Rayscaper Release Notes

Release notes for Rayscaper. Changes between versions are documented in reverse chronological order.

Version 0.9.93 Beta

• Fix SketchUp tag visibility updates for nested groups and components. Nested geometry now appears and reappears correctly in Rayscaper when you toggle tags in SketchUp, matching the SketchUp viewport more reliably.
• Fix material picking when hidden or invisible objects sit in front of visible geometry. The picker now selects the material you clicked instead of the hidden object blocking it.
• Fix crashes after exploding SketchUp tag folders and then changing tag visibility.
• Improve viewport navigation and panel controls with a simpler pan/zoom path and a fixed panel layout.

Version 0.9.92 Beta

• Fix asset thumbnails occasionally failing to download in the asset library.
• Fix AO Distance slider having no effect in standalone AO render method.

Version 0.9.91 Beta

• Add tone mapping options — choose from ACES Filmic, Filmic (Hable), PBR Neutral, Linear, or Reinhard to control the look of your renders.
• Add color grading controls — fine-tune renders with white balance temperature, tint, and contrast sliders.
• Add auto-exposure — exposure now adjusts automatically to scene lighting, with a toolbar toggle and compensation slider.
• Improve asset library reliability — fix occasional failures when browsing or downloading Poly Haven assets.

Version 0.9.87 Beta

• Fix color space detection for opacity and roughness textures. These textures now render correctly when using automatic color space detection.
• Fix environment power slider feeling awkward near zero. The slider now smoothly blends to zero instead of snapping discontinuously at the far left.
• Add box mapping support for textures. Materials can now use box projection instead of UV mapping, which avoids stretched textures on surfaces without proper UVs.
• Automatically apply tri-planar mapping to PolyHaven materials when the model has no UVs. Downloaded materials now look correct out of the box without manual texture coordinate setup.
• Sort the material list alphabetically to match SketchUp’s material panel ordering.
• Fix the Asset Manager sometimes getting stuck in a loading state when switching between assets quickly.

Version 0.9.85 Beta

• Add anisotropy support for metal materials. You can now create brushed metal effects by controlling the direction and amount of anisotropy in metallic surfaces.
• Add sheen roughness control to PBR materials. This gives you finer control over fabric-like reflections on surfaces.
• Add ‘Reload All Materials from SketchUp’ option to the Tools menu. This makes it easy to refresh all materials after making changes in SketchUp without restarting Rayscaper.
• Add Reset button to the material editor toolbar. Quickly restore a material to its default settings with a single click.
• Capture texture physical dimensions from PolyHaven. Downloaded textures now include their real-world size information for more accurate material scaling.
• Improve PBR material editor with better organized advanced settings using subgroup headers for easier navigation.
• Fix normal maps not automatically enabling when loading a normal map image.

Version 0.9.84 Beta

• Add animation completion dialog. When a scene animation finishes rendering, a dialog now displays render statistics including total time, samples rendered, and frames completed.
• Fix crash when minimizing the Rayscaper window via Windows “Show Desktop” (Win+D). The application now handles minimized states gracefully.
• Improve scene archiving by extracting SketchUp embedded textures when external files are not available. This ensures textures are always included in exported archives.

Version 0.9.83 Beta

• Add Nishita sky sun tracking from SketchUp shadows. The procedural sky will now automatically follow the sun position set in SketchUp’s shadow settings, making it easier to match lighting conditions across your workflow. You can enable this via the menu Extensions > Rayscaper > Sync Nishita with Sun. See Syncing with SketchUp Sun for more details.
• Improve environment power controls with logarithmic sliders. Environment intensity is now easier to adjust precisely across a wide range of values.
• Fix crash when changing render resolution. Rayscaper will no longer crash when you adjust the resolution settings.
• Fix alpha textures to use linear color space. Alpha channels in textures now render with correct transparency values.

Version 0.9.82 Beta

• Update the Rayscaper color scheme for better visual clarity.
• Improve the render status bar readability with clearer visual indicators.
• Add area light support. You can now place area lights in your scene for more realistic soft lighting effects.
• Add material selection context menu. Right-click on materials in the asset manager for quick access to common operations.
• Add export selected materials functionality. You can now export materials from your current scene for reuse in other projects.
• Auto-wire SketchUp alpha textures to opacity. Textures with alpha channels in SketchUp will automatically connect to the opacity channel in Rayscaper materials.
• Add multiplier control for float image textures. You can now adjust the strength of roughness and metallic textures.
• Add light icons in the user interface for better visual feedback.
• Apply SketchUp metallic/roughness factor. SketchUp 2025’s PBR material metallic and roughness factors are now properly applied as texture multipliers.
• Add preview of the light component in the light tool for easier placement.
• Add multi-selection support for lights. You can now select multiple lights at once using SHIFT or CTRL from SketchUp, the lights overlay or the lights tab. This feature makes it easier to manage and organize lighting in complex scenes.
• Support grouping Rayscaper light components in SketchUp groups and component definitions.
• Add SketchUp Scene Animation rendering. Rayscaper can now render animations based on SketchUp scenes, including sun and shadow positions. This enables you to create time-lapse renders showing how lighting changes throughout the day.

Version 0.9.79 Beta

• Add log export feature. You can now export Rayscaper logs directly from the application menu, making it easier to share diagnostic information when reporting issues. You can access it via the SketchUp menu bar: Extensions > Rayscaper > Export Logs for Support.
• Add a reset button for the post-processing tab. Quickly restore default post-processing settings with a single click.
• Fix crash when loading scene data. Rayscaper would sometimes crash when opening files with scene data due to incompatible SketchUp API calls. This has been resolved.

Version 0.9.77 Beta

• Add Bloom and Glare post-processing effects. Enhance your renders with cinematic quality.
• Add visual feedback for render failures. A red “RENDER FAILED” text now appears when rendering encounters errors, making it immediately clear when something goes wrong.
• GUI enhancements: Improved sliders and tooltips. Sliders now have dedicated input boxes for more precise control.
• Fix texture environment image update. Loading a new HDRI would not restart the render.
• Add procedural sky environment support. You can now create realistic sky environments directly in Rayscaper without needing HDRI images. Perfect for quick outdoor renders with physically-based sky and sun simulation.
• Add SketchUp environment tracking support (SketchUp 2025 or higher). Rayscaper can now automatically track and sync with SketchUp’s environment settings.
• Add PBR material support for SketchUp 2025. SketchUp 2025’s new PBR materials are now supported and will automatically convert to Rayscaper’s material system with proper metallic, roughness and normal map values. Note: Rayscaper does not support power/scale multipliers on image textures, so if your SketchUp PBR material uses a roughness or metallic texture with a scale value other than 1.0, that scaling will not be applied in Rayscaper.
• Bring back archive creation. You can now export your complete scene including all assets to a zip archive for easy sharing and backup.
• Separate max depth settings by path type. Advanced users can now configure maximum ray bounce depths separately for diffuse, glossy, and transmission paths for more control over render quality and performance.
• Bugfix: Fix FloatImageTexture color space handling. Float textures (like roughness and metallic maps) now correctly use linear color space for accurate rendering.
• Bugfix: Fix noise texture deserialization. Noise textures saved in previous versions now load correctly and don’t crash Rayscaper.
• Bugfix: Avoid duplicate SketchUp shadow light. The sun/shadow light from SketchUp will no longer appear twice in the scene.

Version 0.9.72 Beta

• Rayscaper now supports direct integration with the Skatter plugin. Render-only Skatter data can now be ingested directly from Skatter, bypassing the SketchUp viewport. This offloads complex instancing and geometry handling to Rayscaper, keeping SketchUp responsive and lightweight during rendering. Perfect for large vegetation or scattering setups — just hit render and let Rayscaper handle the heavy lifting.
• Bugfix: push/pull geometry would not properly propagate to Rayscaper.
• Fix Rayscaper for SketchUp 2024, caused by a breaking change in the SketchUp SDK. Note: Going forward, Rayscaper will only support the latest three SketchUp releases because now that it’s for sure that the SDK is not backwards compatible, it’s too much overhead for me to maintain more versions. The current version supports: SketchUp 2026, SketchUp 2025 & SketchUp 2024.
• Make materials assigned to a SketchUp group or component instance work again.
• Rayscaper will now always appear when you open it — it no longer stays hidden if it was minimized in a previous session.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when scrolling through the asset browser.

Version 0.9.69 Beta

• Fix a crash when scrolling the asset browser.

Version 0.9.68 Beta

• Fix a crash when minimizing the Rayscaper window.
• Support for SketchUp 2026.
• Draw overlays for the lights in the viewport. This helps user directly pick the lights in the viewport. You can enable or disable the overlay in the viewport toolbar.
• Save the layout and position of the Rayscaper window between sessions. You can reset the layout via the menu “File > Reset Window Layout”.

Version 0.9.64 Beta

• Fix weird artifacts in the interactive render viewport.
• Fix the upside-down images when saving.
• Add transmission support for the PBR material. This makes it possible to create glass or liquid materials with the PBR material.
• Fix a regression when renaming light components. Rayscaper lights should now correctly use the name of their SketchUp light component again.
• Fix glass rendering, when multiple glass surfaces overlapped, Rayscaper would render them too dark.
• Fix the render timer in the viewport. It will stop counting when the render is paused or finished.

Version 0.9.62 Beta

• Make sure there’s no watermark for licensed users.
• Fix a crash happening occasionally when updating geometry.

Version 0.9.60 Beta

• The default temperature for material emission is now 5600 Kelvin (K).
• Fix cyan textures when using saved materials that use images embedded in the SketchUp file.
• Tweaks to the material saving panel.
• Drop the flip-green option for normal maps. Instead, flag the normal map type as either DirectX or OpenGL. Most normal maps are OpenGL type, so this is now the default.
• Explicitly configure PolyHaven normal maps as OpenGL type.
• Fix the slider for the noise texture.
• Fix scrolling in the lights list.
• In the render settings, increase the maximum number of samples to 50,000.
• Display important normal map settings more prominently in the user interface. The normal map strength , on/off and flip-green controls are now displayed in the main material editor instead of in the nested settings.
• Fix the focal length slider, it was not updating the camera correctly.
• Fix a scroll issue in the material list. The list would always try to scroll back to the selected material, even if the user was scrolling the list.
• Remove the archive creation option. This feature is buggy. I will reintroduce it in a future release once I have fixed the bugs.
• Remember the category and tag selection in the asset browser when switching between different asset types (materials, textures, HDRIs).
• Improve the material preview scene.
• Bugfix: Image textures embedded in SketchUp files would not render correctly in the material preview scene.
• Create new lights with a default temperature of 5600 Kelvin (K).
• Bugfix: Normal maps would not always apply to the full surface but leave some parts of the surface without normal mapping. This is fixed in this release.
• Bugfix: Pausing would not resume the render anymore, fixed in this release.
• Treat denoising as a post-processing step. This means that denoising will not affect the render progress anymore. It’s now possible to enable/disable denoising while the render is running, and it will not restart the render.
• Renamed the “Tone Mapping” tab to “Post-Processing”. This tab now also contains the AI denoise switch.
• Improve the thumbnails for HDRI images by tone mapping them before display. This results in less dark thumbnails.
• Bugfix: When dropping a PBR texture on a material from the asset manager, we would not correctly clear the normal map and emission of the previous material configuration. This is fixed.
• Make the picking cursor (material, camera & info picking) black and white. This way, you won’t lose your cursor on a dark background.
• Fix a crash when opening the global UV editor.
• Fixed the glowing emission on some models. Here is one example of the issue: link.
• Fix the metallic presets, Rayscaper won’t flip back to custom settings anymore after using a preset.
• Add a button to reload the assets in the library. This is handy for example, when you start Rayscaper without internet access, and then later on you get internet access. You can then click the reload button to download the assets.
• Faster asset downloads.
• Display a bigger environment texture preview thumbnail in the environment editor.
• Denoisers seems to slow down the rendering in this release.

Version 0.9.50 Beta

• Bring back the transparency shadows option for the glass material. This option makes the glass material invisible to shadow rays, allowing direct light to pass through the glass. This is useful for allowing direct light through glass in indoor scenes.
• Add extra logging to help diagnose failed installations.
• Cyrillic glyph support: The user interface now includes support for Cyrillic characters.
• Improved pixel filtering: Fixed an issue where edges appeared overly jagged with the default settings.
• Enhanced texture sliders: Scale and translation sliders now have more intuitive ranges.

Version 0.9.44 Beta

• Added support for SketchUp 2025.
• Fixed energy loss in glass materials, which previously caused them to appear too dark.
• Made asset thumbnail size configurable via the settings dialog.
• Fixed reloading of SketchUp materials in Rayscaper.
• Fixed light emission issues with HDRI environments.
• Removed the 1000×1000 pixel resolution limit for the free version.

Version 0.9.43 Beta

• Fix a crash when double-clicking the save button in the GUI.
• Fixed the saving of the DPI scale application setting.
• Rayscaper now takes Windows monitor scaling into account. On scaled monitors, Rayscaper should display correctly without requiring manual user scaling. However, manual scaling is still an option if needed.
• Use the same light sampling algorithm for CPU and GPU. This would sometimes cause render differences between CPU and GPU in complex lighting situations.
• Generate better tangent vectors for normal mapping. This should improve the quality of normal mapping.
• Rename the Disney material to PBR material.
• Drop the thin sheet approximation for the Disney (PBR) material, it’s not working correctly currently.
• Drop the transmission color from the glass material.
• In the PBR material, rename clearcoat gloss to clearcoat roughness for consistency with other materials.
• Drop the environment light fake GI mode, it looks too weird to be useful.
• Drop some render methods that are not that useful except for debugging (“Shading dP/dU”, “Shading dP/dV”, “Shading Incidence”, “Shading Normals / No Bump”).

Version 0.9.36 Beta

• Fix the normal map strength control.
• Fix a crash when exporting the scene to an archive.
• Make the depth-of-field blurriness slider logarithmic. This gives more control for low blur values.
• Spotlights with a falloff of zero would not render on the CPU. That’s fixed in this release.
• Make the depth-of-field (DOF) blurriness easier to control. The range goes from 0 to 1, but if you need more blur for your scene, you can punch in a higher value directly in the slider text box (CTRL + click).
• Add autofocus for DOF to the perspective camera. With autofocus, Rayscaper will automatically use the distance to the center 3D point in the rendered image as the focus distance (if possible).

Version 0.9.34 Beta

• Fix the specular tint texture slot. Loading an image in this slot would load it in the normal map texture slot.
• When applying a custom material (i.e., from the material library) and subsequently modifying the material. These changes would not persist on saving. This is fixed in the current release.
• Fix a scrolling/clipping issue in the render viewport.
• Lights would get an empty name after modifying the light component (for example, moving the light). This is fixed.
• Fix an application freeze caused by light selection.
• Internally, Rayscaper uses the meter as the scene unit. I made that more explicit in some inputs by having a unit. I will follow up with a feature to configure display units.
• Improve the speed of the picking operations.
• Display the material we are hovering over when dropping a material/texture on the viewport. This makes it clear where the dropped asset will apply.
• Add rendering pause/resume capability.

Version 0.9.31 Beta

• Add a right-mouse-button context menu to the texture slots.
• Fix freezing of the file browser when opening an image.
• Add more visual clarity when opening a texture slot.

Version 0.9.30 Beta

• Draw a Rayscaper camera frame over the SketchUp viewport to help align the camera shot. The camera frame also has optional composition guides to help framing.
• Move the render resolution configuration to the camera tab.
• Fix thumbnail display for images, some images would not show correctly as thumbnails.
• Add the missing normal map color space control.
• Fix the overexposed material preview when saving materials.
• Fix a performance regression in the UI.
• Fix render settings loss between Rayscaper rendering sessions.
• Fix a crash when loading Rayscaper data from some *.skp files.
• Fix a rendering difference between CPU & GPU rendering.

Version 0.9.27 Beta

• Fix the sheen tint control in the Disney material user interface.
• Fix a bug where Rayscaper fails to load material and light settings stored in *.skp files.

Version 0.9.26 Beta

• Fix a bug. Rayscaper would not start rendering when opening its window, i.e. the renderer would stay “idle”.

Version 0.9.25 Beta

• Fix “ghost” lights in Rayscaper. Sometimes, lights that you deleted before would re-appear again when loading the scene at a later time.
• Disable the light tools when the user is editing inside a component. Adding Rayscaper lights to SketchUp components is currently not supported (it’s on our roadmap). To avoid this from happening, we now disable the light creation tools when a component is being edited.
• Add a name filter to the light and material lists.
• Show light and material names alphabetically.
• Add the option to sync the SketchUp shadows configuration Rayscaper.

Version 0.9.23 Beta

• Migrate Rayscaper to a new graphical user interface (GUI) framework. This changes the look and feel of the GUI but was done mainly to drastically simplify Rayscaper’s code base to enable faster future development.
• Express the power of light emitting materials (LEMs) in Watt and make this explicit in the user interface.
• Fix VCB input for Rayscaper’s light creation tools.

Version 0.9.15 Beta

• Fix a crash in drag & drop on an environment texture with a constant color.
• Bring back the capability to configure the following texture types: Noise Texture, Uv Texture, Mix Texture, and Checkerboard Texture.
• Add the option to scale the user interface. This makes Rayscaper a lot more legible on high DPI displays.
• Make the exposure slider more intuitive. Negative values darken the image, and positive values brighten it. An exposure step value of one double or halves the brightness.
• Improve the speed of the tone mapping operations. All operations now run in real-time, even on big render resolutions.
• Bugfix: Bring back the double-sided and fake emission controls for light-emitting materials.
• Add zoom controls to the Rayscaper toolbar.
• Add the option to zoom to fit the viewport.
• Reduce the watermarking in the free version.

Version 0.9.13 Beta

• Fix flaky material picking. Sometimes, material picking would not work, or pick the wrong materials. This is fixed.
• Fix a cursor problem after viewport dragging; sometimes, the hand cursor would not go away.
• This release also features a simplification of the user interface: more readable icons for the Rayscaper window, and improved editors for the scene settings with more intuitive controls.

Version 0.9.10 Beta

• Add support for Sketchup 2024.
• Add a panoramic projection mode to the camera.
• Add an orthographic projection mode. The camera is the Rayscaper equivalent of the parallel projection in SketchUp.
• Optionally sync the SketchUp field-of-view with the Rayscaper perspective camera. Note that the FOV in SketchUp differs from the value displayed in Rayscaper because SketchUp uses a vertical FOV value while Rayscaper uses a vertical FOV.
• Add a focal length control to the perspective camera. This is coupled to the horizontal FOV. I introduced this for users who prefer to work with focal length instead of FOV.
• Add a toggle to turn DOF on/off explicitly.
• Express the depth-of-field effect with a blurriness value instead of lens radius. This should make it easier to control the DOF effect.
• Make sure that the rendered image keeps its panning when the render restarts. Before this start, the panning would reset on every render restart, which was annoying to work with.

Version 0.9.8 Beta

• Fix a self-intersection bug, causing dark lines in CPU renders.
• Add support for a near-clipping plane to the camera. With the near clip plane, you can configure a near clip plane at a distance orthogonal to the camera, and Rayscaper will cut away all geometry before the clip plane.
• Improve the sliders in Rayscaper: Every slider now supports dragging. Scrolling is consistent across sliders. Each mouse scroll wheel increment/decrement will step up/down by one slider step value. Holding shift will step up or down with 10x the slider step value.
• Make global illumination (GI) the default render method for new scenes. Using approximate GI as the initial render method might give new Rayscaper users the wrong impression because of its non-physical hacks and limitations.

Version 0.9.7 Beta

• Support units for sliders and text boxes (not all sliders have it yet). For length units, Rayscaper will display values in units configured for the model (cm, mm, yd, etc).
• Fix a bug in the sphere light. The sphere light would become black when the radius increased, so the lights started intersecting geometry.
• Fix wonky behavior with the spotlight. The spotlight would become very bright when configuring a radius of zero.
• Support import and export of Rayscaper materials. You can now share materials with other Rayscaper users.
• Add the option to mark assets as favorites.
• Remove material previews in the material editors. It takes up precious rendering resources and hampers interactivity on low-end machines.

Version 0.9.3 Beta

• Rayscaper would crash when installed in a directory with non-ASCII characters. This is fixed in this release.

Version 0.9.2 Beta

• Improve global UV editing. We will load the transformation of the first image texture in the global UV editor instead of using default values. This speeds up the UV editing workflow.
• Support inference locking for the Rayscaper light tools: Holding down shift locks the current inferred direction, if any. Pressing down the arrow keys locks to an axis direction.
• Fix the spotlight going black using CPU rendering when configuring the falloff as zero.

Version 0.9.1 Beta

• Add support for SketchUp colorized textures.
• Display the SketchUp icon in the user interface when textures use images that are embedded in the skp file.
• Rename the Rayscaper menu item “Preferences…” to “Settings…”.

Version 0.9.0 Beta

• Fix the range for the Gaussian filter’s falloff, it’s not possible anymore to configure the falloff to zero, resulting in a black render.
• Add an option to the Help menu to open the Rayscaper documentation in your default browser.
• Add an option to the Help menu to open the Rayscaper Get Help page in your default browser.

Version 0.8.12 Alpha

• Fix a crash when plugging a procedural texture in the texture environment. The texture environment does not support procedural textures, and with this release we prevent that configuration in the user interface.
• Fix duplicate light creation, sometimes the same light would appear twice in Rayscaper.
• Improve the material preview scene, courtesy of Rich O’Brien from SketchUcation.
• Change the color for surfaces without a SketchUp material from an obnoxious cyan to a less obnoxious clay color.
• Display an error to the user when they try to pick a material on a surface that has no material assigned.
• Improve the render window icons, again courtesy of Rich O’Brien from SketchUcation.
• Display GPU memory (a.k.a. VRAM) usage in the render status bar.

Version 0.8.11 Alpha

• Don’t trigger a pick when the user pans the render and releases the mouse button.
• Add keyboard shortcuts.
• Re-order the inputs of the Disney material, put more frequently used inputs first.
• Fix the scaling of SketchUp textures. Rayscaper will now correctly apply the dimensions configured textures that are part of materials that are applied to objects.
• Fix the loading of Rayscaper from directories with non-ASCII characters.

Version 0.8.10 Alpha

• Fix picking when the render image is zoomed in or out.
• Fix a render regression with clearcoat gloss in the Disney material.
• Tweak the look of the thumbnail components, display a checkerboard when the image has alpha.

Version 0.8.9 Alpha

• Make sure the Rayscaper data is saved when opening and closing the Rayscaper window in SketchUp.
• Support pan and zoom in the render viewport.
• Fix black edges in the diffuse material on grazing viewing angles.
• Fix a crash when dropping an HDRI environment when there was no previous environment.
• Improve the user interface for image textures.

Version 0.8.8 Alpha

• Fix a load error in version 0.8.7, making that version useless to end users.

Version 0.8.7 Alpha

• Fix a crash when deleting a material from SketchUp.
• Disable the live-link between SketchUp and Rayscaper when Rayscaper is not running.
• Represent the image texture configuration in a more screen-efficient manner.
• Support copy/past of light components.
• Add a splash screen for Rayscaper. Artwork by the great Rich O’ Brien from SketchUcation.
• Fix viewport matching, Rayscaper will now exactly match the resolution.

Version 0.8.6 Alpha

• Fix geometry updates when push-pulling faces. Sometimes, the faces adjacent to the one being push or pulled would not propagate to Rayscaper leading to out-of-sync geometry in Rayscaper.
• Support hiding and unhiding of SketchUp geometry and objects.
• Support hiding and unhiding of SketchUp tags (layers).

Version 0.8.5 Alpha

• Fix a failure when opening *.skp files that contain an incorrect path. The result of this load failure was that the Rayscaper settings were not correctly loaded.
• Support saving PNG images with non-ASCII characters in their path names.
• Fix a render bug when updating the normal map on the GPU.

Version 0.8.4 Alpha

• Fix a GPU rendering bug. The same scene, with the same configuration, would sometimes give different results when re-rendering the scene using the GPU.
• Support material inheritance. SketchUp faces that don’t have geometry assigned can inherit the material from their parent instance or group.
• Fix the roughness control for glass and metal materials. Low roughness values look more reasonable now.
• Remove the spherical texture mapping option.

Version 0.8.3 Alpha

• Fix a crash when opening a recovered SketchUp file.
• Update the SketchUp toolbar icons - Icons courtesy of Rich O’ Brien.
• Fix a crash when we cannot create an OpenImage denoise device.

Version 0.8.2 Alpha

• Fix the alpha channel for GPU rendering.
• Fix the texture scaling for faces that inherit their material texture from the parent group or component.
• Fix a crash when refreshing SketchUp materials in the material editor.
• Make sure the Rayscaper installation process works for users that run multiple SketchUp instances in parallel.
• Support loading of image textures that are embedded in the skp file. Before this code change. Before this change, Rayscaper users could reload the materials from SketchUp to fix the textures, but these changes would be gone again after saving and reloading the file. Now users should be able to retain their changes after reloading the skp file.
• Fix a crash when editing the scene after clearing the Rayscaper data. Also changed the clearing behavior, Rayscaper will not reload the data after clearing the data.

Version 0.8.1 Alpha

• Fix a crash when deleting a SketchUp material while rendering using the GPU.
• Fix a crash for SketchUp materials that don’t have a default color.
• Fix a bug when selecting categories and tags in the asset manager, now it’s visibly clear which category or tag is selected by highlighting the correct item in the list.
• Fix an intermittent crash when downloading HDRI and texture thumbnails.
• Fix the artifacts in GPU rendering with high quality denoise enabled.

Version 0.8.0 Alpha

• Add support for GPU rendering. Rayscaper supports NVIDIA boards with CUDA support and compute model 5.0 or higher. You can cross-check your video card specifications here.
• Add the option to toggle remapping of the values of the normal, dpdu, and dpdv render methods to RGB colors. Sometimes, it’s handy to display the raw values, which can be negative and will render black. Sometimes, it makes more sense to remap to RGB so that negative values also get a color.
• Improve the display of filenames in the user interface. Instead of displaying the full path, which is illegible, display only the filename. The tooltip displays the full path.
• Add swatches to the color selector.
• Change how Rayscaper works when unlicensed. Instead of always requiring a license, you can use Rayscaper without one (i.e., for free), subject to the following limitations: you are not allowed to use the renders for commercial purposes, renders are watermarked, and resolution is limited to 1000 by 1000 pixels.
• Implement sending of anonymous usage statistics for Rayscaper. You can disable tracking via the global settings.
• Fix the incorrect handling of filesystem paths with non-ASCII characters.
• Display render errors in the viewport.
• Add the capability to save materials in the asset library and reuse them in other projects.
• Add a menu in SketchUp for Rayscaper (Extensions > Rayscaper).
• Change the Rayscaper toolbar title from “Rayscaper for SketchUp” to “Rayscaper”.
• Integrate Rayscaper with Sentry (https://sentry.io) for crash reporting.
• Change the Rayscaper log file (SUEX_Rayscaper.log) location from the user’s home directory to the application data directory (%APPDATA%/Rayscaper/SUEX_Rayscaper.log).
• Fix a crash when loading degenerate faces, i.e. faces without any vertices.

Version 0.7.3 Alpha

• Fix the propagation of the “smooth normals” option to Rayscaper. Changing this property would not update Rayscaper before this change.
• Add the options to manipulate the normal map: flip the red channel, flip the green channel, and swap the red and green channels.
• Add the option to specify the color space of an image texture (either normal RGB or float textures). This is very important to obtain correct render results when using LDR images (jpg / png / etc).
• Add the capability to export the model and all the assets used by Rayscaper to an archive (zip file).
• Update the styling of the thumbnails in the assert browser.
• Add increment/decrement buttons to modify numeric values. Pushing the buttons will increment/decrement by the step size. Holding the shift key while pushing the buttons will increment/decrement by 10x the step size.
• Don’t use sliders for configuration values that have a high range (for example, scale/translation/shear). It’s impossible to control such a large range with a slider precisely.
• Add the “Highlight Clamp” option which clamps bright incoming light to reduce bright pixels ( fireflies).
• Reduce the logging in Rayscaper. This improves the performance of SketchUp when running Rayscaper.
• Fix the saving of the camera settings, image resolution, and tone mapping settings.
• Make the material and light lists resizable in the material and light tabs of the scene editor.
• Fix the saving of light data.
• Support emission for high-poly geometry.
• Fix the high power values required to light up a scene with sphere lights or spotlights. Now the user can punch in more realistic power values for the scene.
• Add a fake emission capability to emitters. With fake emission, the geometry the material is applied to will look like it is emitting light, but it won’t actually act like a light source in the scene. This can reduce the render times.
• Fix the approximate global illumination kernel’s washed-out ambient occlusion fake GI mode.
• Add a new environment fake GI mode to the approximate global illumination kernel. This mode uses the environment light to fake indirect light.
• Fix the albedo render pass.
• Improve the high-quality denoiser algorithm.
• Fix the time value in the render status bar. The timer would display wrong values when the render took longer than 1 hour.
• Sort the materials/lights alphabetically in the scene editor.

Version 0.7.2 Alpha

• Add a help button to the SketchUp toolbar, clicking this button launches a browser with the Rayscaper documentation.

Version 0.7.1 Alpha

• Fix reloading of SketchUp materials in Rayscaper.
• Fix a crash when loading a new image texture.

Version 0.7.0 Alpha

• Fix the default values for shear/translate/rotate in the global UV editor. They should be all 0 instead of 1.
• Speed up the pre-processing of scenes with a lot of image textures.
• User interface tweaks: Inset the material/light names in the materials/lights list of the scene editor. Open nested controls by clicking either the chevron or the text to the right of it. Display the number of textures in the render status bar.
• Add the capability to load PBR images from user-selected file.
• Remove the “Colored Tiles” render method.
• Fix a selection bug where the scene editor becomes empty when the user selects something in the SketchUp scene.

Version 0.6.16 Alpha

• Rename the misspelled “vignet” to “vignette”.
• Make the “No GI” mode the default for Approx. Global Illumination, until we have a less out AO mode.
• Clamp the range for exposure.
• Re-arrange the main window layout, more space for the scene editor, and less space for the asset browser.
• Reduce the size of texture thumbnails from 196px to 144px.
• Fix the power control of the texture environment light.
• Only do material picking when the user activates the tool in the toolbar.
• Picking a material when the material list was not visible would sometimes result in selecting the wrong material. This is fixed in this release.
• Visually indicate in the toolbar if material/focus picking is active.
• Properly support the alpha channel in the tone mapping settings. Note: This change is a work in progress and will only be useful when we support a background image backplate + shadow catcher material.
• Add buttons to expand/collapse all widgets in the scene editor.
• Introduce the concept of “quick edits”. A quick edit provides an alternative view of the material configuration, allowing the artist to accomplish specific tasks quickly. The first quick edit is global UV edit, which means setting the UV for all image textures that are part of a material.
• Add a quick edit to load image textures. This quick edit also support automatic matching of PBR textures, based on their filename (e.g. MyTexture_rough.png or diffuse_MyTexture.png).

Version 0.6.15 Alpha

• Increase the default resolution for PolyHaven HDRI files from 1k to 2k.
• Fix rendering of refractions (e.g., glass). This bug was introduced in the previous release.
• Using the spotlight tool would create a point light.
• Fix inverted normal maps.

Version 0.6.14 Alpha

• Fix an intermittent crash when closing SketchUp.
• Fix an intermittent crash when dragging and dropping textures.
• Add a new render method to visualize the shading normal minus the bump mapping. When there’s no bump mapping applied, this is the same as the normal shading normal render method. I introduced this for debugging normal issues, which might be handy for others.
• Fix banding artifacts when using normal maps on low-poly geometry. Note that the fix uses a “hack” by offsetting the shadow rays by the ray epsilon configured in the render kernel. This might not work for all situations. Increasing the poly count of the mesh will always work but might not always be desirable.
• Change how Rayscaper matches the SketchUp camera: We still match the camera transformation but don’t update the field-of-view anymore, only the camera’s orientation. Add a “Match Viewport” button to the toolbar that will explicitly match SketchUp’s viewport, matching the camera settings and updating the smallest render resolution width or height to match the viewport’s aspect ratio.

Version 0.6.13 Alpha

• Fix a crash triggered by drag and dropping a texture on geometry that doesn’t have a material assigned in SketchUp, i.e., the geometry colored in cyan in Rayscaper.
• Fix a crash during the material preview rendering.
• Fix a crash when loading some environment maps from PolyHaven (e.g. “Blue Lagoon Night”).
• Sorts the assets in the asset browser alphabetically by their name.
• Fix a bug in the asset gallery display. Sometimes, the bottom row was truncated, making the asset names of the bottom row invisible.
• Add additional render methods (mainly for debugging, but might be helpful for someone else): dP/dU to render the first surface tangent, dP/dV to render the second surface tangent, world coordinates to render the world position, and shading incidence (a.k.a. cos theta).
• Fix a crash when using the FredoScale radial bending tool.
• Integrate the SketchUcation licensing system into Rayscaper.

Version 0.6.12 Alpha

• Add a thin glass option for the glass material. This option is for glass that is modeled as a thin polygon. This type of glass only has Fresnel reflections but no refractions.
• Add a transparency shadows option for the glass material. This option makes the glass material invisible to shadow rays, allowing direct light to pass through the glass. This is useful for allowing direct light through glass in indoor scenes.
• Add a Perlin noise procedural texture.
• Add mix textures that mixes between 2 input textures based on a third blend texture.
• Add an asset library. Right now, only Poly Haven (www.polyhaven.com) assets are supported. The next step is to support saving materials into a “material pack” and make them available in the asset browser.
• Unify the Rayscaper windows in a single window.

Version 0.6.11 Alpha

• Update the Rayscaper icon in the SketchUp toolbar, the About dialog, and the title bar of the Rayscaper windows.
• Fix a crash with material emission.
• Fix a crash triggered during the saving of the model.
• Remove texture emission from the area light. This isn’t working correctly, so I’m reverting this capability.
• Support two-sided emission for the diffuse and blackbody emitters.
• Emission applied to groups or component definitions is working now.
• Fix a crash when deleting a material from the SketchUp model.

Version 0.6.10 Alpha

• Add a progress indicator for image texture loading. Loading large textures (e.g. 16K HDR) can make the user interface unresponsive. Instead, we’ll show a progress indicator to the user to give a visual cue that a long-running operation is ongoing.
• Fix a normal mapping bug.

Version 0.6.9 Alpha

• Fix the file chooser when saving an image. The file chooser wasn’t displaying the already existing files in the folder.
• Fix the Rayscaper windows (scene editor & render window). Before, they were always on top of every application. With the fix, they are only on top of SketchUp.
• Fix the spot light, which was emitting front and back.
• Change how we configure the spot light. Instead of fiddling with the falloff angle of the internal cone, I changed it to specify a falloff value between 0 and 1. It’s much more intuitive that way.
• Add the option to image textures, both color and float textures, to invert their values.
• Fix normal mapping.
• Add a strength option for normal mapping.

Version 0.6.8 Alpha

• Fix a crash when grouping the geometry inside an already existing group.
• Fix nans (manifesting as a white render window) when using a black color for the texture environment.
• Support using HDR format images as image textures.
• The 3D composite transform would only rotate around the X-axis. Even modifying the Y and Z rotations would result in an X-axis rotation.
• Fix facets in reflections caused by a shading normal bug.

Version 0.6.7 Alpha

• Add support for AI denoise. Our implementation is based on the Intel Open Image Denoise open-source library.
• Implement a render method to render the albedo (”average color”).
• Fix image saving. Make it explicit which file format to save, and ensure the file has that extension when saving it to disk. Before this change, saving a file without an extension was possible. This is not a problem per se, but for example, on Windows, you won’t get a thumbnail or contextual menus based on the image format.
• Make the sampling method configurable in the Render Method. In the long run, this isn’t something I want to expose. But it can be used now to work around the fact that Sobol sampling has a bug that results in patterned artifacts, even after many samples.
• Rename point light to sphere light.
• Add a radius control to the sphere light to control the softness of the shadows.
• Add an angle control to the directional light to control the softness of shadows.
• Rename spotlight to spot light. I think that’s technically the incorrect way to write it. But the other lights are written with two words, and I like consistency.
• Add a radius control to the spot light to control the softness of shadows.
• Tweak the sliders. I gave them a lovely orange, reduced the range to 2 digits, and made them scrollable.

Version 0.6.6 Alpha

• Bring back the tooltips. I broke them when refactoring the material editing workflow.
• Change the tooltip text for the anisotropic input of the Disney material.
• Fix a crash when trying to delete lights Rayscaper doesn’t know about. This can happen when the user clears the Rayscaper data, and the user still selects a light instance component.
• Clear the user-defined Rayscaper lights when clearing the data from SketchUp.
• Improve the material preview scene.
• Fix a crash when converting SketchUp STQ coordinates to Rayscaper UV coordinates. This would result in a divide by zero when the third Q coordinate was zero.

Version 0.6.5 Alpha

• Rename the specular material to glass material.
• Rename the glossy material to plastic material.
• Rename the substrate material to coated material.
• Add a new material named Disney material. This material implements Disney’s principled BRDF, available in several other engines.
• Declutter the labels in the left pane of the scene editor.
• SketchUp materials are converted to Disney materials instead of diffuse materials.
• Re-architect the user interface for the material editor. Everything is compacter now and can be edited inline instead of jumping between views.
• Add a button to nuke all the Rayscaper data from the SketchUp files. I added this to nuke old incompatible data from SketchUp, which can still happen while we are in alpha (once we are 1.0, changes will be backward compatible).
• Make the render method for the material preview configurable: Global Illumination vs. Approx. Global Illumination. The reason is that the Approx. Global Illumination method cannot render all options offered by the new Disney material, particularly specular transmission with roughness.
• Fix a SketchUp texture conversion bug.

Version 0.6.4 Alpha

• Fix hot pixels caused by NaNs in the AO mode for the approx global illumination render method.
• Change the camera lock behavior: When the lock is released, we update the Rayscaper camera to the latest view in SketchUp. When opening the render window, the camera in Rayscaper is reset to the latest view in SketchUp.
• Make sure the scene editor window is opened when picking a material.