add, change, and remove products dynamically while the system is online. This incredible power gives you the ability to easily customize products, add support for multiple versions of a renderer to be supported at the same time, add your own custom fields to Job data, and remove products you don’t need system-wide.

The dynamic systems are accessible from both the GUI and the command line tools. Products can be imported and exported from JSON files, so you can easily read, modify, and create products manually or through standardized automated tools.

Mistika Ultimate and Boutique

Mistika support has expanded to include the full product line with a new default product that can control Mistika Ultimate and Mistika Boutique. Note that these products are basically versions of the same engine, so they share a single Product configuration by default, which is different from the Mistika VR product we had supported before. Of course, these products can now be dynamically configured like all others, so you can customize it to your needs.

Modo Supports Custom Render Commands

Modo based products now allow you to customize the commands that are sent to configure and start the rendering. This allows support of rendering plugins, like V-Ray, that require a slightly different set of commands to initiate the render than the default Modo renderer. To access the settings, use the new RenderCommands parameter, which is available as a Job Advanaced parameter or an Engine option for Modo based products. If you leave this blank, it will use the default Modo rendering commands. If you set the Job parameter, that will override the Engine option. You can configure the default for a custom Modo based product using the Configure Product dialog.

V-Ray for Modo

By default, Smedge includes a new product to support the V-Ray plugin renderer for Modo. Using V-Ray for Modo requires a different render command to initiate the rendering, which is defined in the default for this product.

Improved Finding Latest Executable on Windows

Windows API provides a method to find the “program files” folder, no matter where you have set it or what language your operating system is using. Smedge now makes use of this functionality as part of its automatic executable location system, without any changes required to product code or virtual module configurations. Any time it sees C:\Program Files as a root, it will automatically replace that string with the actual path on disk that the Windows API provides, and use that as the actual search location.

Performance Optimization

Reduced code in many places for overall performance increases, and changed some especially heavy GUI displays that could affect the Submit Job window, the Configure Engine dialog and the Job and Engine info panels in the main window.