Just to let everyone know changes were made in MicroStation 2023 for Solar Lighting and Cloudiness so that Solar Intensity and Cloudiness now work with VUE for both the Ray Tracer and the Path Tracer renderings. These settings were not working in MicroStation CONNECT Edition for VUE. If you were trying to change these values then it's possible to see the results in MicroStation 2023 leading to dark renderings. These settings work a bit differently (better) than they did with Luxology where increasing cloudiness decreased solar intensity. With VUE the solar intensity can be changed independently from cloudiness. When you increase the cloudiness the contribution of sky lighting is increased.
As mentioned in a previous blog post the Bentley_Materials.DGNLIB was updated to improve transparent and refractive materials such as water and glass. A few new water materials were added to the Water palette that should work well when rendered with VUE's path tracer.
3D Line Styles now render correctly with VUE.
Two new Environment map-based environments were added to the Atmosphere Editor one being a compact cube map and the other one being spherical. Ignore atmosphere on map is turned off for the Alsace_CCM environment meaning an atmosphere setting such as decay will be seen on the image.
TIP: Use Fast Preview with Path Trace to adjust the solar intensity and cloudiness or make changes to atmosphere settings to immediately visualize the effects.
NOTE: The path tracer now honors the diffuse value setting whereas in previous versions diffuse was ignored by the path tracer. The Air Quality settings have been removed from Light Manager these settings worked with Luxology but not for VUE renderings. To accomplish the same thing for VUE you can increase or decrease the amount of Decay using the Atmosphere Editor.
Cheers,
Jerry