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Changelog
Every release of Auddomate Render, the free spectral 3D renderer in your browser, newest first.
Your file's frame rate
The timeline now opens at the frame rate your animation was made at, like 24 frames per second from Blender or a USD scene, so every frame of your animation lines up with the timeline. You can still change it in the Animation tab.
Caustics from windows, lamps and softboxes
Glass and liquid now focus light from small, bright lights in your sky, like a window or a lamp in an HDRI or a small softbox, into sharp, clean caustics on the table, just as they already did with the sun. Brighter lights get more of the work, and the result is checked against pbrt-v4 like everything else.
A studio laid out like your 3D app
The render now takes the left of the window, with your scene and its settings on the right and a timeline along the bottom, the way Cinema 4D and Blender arrange things. Drag the edges to give any part more room.
- The scene tree. Everything in your scene is listed at the top right: your model and every object in it, nested just as in your file, plus the cameras, the lighting and every material. Click an object to see its triangles and materials; click the render and the tree opens straight to what you clicked.
- Hide anything. The eye beside an object hides it from the render, with its shadows and reflections. Hide a whole group, like the walls of a room, to see what's inside. Hidden objects are saved with your scene.
- A Material tab. Pick a material in the render or the scene tree and it opens in its own tab, ready to adjust.
- A real timeline. Play, step and scrub your animation or turntable on a frame ruler along the bottom, with the arrow keys, Home and End.
- New in the Docs: A tour of the studio, rewritten for the new layout.
USD scenes, straight in
Drop a .usd, .usda, .usdc or .usdz file from Maya, Houdini, NVIDIA Omniverse, Unreal or any app that writes USD, and Auddomate Render brings in the whole scene: meshes, materials and their textures, lights, cameras and moving objects. Scenes made of many files work too. Drop the whole folder, and props, sets, variants and instanced copies all arrive as your 3D app shows them.
- Materials from your renderer. UsdPreviewSurface, MaterialX Standard Surface and OpenPBR, Arnold Standard Surface, and Omniverse's OmniPBR, OmniGlass and OmniSurface arrive with their color, metal, roughness, glass, clear coat, glow and texture maps.
- Lights and sky. Sphere, spot and distant lights arrive as lights you can brighten or dim together, and a dome light with an HDRI becomes the sky.
- New in the Docs: USD scenes, in Importing models, and USD export steps in the guides for Maya and Houdini.
Blender add-on 1.0.2
The add-on now respects Blender's Allow Online Access setting. With it off, your scene is still saved in Documents › Auddomate Render, ready to drop into the studio, but your browser isn't opened. Sending from Edit Mode is more reliable too.
- To update, download the add-on again from the Blender guide in the Docs and install it the same way. It replaces the old version.
The studio, in eight languages
Auddomate Render now speaks English, 日本語, 简体中文, Deutsch, Français, Español, 한국어 and Português (Brasil). It opens in your browser's language, and you can switch any time from the Interface menu or the flag at the bottom of the panel, without stopping your render. Every panel, tip, message and showcase scene is translated, with Japanese, Chinese and Korean set in type made for them.
- The Docs and this changelog stay in English for now.
Counting visits, privately
auddomate.com now counts visits and studio actions, like renders finished and plugins used, so we can see what helps people and what to build next. It's done on our own server, with no cookies, no analytics company and no stored IP addresses, and file names, models and renders are never counted. If your browser asks not to be tracked, nothing is counted at all. The Privacy page explains exactly how it works.
A page for every comparison
Auddomate Render now has its own page beside each renderer people ask about: KeyShot, Blender Cycles, V-Ray, Corona, Octane, Redshift and Maverick. Each sets the two side by side, line by line, says plainly when to choose each, and answers the common questions, like whether there's a free alternative and how to bring your scenes across.
- Every comparison on the Compare page links to its full page.
Links that look good when shared
Share any page of auddomate.com on X, LinkedIn, Slack or in a message, and it now shows a picture and a short summary instead of a bare link.
Send to Auddomate Render, from 3ds Max
A free plugin for 3ds Max 2023 and later adds an Auddomate Render menu. One click exports your scene, opens the studio in your browser, and your model arrives already loaded, just as from Cinema 4D and Blender.
- V-Ray, Corona and Arnold materials arrive in color. 3ds Max can't export them, so they used to arrive plain white. The plugin sends each one in its base color, keeps its name, and the studio tells you which ones to finish in the material editor.
- New in the Docs: Send to Auddomate Render, in From 3ds Max, with the download.
Auddomate Render, by name
The plugins for Cinema 4D and Blender are now called Auddomate Render. Look for Send to Auddomate Render in Cinema 4D's Extensions menu, and in the Auddomate Render tab and File → Export menu in Blender. Scenes you send are saved in Documents › Auddomate Render.
- To update, download the plugin again from the Docs. In Cinema 4D, delete the old Auddomate plugin folder before adding the new Auddomate Render one.
Uber materials arrive in color
Uber and other node materials sent from Cinema 4D now arrive in their own color instead of plain white, and the studio tells you which ones to finish in the material editor.
- Metal only when it's metal. Materials like Cinema 4D's PBR preset no longer arrive as metal. Only materials that are metal in Cinema 4D come across as metal.
- Download the Cinema 4D plugin again from the Docs to get these improvements.
Send to Auddomate, from Cinema 4D and Blender
Free plugins put a Send to Auddomate command inside your 3D app. One click exports your scene, opens the studio in your browser, and your model arrives already loaded, with a progress bar while it comes across. No exporting by hand, no dragging files.
- Redshift materials arrive in color. Cinema 4D can't export Redshift, Octane or other render-engine materials, so they used to arrive plain white. The plugin sends each one as a plain material in its preview color, keeps its name, and the studio tells you which ones to finish in the material editor. Your own scene and export settings are never changed.
- Always a copy. Every scene you send is also saved in Documents › Auddomate, ready to drop onto the render by hand.
- Private by design. The scene goes straight from your 3D app to the browser on your own computer, and nothing is uploaded. The first time, Chrome may ask whether auddomate.com may access other apps and services on this device: allow it once and every send after that arrives on its own.
- Choosing a .c4d or .blend file in Import model now points you to the plugin as well as the export steps.
- New in the Docs: Send to Auddomate, in From Cinema 4D and From Blender, with the downloads.
Cleaner panel edges
The line between the panel and the render is now one even, fine line from top to bottom, and the corner under the Auddomate name is square.
- The line under the panel header now meets the line under the toolbar exactly, as one straight line across the studio.
- With scroll bars set to always show, the panel's scroll bar is now slim and quiet, with no extra line down the panel.
A gallery
The new Gallery page shows renders made in Auddomate, straight from the studio with no retouching. The top image resolves before your eyes, from one sample per pixel to finished. One bottle, eight materials shows a single perfume bottle in glass, frost, milk, wax, jade, gold, rose gold and red lacquer under the same light. Open any image to see how it was made, drag across it to see the same render at one sample per pixel, and open its scene in the studio with one click.
- Open a scene from a link. Studio links can now name a showcase scene, such as
/studio/?scene=rum-bottle, and the studio opens on it. - Materials that came in white. Some apps, Cinema 4D among them, write only their simple materials into an OBJ's .mtl file and leave the rest out. Those parts used to arrive plain white with no explanation. Now a notice in Your model lists them, explains why, and links to how to export a GLB instead.
- Files from your 3D app. Choosing or dropping a .c4d, .blend, .max, Maya, Rhino or Houdini file now tells you the one export step that app needs, with a link to its guide, instead of greying the file out. FBX files, which Auddomate doesn't read yet, get the free route through Blender.
- New in the Docs: Materials that come in white and Files from your 3D app, in Bringing in your model.
Translucent materials
Glass can now be cloudy, with light scattering many times inside it the way it does in milk, wax, soap, jade or marble. Edges glow, shadows fill with soft color, and thin parts let light through while thick parts stay solid. Open any glass material and choose a Cloudiness: Clear, Milk, Wax, Soap, Jade, Marble, Peach or Frost.
- Spread sets how far light travels inside before it scatters, from a tenth of a millimetre to a metre, so the same wax can be a dense candle or a thin, glowing sheet.
- The color you pick is the color you see. Cloudiness colors are the color the material looks after all that scattering, not a raw setting you have to guess at.
- Checked against pbrt-v4. A new check, T19, renders a ball of wax and a frosted ball of jade and compares them with pbrt-v4's volumetric path tracer. That makes 37 checks you can run in the studio.
- New in the Docs: Translucent materials, in Materials.
A full material editor
Click any surface in your render, or choose it in Scene → Materials, and change what it is. Type turns it into Matte, Glossy, Metal, Clear coat, Glass or Thin glass, and the light follows: a ceramic vase becomes polished gold, a plastic cap becomes glass.
- Color, finish and coat. Pick from paint colors or real metal colors (silver, gold, copper, brass, rose gold and more), or open Adjust color for hue, saturation and brightness. Roughness goes from mirror to satin. Clear coat puts lacquer over paint or over metal, like a car body or candy chrome. Glass keeps its index of refraction, and its color and depth for liquids.
- The same trusted light. Every type is one of Auddomate's own materials, each checked against pbrt-v4, so whatever you choose, the light stays physically right.
- Kept with your work. Edits show straight away, saved scenes keep them, Back to the original undoes one material, and Reset materials undoes them all.
- New in the Docs: Edit any material, in Materials.
A panel as wide as you like
Drag the small handle on the panel's right edge to make it wider or narrower, from 280 to 520 pixels. Auddomate remembers the width, double-clicking the handle puts it back, and the arrow keys move it too.
- Clicking something in the render now always scrolls its material into view in the panel.
- Dispersive glass, like the Water glass tumbler, no longer shows as Edited in Materials when nothing has been changed.
A calmer panel
Every tab is now made of compact cards, like Sky, Lens, Materials or Quality. Click a card's name to fold it away; Auddomate remembers what you folded. Rows are one line each, with the setting on the left and its value on the right, so far more fits on screen.
- Click the render to edit a material. Click anything in your render, and Auddomate tells you what it is, with a small label right where you clicked, and opens that material in the panel. On a model with dozens of materials, it's the quickest way to find the right one. Dragging still turns the view; only a quick click picks.
- Materials, one at a time. Scene → Materials now lists every material in your scene, with its color and type. Choose one to open its settings underneath; big models get a search box and show the first few until you ask for more. Glass, liquids and glossy coatings can be adjusted, and every material shows its name.
- Scenes from the toolbar. The scene's name at the top left is now a picker, with a picture of every showcase scene, your saved scenes, and the test scenes when they're turned on. Import model and Open file sit right there too. The Scene tab is left for the scene you're working on, so it's a fraction of the length.
- Your scenes, compact. Saved scenes are now tidy rows with a small picture, and saving or opening a file is one click from the card's header.
- New in the Docs: folding cards and clicking to edit materials, in The studio.
Missing materials, impossible to miss
An OBJ keeps its materials in a separate .mtl file, and bringing in the .obj alone used to leave it plain grey with only a passing message. Now a notice stays in Your model, names exactly which files are missing, and Add materials file reloads your model with them in place, without importing it all over again.
- Drop the whole folder. Drag a downloaded model's folder onto the render, and Auddomate finds the model, its materials and its textures inside, even in subfolders. If a folder has several formats, it picks GLB first, then glTF, then OBJ.
- Textures from separate files come through. Texture images picked or dropped alongside an OBJ or glTF were being left out before they reached the model. They now come in with it.
- Names with spaces. Material and texture files with spaces in their names, like
Car Paint.mtlorRed Paint.png, are now found correctly. Before, Auddomate read only the last word and reported them missing even when they were there.
The panel stays put
With the panel scrolled down, turning a switch on or off, such as Floor, could push the whole studio up off the screen with no way to scroll it back. Every switch now stays inside the panel it belongs to, and the studio itself can no longer be moved out of place.
- See your model load. While a model imports, Import model turns into a progress bar that fills as the file is read, with the percentage beside it, then shows Preparing… while the scene is built.
Huge models import
Large OBJ files, like the gigabyte-plus models sold on model marketplaces and exported from CAD, could stop the studio before it showed anything. They now import smoothly: a 1.2 GB OBJ with 4.2 million triangles loads in about twelve seconds.
- Leaner on memory. Large CAD models now take far less memory while rendering, so bigger scenes fit on your graphics card. They look exactly as before.
- Progress you can see. While a model loads, Import model shows how far along it is, then Preparing… while the scene is built.
- Big files stay light everywhere. Saved scenes, paused renders and .auddomate files now keep your model as the original file instead of a copy in memory, so saving, downloading and opening scenes with large models is quick.
- Batch render's scene cards now use the studio's typeface, and the ring around a chosen scene goes all the way around its picture. The same fix applies to the cards in Your scenes.
- New in the Docs: Large models, in Bringing in your model.
A page that never came back
Follow a broken link to auddomate.com and you no longer land on a plain server error. Instead, a glass 404 renders itself in front of you, from spectral grain to clean in exactly 404 samples per pixel, with caustics on the floor, a reflection and a status bar just like the studio's. Move your pointer, or tap on a phone, and the light follows; the render starts again and settles, as it does in the studio. A ray report underneath confirms the bad news: it was checked against pbrt-v4, and pbrt couldn't find the page either.
Every page's footer now has a small Built with Lucid badge. It opens lucidui.dev, the open-source interface library the studio is made with, in a new tab
Links that leave Auddomate, like Lucid UI, pbrt-v4, the licences we credit and the makers on the Compare page, now open in a new tab, so you never lose your place
How we compare, honestly
A new Compare page sets Auddomate beside the renderers people ask about most: KeyShot, Blender Cycles, V-Ray, Corona, Octane, Redshift and Maverick. Pick one and see both side by side, line by line: what each costs, how you run it, what it works on, how it handles light and caustics, how it builds scenes and materials, and how far it scales.
- Where we're not there yet. The page says plainly where other tools are ahead: they can model and arrange scenes, have far richer materials and libraries, scale across graphics cards and render farms, and have decades of production behind them. For each one, it says who should choose it, and who should choose Auddomate.
- Sourced and dated. Prices come from each maker's own price page, checked 21 October 2026, and anything we couldn't confirm is left out. If something is out of date or unfair, the page asks you to tell us so we can fix it.
- Compare is in the footer of every page and in the menu of Pricing, the Manifesto and the help pages, and Pricing and Support link to it.
Exact output sizes
A new Output group in the Render tab sets how big the finished picture is: Fit the window as before, or an exact size from Square 2K, HD 1080p and QHD 1440p up to 4K UHD. The render keeps its shape on screen and saves at the full size, whatever your display. Portrait stands any size upright, for posters, phone screens and tall product shots, and your saved scenes remember both.
- 8K and print sizes. 8K UHD, and A4 and A3 at 300 dpi, for billboards, crops and print. If your graphics card can't manage a size, the studio says so and keeps the one you had.
- Batch render. Under Your scenes, Batch render renders your saved scenes one after another, each with its own size, sky, camera and settings, until it's clean. Pick the scenes, choose PNG, JPEG, TIFF or EXR, and walk away: they download together as one numbered zip. Stop keeps every scene that has already finished.
- Ready for Pro. 8K and print sizes, videos longer than 10 seconds and batch renders are what Pro will add. Pro needs no account: a licence key, checked on your computer, turns it on in Interface → Auddomate Pro, and Priority support writes to us with your licence number. Pro isn't open yet, so for now all of it is free for everyone, with no key needed.
- New in the Docs: Auddomate Pro, with batch renders in Saving your scenes and every size in Quality and noise.
Pricing
A new Pricing page sets out how Auddomate is priced. Free is the whole studio, forever, with no account and no card. Pro, coming soon at $12 a month or $96 a year, is for people who render for a living: renders beyond 4K, video of any length, batch renders of your saved scenes, and priority support.
- We never paywall the physics. Every plan renders with the same engine, the same accuracy against pbrt-v4 and the same privacy. A side-by-side comparison and answers to common questions sit underneath, and Tell me when it opens lets you hear the day Pro arrives. Until then, everything in Auddomate is free.
- Pricing is in the site's menu and every footer, and Support and the Terms point to it.
The Licences page now credits Lucid UI, the open-source library the studio's interface is built with, and links to lucidui.dev. The Privacy policy names it too
- On the smallest phones, the site's header no longer crowds the Auddomate wordmark against Open the studio. Below 300 pixels wide, only the Auddomate mark is shown.
The changelog's footer now has the same links as every other page: Manifesto, Docs, Support, Privacy, Terms, Licences and the studio
- On narrow screens, the changelog's Open the studio button stays on one line.
The Terms now name the Province of Ontario, and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, as the law that governs them
Support
A new Support page gathers the best places to start in the Docs, what you need to run Auddomate, answers to common questions, and how to reach us at hello@auddomate.com, including the details that help us find an answer quickly.
- Privacy, in plain words. Our Privacy policy sets out exactly what Auddomate does with information, which is very little: your models, scenes and renders never leave your computer, there are no accounts, no cookies and no tracking, and it names the two services that deliver parts of the site.
- Terms of use. You own your work and every render you make, Auddomate is free to use today, and the terms say plainly what we each promise.
- Credits and licences. A Licences page credits the research, data and typefaces Auddomate is built on, including the Hosek–Wilkie sky model and pbrt-v4.
- Every page now links to Support, Privacy, Terms and Licences in its footer, and the studio's Interface and command menus have Get support. On phones, footer links now line up neatly under the Auddomate mark.
Save your scenes
A new Your scenes group in the Scene tab saves everything about the shot in front of you: your model, the sky, the exact camera view and lens, every material you changed, and your exposure, look, white balance, glow and Stop at. Give it a name and it appears as a card with a small picture of the render.
- Back exactly as you left it. Click a card and the scene opens just as you saved it, model and all, even after you've closed the browser, and the render starts by itself. Update the open scene with Save changes, and rename or delete scenes from each card's menu. Deleting asks once first.
- Take a scene anywhere. Download turns a scene into a single .auddomate file, with your model and HDRI inside. Open it with Open file, or drop it onto the render, on any computer.
- New in the Docs: Saving your scenes.
Stop when clean
Renders no longer stop at a sample count you have to guess. Stop at now opens on Clean · Good: Auddomate measures how much grain is left in every part of the picture and stops by itself once it's clean. Choose Clean · Draft for quick looks while you set up a shot, or Clean · Final for finished stills. A matte still life might be clean in a few hundred samples; a sunlit bottle of rum takes a few thousand. Now each gets exactly what it needs.
- An honest time left. The dots fill up as the grain clears, and the time left is worked out from the grain itself, because grain halves every time the samples go up four times. Fixed counts, from 256 to 16,384 samples, and No limit are still there when renders must match.
- Judged the way you see it. Clean is measured on the picture as it's shown, so the brightest sparkles and the darkest corners can't hold a render up for ever.
- Smoother glossy floors under caustics. Light traced out from the sun now lands only on matte and satin surfaces, where it's at its best. On near-mirror floors, like the one in the Water glass, caustics are found the way they were before 2.31, so they no longer leave stray sparkles. Caustics still match pbrt-v4.
- The Docs page Quality and noise explains Stop when clean.
Scenes always start themselves
Choosing a scene now loads it and starts rendering straight away, even if the last render was paused or finished. Before, a paused studio could open a new scene to a black picture until you pressed Start.
- Changes never leave you looking at black. Changing anything that alters the light while paused, like the sky, a material or the number of bounces, now starts the render again by itself. A pause still holds for as long as nothing changes, and exposure, look and white balance can be adjusted on a paused picture without restarting it.
- Rendering a video now fully pauses the live render while it works, so every frame gets the whole graphics card.
A filmic look
A new Film group in the Camera tab chooses how light becomes a picture. Standard shows the light exactly as calculated and clips the brightest parts to white. AgX is filmic: very bright light rolls off gently and keeps its color, so a sunlit glint through rum stays golden instead of turning flat white, and bright skies stay blue. Punchy is AgX with more contrast and richer color.
- White balance, like a camera. Set the color of light that should read as white, in kelvin, from 2,000 to 12,000 K. Lower makes a warm, candle-lit scene neutral; higher warms a cold, shady one; 6,500 K leaves the light exactly as rendered. It works in the light itself, the way a camera does, so whites become white and every color shifts with them.
- Instant, and saved as you see it. Neither setting restarts the render. JPEG, PNG, TIFF and videos are saved with your look and white balance, while EXR keeps the true light values for compositing and passes stay plain.
- The Rum bottle, finished. The Rum bottle now opens in Punchy at 5,800 K, for deep amber rum against a cool, pale table, the way a product photographer would grade it. Other scenes open in Standard as before, and leaving the Rum bottle puts everything back.
- New in the Docs: Film look and white balance.
Caustics, traced from the sun
Glass and liquid now throw the bright, colored patterns real sunlight makes: the golden pool inside a whisky glass's shadow, the bright lines a ribbed bottle focuses onto the table. Opal now sends light out from the sun as well as back from the camera, aimed only at the glass in your scene, and joins the two without ever counting the same light twice. Caustics that other renderers leave as a scatter of sparkles come out sharp and clean in seconds. A Caustics switch in the Render tab is on by default, and they work with the Physical sky, the studio lights and any sky with one small, bright sun.
- Colored glass and liquid. Rum, wine, perfume and tinted glass now take their color from inside, the way real ones do: light loses a little color with every millimetre it travels, so thick middles glow deep and thin edges stay pale, and the light that passes through carries its color onto whatever it falls on. Under Scene → Materials, every solid glass and liquid has a Color, from Amber and Whisky to Wine, Emerald, Ocean and Smoke, and a Depth in real centimetres for how dense it is. glTF files with an attenuation color and distance arrive already colored.
- Meet the Rum bottle. A new showcase scene, and our finest yet: a fluted bottle of aged rum with a gold cap and a gold foil label, beside a ribbed tumbler with ice, on a pale table in low evening sun. The rum glows amber from inside, the ribs scatter light, and both throw golden caustics through their shadows. It opens with its sun, its glow and everything set, ready to render.
- Checked against pbrt-v4. Two new checks bring the total to 36: colored glass and liquid against pbrt-v4's volumetric path tracer, and caustics against its bidirectional path tracer.
- New in the Docs: Caustics, a section on colored glass and liquid in Materials, and the Rum bottle in Your first render.
Change the index of refraction of any material
The Scene tab has a new Materials list: every glass, liquid and glossy coating in your scene gets its own slider, named after the material in your file. Turn a glass bottle into crystal or diamond, make water look thicker, or give a plastic a wetter, more lacquered shine, and watch the render update as you drag.
- Know the numbers. The (i) beside Materials gives the common values: water 1.33, glass 1.5, crystal 1.6, sapphire 1.77, diamond 2.42.
- Dispersion kept honest. Glass that splits light into color shows as dispersive. Moving its slider sets a fixed index and turns the color off; Reset materials puts every material back exactly as your file had it.
- Kept with your work. Your changes stay with each scene while the studio is open and come back when you resume a long render. Your file is never changed. The showcase scenes now name their materials, like Bottle glass, Water and Vase glaze, and the Docs page Materials explains it all with a worked example.
A Fresnel pass
Next to Beauty and Occlusion in the Render tab, Pass now offers Fresnel: a black-and-white image of how strongly each surface reflects at the angle you see it. Faces turned towards the camera are dark, while rims, edges and surfaces seen side-on glow white. Compositors use it as a mask for rim light, for boosting reflections where they're naturally strongest, or for grades that fall off towards an object's edges.
- Tuned to the material. Index of refraction sets how reflective surfaces are head-on: 1.5 for glass and most plastics, higher for gemstones and polished stone, lower for water. The pass follows normal maps, so embossed detail shows up too.
- Saved like any pass. Tick Fresnel in the Save menu, save in any format, and the file name ends in "fresnel", so it sits next to its beauty render. It renders in moments, at the same size and from the same camera, so everything lines up.
- The pass that was called Ambient occlusion in the Render tab is now labelled Occlusion to fit all three side by side. The Docs page Passes covers the new pass with a worked example.
Tint the sky
A new Tint row in the Light tab colors all the light that comes from the sky, like a gel over a lamp. Choose Golden or Warm for late afternoon, Rose for a soft glow, Mint or Cool for clean light, or Blue hour for the deep blue after sunset. Tint strength goes from a hint of color to the full swatch.
- Brightness stays put. A tint changes the color of the light, not how much there is, so your exposure holds when you try one.
- Color the way real light does. The tint filters every wavelength of the sky, so colored surfaces react the way they would under real colored light: blue light dulls an orange and lifts a teal glaze. It works with Studio, Physical, HDRI and scene skies, reaches every reflection, and is kept with your saved render settings and with long renders you resume.
- The Docs page Skies and studios shows each tint in action.
The Auddomate Manifesto
A new page at auddomate.com/manifesto says plainly what Auddomate believes about rendering, and what it refuses to do: light that isn't faked, color carried as real wavelengths, every release checked in the open against pbrt-v4, your work never leaving your machine, no installer, controls written for artists, and nothing shipped half-baked.
- Made to be read slowly. Each principle lights up word by word as you scroll, a thin line of light down the side tracks how far you've read, and every picture on the page is a render made in Auddomate. The proof section shows the figures from the latest live run of the checks.
- The Manifesto is linked from the front page, the Docs and this changelog.
Long renders that pick up where they left off
Every finished frame of an animation or turntable render is now saved in your browser as soon as it's done. Press Pause and the render stops after the frame it's on; close the tab, reload or let your computer sleep, and nothing is lost. The Animation tab shows your Unfinished render, with how many frames are saved, and Resume carries on from the next frame.
- Back exactly as it was. Resume restores the whole studio for you: the scene, the camera and lens, the sky and lights, exposure, glow, glare, denoising, bounces and the render size, so the new frames match the old ones perfectly. It even works for a model you imported or an HDRI you loaded: Auddomate keeps a copy with the saved frames and brings it back in. Everything stays in your browser and is never uploaded.
- Renders that survive a hiccup. If a render stops by itself, because the browser closed or the graphics card was reset, it's kept and resumes the same way.
- Built from saved frames. When the last frame is done, the MP4 or the zip of PNG or EXR frames is put together from the saved frames, downloaded, and the saved frames are cleared to free the space. Very long renders no longer have to fit in memory while they run.
- Room checked first. Before a render starts, Auddomate checks your browser has space for its frames and tells you if it doesn't. Discard asks once before deleting saved frames.
- With motion blur, rigs and morphs, lights from your file and now renders that resume, Auddomate takes an animation all the way from your 3D app to a finished video. The Docs page Rendering video explains it all.
One panel, in the order you work
The sidebar and the separate settings rail are now a single panel with five tabs: Scene, Light, Camera, Render and Animation. They follow how a render comes together, from choosing your model to lighting it, framing it, finishing it and animating it, so a new render is simply left to right. Everything that used to be split between the sidebar sections and the settings rail now lives in exactly one place, and the panel remembers the tab you were on.
- Help on hand, not in the way. Every setting shows just its name and its control. A small i beside each one explains what it does and when to use it: hover over it, tab to it or tap it, and it opens beside the panel without covering what you're adjusting.
- Progress where you look. The bar above the render now always shows whether it's rendering, the progress dots, the time so far and roughly how long is left. Along the bottom of the render, readouts show samples per second, samples per pixel, the resolution and the size of your model, and step aside gracefully when the window is narrow.
- An Interface menu. The sliders button at the top right holds the settings about the studio itself: the theme, test scenes, the axes, a keyboard shortcuts list and a link to the Docs.
- ⌘P shows or hides the panel, giving the render the whole window when you want it. The command menu can jump straight to any tab.
- On phones, the same five tabs open as a sheet from the button at the top left.
- New in the Docs: A tour of the studio, and every page now points to the right tab.
Checks you can watch
While the checks run, the window now keeps the check that's running at the top, with its progress in view, instead of only catching up once each one had finished. Scroll back to read an earlier result and the window waits for you, then carries on following a few seconds after you stop.
Guides for Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini and Rhino
The Docs gain four new step-by-step export guides, next to Cinema 4D and Blender: which exporter or node to use, the settings that matter, how each app's materials come across, and how to bring animation, rigs and lights with you. Maya's guide covers both glTF plug-ins and a quick route through Blender; Houdini's covers deforming meshes and KineFX characters; Rhino's covers mesh quality and pointing the model the right way up.
- Every app, not just a few. Bringing in your model now lists guides for all six apps, plus notes for ZBrush, SketchUp, Fusion, SolidWorks, Onshape, Substance 3D Painter, Spline, Womp, Shapr3D and Nomad Sculpt. Anything that exports GLB, glTF or OBJ works in Auddomate.
The Auddomate Docs
A complete manual for the studio, at auddomate.com/docs, written for artists rather than engineers. Twenty-three pages take you from your first render to a finished animation: bringing in models from Cinema 4D and Blender, how each kind of material comes across, skies and lights, the camera and lens, quality and noise, glow and glare, passes, saving and every format, playback, turntables, rendering video, motion blur, and how Auddomate checks itself against pbrt-v4. Every illustration is a render made in Auddomate.
- Start here. The front of the Docs offers three steps for newcomers: your first render, bringing in your model, and lighting it. Every page ends with links to the one before and after, so you can read it like a book.
- Find anything. Press ⌘K, or /, on any page to search the whole manual, down to individual sections. A contents list runs down the side, and on wider screens an "On this page" list follows you as you read.
- One click from wherever you are. The Docs are linked from the front page, the changelog and the studio's sidebar footer, which now reads "© Auddomate • Docs • Changelog"; the Auddomate mark at the top of the sidebar still takes you home. Open the docs is in the studio's ⌘K command menu too.
- The Checks window now describes its tests in plain words.
Lights from your 3D app
Point lights, spotlights and suns placed in Cinema 4D, Blender or any glTF app now come in with your model, at the position, aim, color and strength you gave them. A bulb glows warm on what's near it and falls off with distance; a spotlight throws a pool of light that fades softly between its inner and outer cone; a sun lights everything with parallel rays and long, crisp shadows.
- Lights that move. A light parented to a moving object, or animated itself, moves with it: a headlight follows its car, a spotlight sweeps across the set, a torch moves with the hand that holds it. With motion blur on, a moving light's shadows blur as they would on film.
- Lights from the file, under Scene. Switch them on or off, and raise or lower all of them together by up to 12 stops with Light strength, without touching your file. A model that brings its own lights opens under a dim sky, so your lighting sets the look; pick any sky to add to it.
- Exposure. A new Exposure control under Settings → Camera brightens or darkens the whole image in stops, as on a camera. Lights stored in real units can be far brighter or dimmer than the sky, and exposure brings the image back without changing the light itself. Saved images include it.
- Bringing it across. Export glTF or GLB with lights switched on (KHR_lights_punctual). Lights with no size cast perfectly sharp shadows, exactly as pbrt-v4 renders them; for soft shadows, use a glowing panel or the studio sky.
- New test scene Lights from a file (T16). Checks grow to 34: a point light, a spotlight and a sun read from a glTF file must match pbrt-v4's own point, spot and distant lights.
Characters and shapes that bend
Skinned meshes now come across from your 3D app. A character's arm bends at the elbow, a tail sways, a rigged hose curls, with every point of the surface following the bones it's weighted to, exactly as in Cinema 4D or Blender. Smooth weights give smooth joints, and the surface shading bends with it.
- Morph targets. Shapes animated with morph targets (pose morphs in Cinema 4D, shape keys in Blender) play back too: a ball that squashes as it lands, a face that changes expression, a logo that swells and settles. Morphs and bones work together on the same mesh, and alongside objects that move, turn and scale.
- Motion blur on moving surfaces. A fast swing or a quick squash blurs along the path each part of the surface actually travels, not just as a whole object, so a whipping arm softens towards the hand while the shoulder stays crisp.
- Quick on every frame. Only the shapes that bend are updated for each frame, and their structure is adjusted in place rather than rebuilt, so scrubbing and playback stay responsive.
- Bringing it across. Export glTF or GLB with skinning and morphs (shape keys) switched on. Skins with up to four bone influences per point come across exactly, which is the glTF standard.
- New test scene Skinning and morphs (T15). Checks grow to 33: a tube bent by two bones and a ball squashed by a morph, read from a glTF file, must match pbrt-v4 rendering the same deformed shapes.
Opal on the front page
The front page now introduces Opal, the spectral engine inside Auddomate, right at the top: in the line above the headline and in the opening paragraph. The headline and its text also sit a little lower beneath the art, so on mid-sized screens the line above the headline never brushes the shapes.
Turntable on every model
The Animation section is now always in the sidebar. On a model with no animation, Play turns it a full 360° on its spot, like a product on a turntable: the backdrop, floor and lights stay still while the model turns, so its reflections, refractions and shadows move across it the way they would under real studio lights.
- Render a seamless loop. Choose how long one turn takes, 4, 6, 8 or 12 seconds, then press Render animation to save the spin as an MP4 video or as PNG or EXR frames. The last frame leads straight back into the first, so the video loops without a jump.
- Motion blur on the spin. The shutter setting applies to the turntable too, so a fast spin softens along the arc each part travels.
- From the Save menu. Video and Image sequence under Save → Motion now open Render animation with that format chosen, whether your scene is animated or spinning on the turntable.
- Models with their own animation play that instead, exactly as before.
Motion blur
Moving things now blur the way they do on film. A spinning wheel smears into a disc, a fast camera move streaks the background, a falling object softens along its path. Every sample is taken at its own moment while the shutter is open, so the blur happens in the scene itself: in reflections, through glass, and in the shadows of moving objects. Turning objects blur along the arc they actually travel, not in a straight smear.
- Shutter control. Choose Off, 90° for crisp action, 180°, the classic film standard and the default, or 270° for a smooth, dreamy look, in the Animation section. The blur follows your frame rate, just as on a real camera, and your animated camera blurs too.
- Playback. Press Play in the Animation section to watch your animation loop at its frame rate. The preview renders quickly at a lower resolution, denoised on every frame, so you can judge timing, camera moves and motion blur before rendering; pause and it sharpens to full quality.
- Stills stay fast. Scenes with no motion render exactly as fast as before.
- New test scene Motion blur (T14). Checks grow to 32: a spinning and a sliding box must blur exactly as pbrt-v4 renders them over the same shutter.
Animation, from your 3D app to a finished video
Export a glTF or GLB with animation from Cinema 4D, Blender or any other 3D app and Auddomate plays it back exactly: objects moving, turning and scaling, hierarchies of nulls and parented parts, and animated cameras. A new Animation section in the sidebar lets you scrub through time, step frame by frame and choose the frame rate, and look through your file's camera or move freely.
- Render animation. One button renders every frame to the quality you choose, denoised and finished with your depth of field, glow and glare, then saves it as an MP4 video encoded right in your browser, or as PNG or EXR frames in a zip for After Effects or Nuke. A progress view shows the frame count and time left, and you can cancel at any point.
- Built for motion. Moving to a new frame takes milliseconds, even in scenes with millions of triangles. Lights that move, such as a glowing panel on an animated object, move their light with them.
- What comes across. Position, rotation and scale keyframes in linear, stepped and smooth curves. MoGraph, dynamics and other simulations come across when baked to keyframes in your 3D app before export, as with any external renderer. Skinned characters, morphs, motion blur and lights stored in the file are coming in the next releases.
- New test scene Instances (T13). Checks grow to 31: turned, stretched and tipped objects and a transformed panel light must match pbrt-v4 rendering the same objects through its own transforms.
Glare that behaves like a real lens
Star rays now come only from point-like highlights, such as a sun glint on chrome, a hot spot on a gold cap or a tiny bright reflection, which is where a camera actually produces them. Broad bright areas like a ceiling panel or a softbox simply glow instead of being stamped into a star. The rays themselves are brightest right at the highlight and thin out quickly with distance, as diffraction does, instead of spreading into flat, even petals.
Glow and glare
The finishing touches of a real camera lens. Glow lets the brightest parts of your render spill a soft halo into their surroundings: light strips seen through glass, sun glints on chrome, the hot spot on a gold cap. Choose Subtle or Strong under Settings → Render. Glare adds star-shaped rays to the very brightest highlights, like the blades of a camera aperture, as a 4, 6 or 8-point star.
- A look on top, never in the light. Glow and glare are added after Auddomate has finished calculating the light, the way a lens adds them after the scene, so they never change the render itself and the checks against pbrt-v4 are unaffected. Both are off by default.
- Saved as you see it. JPEG, PNG and 16-bit TIFF include the glow and glare exactly as on screen. EXR stays clean, so you can add your own in compositing.
Depth of field
The camera now has a real lens. Open the aperture under Settings → Camera → Aperture, from f/16 down to f/1.4, and everything in front of and behind the focus softens the way it does through a camera: a shallow, expensive-looking product shot with one click. The blur follows the lens you've chosen, so a long lens at f/1.4 melts the background while a wide one at f/8 keeps most of the scene crisp.
- Click to focus. Press Pick on render and click any point on your model, and it becomes perfectly sharp. Focus otherwise sits on the point you orbit around, and Auto brings it back there. The focus distance is shown in centimetres or metres.
- True to scale. The amount of blur depends on how big your scene really is, so Auddomate reads the size from your file: glTF and GLB are in metres, as the format defines, and large OBJ files from Cinema 4D are read as centimetres. The showcase scenes are set at product scale.
- Denoised as it renders. The denoiser cleans up the blur within seconds, and saved renders and their embedded settings record the aperture you used.
- New test scene Depth of field (T12). Checks grow to 30: the blur in front of and behind the focus must match pbrt-v4's thin-lens camera.
Denoising
Renders now look finished in seconds instead of minutes. As the image builds up, a denoiser on your graphics card cleans out the grain while keeping everything that matters sharp: edges, the facets of a vase, reflections in metal, the print on a label. It knows each pixel's surface color, direction and distance, so it only smooths where the scene itself is smooth, and it separates texture from light so patterns and labels are never blurred.
- Clean through glass and mirrors. Behind glass and in mirrors, the denoiser follows what you actually see through them, so a bottle keeps the backdrop it bends and a mirror keeps its reflection crisp.
- A clean preview while you move. When you orbit, pan or zoom, the quick preview is denoised on every frame, so you can judge lighting and composition without waiting.
- Saves what you see. JPEG, PNG, TIFF and EXR saves use the denoised image when the denoiser is on. Turn it off under Settings → Render → Denoise to see and save the raw samples. It is on by default.
- The checks against pbrt-v4 always measure the raw render, so the denoiser never hides an error.
A way home from the studio
The Auddomate mark and name at the top of the sidebar now take you back to the front page, as does the small mark in the toolbar when the sidebar is closed. The sidebar footer gains a Home link too, reading "© Auddomate • Home • Changelog • EN". The language menu shows its short code so the footer stays on one line, and still lists every language in full when you open it.
Headlines and art never collide
On wide screens, where the workflow headline wraps onto two lines, the large shape behind the three steps could slide up under the words. The shape now always begins below the headline, however many lines it takes, and no heading or paragraph sits on the art at any screen size.
- No small shapes on phones. The closing cluster shows three large shapes on a phone instead of shrinking five down to thumbnails.
A tidier hero line
The small line above the front page headline, "Spectral path tracer · in your browser", now always sits on a single line with its glowing dot right beside it, at every screen width. On the narrowest phones it shortens to "Spectral path tracer" instead of wrapping.
A front page for Auddomate
auddomate.com now opens on a page that shows what Auddomate is before you step inside. Oversized forms of light glow across it, each on its own halo of color: they bend behind frosted glass in the glass section, split into color at their edges in the spectral section, and catch a slow sweep of light in the materials section. The proof section is plain on purpose: the checks against pbrt-v4, in numbers.
- The studio has its own address. The renderer now lives at auddomate.com/studio. Everything works as before; the front page, the changelog and the footer all lead straight to it.
- The page follows your light or dark setting, reads well on phones, and keeps its motion gentle, switching it off entirely if your system asks for reduced motion.
Three showcase scenes
Auddomate now opens on scenes made to show what it can do, built entirely in Auddomate. Perfume is a solid glass bottle with a gold cap and a glossy black stone in the studio: the glass turns the backdrop upside down and the gold carries warm reflections of the softboxes. Still life puts a glazed ceramic vase, a copper bowl and an orange on a stone plinth under soft overhead light. Water glass is a crown-glass tumbler of water on a dark glossy floor, lit from behind so its edges glow and the brightest ones split into color.
- Test scenes, tucked away. The test scenes Auddomate is measured with against pbrt-v4 no longer fill the scene list. Turn on Settings → Interface → Show test scenes to see them again; Checks always uses them either way.
- Smoother studio edges. Where you see the Studio sky directly, behind your model or through glass, the edges of its softboxes and strips are now smooth instead of stepped.
Fresnel on everything
Plastic, rubber, ceramic, painted wood and every other non-metal now carries a clear reflective layer, the way real materials do. Look at them head-on and you mostly see their color; turn them towards the edge and the reflection of the room grows stronger. That edge glow is the Fresnel effect, and it is what makes a surface read as solid and real instead of flat and chalky. Metals, glass and clear coats already had it; now it reaches the rest.
- Your roughness comes through. A glossy plastic shows a crisp reflection and a satin one a soft blur, straight from the roughness in your file, and roughness maps now work on non-metals too, so wear, fingerprints and polished patches show up where you painted them.
- From glTF and OBJ. glTF non-metals gain the layer automatically, as the glTF standard describes them, with their index of refraction; a file that marks a material as having no specular reflection stays fully matte. OBJ materials with a specular color (Ks) get it too, using their shininess; materials without one stay matte.
- New test scene Plastics (T11). Checks grow to 29: glossy and satin plastics and a roughness-mapped plastic panel must match pbrt-v4's layered material.
Saving the AO pass, fixed
If a render had already finished, switching to the ambient occlusion pass cleared the image but didn't start rendering again, so saving straight away wrote an empty, fully transparent file that most viewers show as white. Changing the pass, bounces or anything else that restarts the image now starts rendering again by itself. Save and Copy image also refuse to write a render with no samples yet, and tell you to give it a moment instead.
Save your renders
Save now does what it says. Pick a format and your render downloads straight away at full resolution, named after the scene with its sample count and the time, like auddomate-cornell-box-1024spp-20261018-2243.png. JPEG, PNG and 16-bit TIFF look exactly like the render on screen; EXR, in half or full float, keeps the true light values for grading and compositing in Photoshop, Nuke or After Effects.
- Transparent backgrounds that hold up. Turn on Transparent background and PNG, TIFF and EXR save your model on clear alpha. Opal keeps track of which samples hit your model, so soft edges blend cleanly onto any backdrop instead of carrying a fringe of sky color.
- Settings travel with the file. Embed render settings writes the scene, samples, bounces, sky, lens, turn and tilt into the file's own description field, so you can always tell how a render was made.
- Render history. Every save is kept in this browser with a thumbnail and its settings, ready to download again exactly as you saved it. Remove one with a second click to confirm. Your last 40 renders are kept.
- Copy image. Copies the render to your clipboard, ready to paste into Photoshop, Figma, Slack or a message.
- Everything in one view. The Save Dialogue now opens as a two-column panel, formats on the left and options on the right, so nothing scrolls. Options stay open while you tick them. The Ambient occlusion item switches the render to the AO pass, so you can save it in any format once it has cleaned up.
Normal maps and roughness maps
Surfaces now carry the fine detail painted into their texture maps. A normal map bends the light across a surface to show the grain of wood, the weave of fabric, hammered metal or embossed lettering, without adding a single triangle. A roughness map changes how glossy a surface is point by point, so a copper panel can be polished in one place and frosted in another, and fingerprints or wear show up where you painted them.
- Straight from your 3D app. glTF and GLB normal maps are read with their strength setting, and roughness comes from the standard metal-roughness map. OBJ files bring their maps through the
normandmap_Prlines of the .mtl, matched by file name like other textures. Roughness maps work on metals, rough glass and coated metals. - Ambient occlusion pass. Settings → Render has a new Pass switch. Ambient occlusion shows, in black and white, how open each point is to its surroundings: creases, corners and contact points go dark. Set its Occlusion reach to keep the shading tight or let it spread. Your beauty render already includes real occlusion, because Opal traces the light itself; this pass is for compositing in Photoshop or Nuke, and it will save alongside your renders.
- Bumps catch the light the way they should. Where a bump tilts away from the camera, the surface now still picks up light from around it instead of going black, exactly as pbrt-v4 shades it.
- Passes in the Save Dialogue. A new Passes group lists the ambient occlusion pass, ready for when saving switches on.
- Checks in color. The Checks counter now reads at a glance: done in green, queued and failed in red, and "not yet run" in purple before you start.
- A toolbar that never overlaps. In a narrow window, the scene name shortens, Checks shrinks to its icon and the test tag steps aside, so the status pill never sits on top of a button.
- New test scene Surface maps (T10). Checks grow to 28: the normal-mapped floor and the roughness-mapped panel must match pbrt-v4 reading the same images, and on the first run they do, to within 0.02% across the image.
Meet Opal
The spectral path tracer inside Auddomate has a name: Opal 1.0. It's named after the stone whose colors come from light splitting inside it, the same splitting of light into colors that Opal reproduces wavelength by wavelength. Opal is the engine; Auddomate is the studio around it. You'll see it under Progress and in Settings → Render.
The changelog
Every release of Auddomate, newest first, at auddomate.com/changelog, linked from the footer of the sidebar. Each release reads like a short article: its version and date, what kind of change it is and which part of Auddomate it touches, a headline, a paragraph on what it means for your work, then the detail.
- A release index follows you down the left side on wider screens, so you can jump straight to any version, and the header has a light and dark switch. It reads well on phones too.
Shortcuts, laid out properly
Settings → Shortcuts lists every key and gesture in Auddomate: ⌘P for settings, ⌘K for commands, F to reset the view, and drag, Shift-drag and scroll to move around your scene. Each one now sits on the right of its row, level with its name, so the list reads at a glance like the menus in your other apps.
Sections that snap into place
When you drag a sidebar section by its grip to reorder it, the other sections now slide smoothly out of the way, and the one you drop settles into its slot with a gentle spring. It feels like moving real cards around, and you can see exactly where a section will land before you let go. If your system asks for reduced motion, sections move instantly instead.
Menus that show they're open
The small arrows on Save and the language switcher now turn over when their menus open and turn back when they close. It's a small cue, but it tells you at a glance which menu is open and that a second click will close it.
Motion in the Save Dialogue
The Save Dialogue gains a Motion group: a 360° turntable video in MP4 and image sequences in PNG or EXR, for showing a product from every side or taking frames into your editor. They arrive with motion rendering, and the menu shows you what's coming.
The Save Dialogue
Save opens a menu of every way to keep a render: JPEG, PNG and 16-bit TIFF exactly as you see it, or EXR in half or full float for compositing with the full range of light intact. Options let you save with a transparent background, embed your render settings in the file, and keep each render in your history. Saving itself switches on with the next big update.
Save, in the toolbar
A Save button now sits in the toolbar beside Reset and Start, where your hand expects it. Saving arrives with JPEG, PNG, TIFF and EXR; until then, Save tells you it's on its way rather than doing nothing.
Printed labels on glass
Textures with transparency now work the way Cinema 4D and other apps intend. Where a label image is see-through, the surface becomes clear glass; where it's printed, you see the print. A labelled glass bottle now comes through as clear glass with the label on it, instead of an opaque body.
- Cut-outs. Textures marked as cut-outs (glTF "mask") let light straight through their transparent parts, for leaves, grilles and perforated panels.
- Sharper textures. Textures load at up to 2048 × 2048, twice the detail of 2.10.0, so small print and fine lettering stay readable. Smaller images keep their own size.
Textures
Image textures now come in with your model: paintwork, labels, decals and wood grain from Photoshop or any paint app show up on the surfaces they belong to. Each pixel of the image becomes its own color of light, the same way Auddomate treats every other color.
- From GLB, glTF and OBJ. GLB files carry their images inside, so they just work; for glTF, drop the image files with it. For OBJ, drop the .obj, the .mtl and its images together; Auddomate matches them by file name and tells you which ones are missing.
- Textures color paint, metal and clear-coated surfaces. Roughness and bump maps come next.
- New test scene Textures (T09), with a check against pbrt-v4 reading the same image.
Studio sky
A photo studio made by Auddomate: softboxes, light strips and a soft backdrop, in three looks. Studio has a warm key, a cool fill, an overhead box and a rim light; Soft is a big overhead box with wrap-around fills for gentle product shots; Rim is dark with two tall strips behind, for dramatic reveals. Turn it with Rotation to move the lights around your model.
- Imported models open in the studio, which shows off paint, glass and metal far better than daylight. The physical sky is one click away.
- HDRI. The Panorama sky is now called HDRI, as artists call it.
- Arrange the sidebar. Each section has a grip on the right of its title. Drag it to put Progress, Scene, Sky, Quality and Theme in the order you like, or focus the grip and use the arrow keys. Your order is remembered.
- Checks grow to 26: each studio look must shed exactly the light its formula says.
Clearcoat
A clear lacquer layer over paint or metal, the look of car paint, glazed ceramics and varnished wood. Light reflects off the coat and also passes through it, bouncing on the color underneath before it comes back out, which gives paint its depth. The coat can be glossy or satin.
- Coated metals. Candy and lacquered metals: a clear coat over gold, chrome or any metal, rough or polished underneath.
- Paint comes across. glTF clear coat is read from the file, and OBJ materials named paint, lacquer or varnish get a smooth clear coat.
- Fixed in Firefox: clicking around the sidebar could scroll the whole page up and hide the toolbar. The page now stays put.
- New test scene Clearcoat (T08). Checks grow to 25: clearcoat matches pbrt-v4's layered materials.
Real glass
Glass now bends light. A solid glass object refracts what's behind it, turning it upside down the way a glass ball does, with reflections where Fresnel says and total internal reflection at steep angles.
- Frosted glass. Rough glass blurs what's behind it, from lightly misted to fully frosted.
- Thin glass for windows. Single sheets like car windows and shop panes let light straight through with the right reflections, instead of acting as solid lumps of glass.
- Dispersion. BK7 crown glass bends each color by its own amount, so bright edges split into color like a prism. Auddomate renders by wavelength, so this falls out naturally.
- Glass in your models. Imported glass, from glTF transmission or OBJ transparency, becomes thin glass with the file's refractive index; glTF glass marked as a volume becomes solid glass.
- Two new test scenes, Glass (T05) and Dispersion (T05b). Checks grow to 24: both scenes match pbrt-v4, and the GPU matches the CPU reference through glass.
- The axes in the corner now sit the same distance from the right and bottom edges.
- Importing a model now always starts rendering, even if you had paused before.
Axes
A small X, Y and Z sits in the bottom-right corner of the render, in red, green and blue like Blender and Cinema 4D. It turns as you orbit, turn and tilt, so you always know which way is up and front.
- Click to look along an axis. Click X, Y or Z to look straight along it; Y gives a top view. Click the same axis again, or its hollow end, to look from the other side.
- Turn it off under Settings → Interface → Axes.
Turntable
A slim bar under the render spins your model and its floor under the lights with Turn, from −180° to 180°. The camera, sun and sky stay exactly where they are, so you can find the angle where the light rakes across the paint best.
- Tilt. Roll the whole frame up to 45° either way for a dramatic angled shot.
- Both sit on top of your camera, so orbiting, views and your file's camera keep working as before. F straightens everything, and the small target button on the bar resets just the turn and tilt. On phones they live in Settings → Camera.
- Checks grow to 21: the turntable must match a scene whose spheres and floor were really rotated.
Color sky
A fourth sky choice next to Scene, Panorama and Physical: one even color all round, like a studio dome. Pick white, greys, black, warm or cool, and set its brightness with Intensity.
- Show sky in render. Turn it off for a plain background behind your model. The sky keeps lighting the scene and still shows in reflections; only the backdrop changes, to the color you pick.
- Floor switch. Imported models get a Floor switch under Scene. If your model already has a floor or backdrop of its own, Auddomate notices and leaves its grey floor off, so the two never fight.
- Checks grow to 20: a Color sky must be an exact furnace, and hiding the sky must leave every object pixel identical to the last bit.
Settings docks beside the sidebar
A slim column of icons now sits to the right of the sidebar, under the toolbar: Render, Camera, Sky, Scene, Interface and Shortcuts. Click one and its settings open right there, next to the render, which makes room. Click the lit icon or the arrow to fold it back to just the icons. ⌘P opens and folds it too.
- Minimise to the footer. The minimise button tucks settings into a small pill on the footer line, centred under the render. Click the pill to bring them back.
- The sidebar is back to how it was, with the knot mark and the Auddomate name together at the top. The extra icon column at the far left and its gear are gone.
- On phones, the gear in the toolbar still opens settings as a full sheet.
Your cameras come with your model
Import a glTF or GLB with cameras in it and the scene opens on the first one, with the same position, aim and lens you set in your 3D app. Every camera in the file is listed by name under Settings → Camera, and in ⌘K. Reset view takes you back to your camera. OBJ files can't hold cameras, so those are still framed automatically.
- Settings floats. The settings window no longer covers the render: drag it by its title, and widen or narrow it from either side, down to half its width. Hide tucks it into a small pill on the footer line; click the pill or press ⌘P to bring it back. It remembers where you left it.
- Icon rail. A slim column of icons beside the sidebar opens each settings section in one click, with its name on hover. Click the lit icon again to close. The knot mark now sits at its top, and the gear at its foot.
- Checks follow along. While checks run, the Checks window scrolls to each one as it finishes, and to the end when they're all done.
- The GLB check now renders from the camera saved inside the file, which must land exactly where pbrt-v4's camera is.
Settings panel
Press ⌘P (Ctrl+P on Windows), or the gear in the toolbar, for one place that holds every setting: Render, Camera, Sky, Scene, Interface and Shortcuts. Pick a section on the left and adjust it on the right. It reopens where you left it.
- Field of view. The Camera section has a lens control from 10° to 100°, with the matching full-frame lens in millimetres beside it. Reset view brings the scene's own lens back too.
- Camera buttons. Front, three-quarter, side, back and top views, plus orbit and zoom steps, are one click away in the Camera section.
- The quick tools from 2.7.1 now live in the ⌘K command menu, next to everything else.
- On phones, the settings sections switch with a menu at the top, and the toolbar drops the commands button to give the scene name room.
Progress follows you
Close the sidebar and the progress dots move into the toolbar, right beside the Rendering, Finished or Paused label. Open it again and they go back to the Progress section.
- On phones the dots sit beside the status at the bottom of the screen, next to the render speed.
Tools on ⌘P
(Ctrl+P on Windows). One keystroke opens the core tools: camera views (front, three-quarter, sides, back, top, reset), orbit steps (turn 45°, tilt 15°, zoom in and out), settings (bounces, stop at, sky, theme) and render controls. Type to filter, Enter to run.
- Camera views keep your current zoom and the point you're looking at.
- ⌘K still opens the full command menu, which now lists Open tools.
Move around your scene
Drag the render to turn around it, Shift-drag or right-drag to slide the view, and scroll or pinch to zoom. On phones and tablets, drag with one finger and pinch with two.
- Smooth while you move. The render drops to a quick preview while the camera moves, then sharpens back to full quality the moment you let go.
- Reset view. A button appears in the toolbar once you've moved the camera. It and the F key take you back to the scene's own view.
- Imported models now show their proper icon in the scene list.
- Checks grow to 18: the camera goes all the way round, tilts, slides and zooms, must come back exactly where it started, and the render from there must still match pbrt-v4.
Bring your own models
Drop a .glb, .gltf or .obj file (with its .mtl or .bin) onto the render, or press Import model under Scene. Auddomate frames it, sets it on a grey floor and lights it with the physical sky. Imported models join the scene list for the rest of the session.
- Materials come across. Colors, metals, roughness, glass and glowing lights are read from the file and turned into Auddomate materials. Textures aren't read yet.
- Big models stay quick. A model of 1.5 million triangles imports in about 3 seconds, and smooth surfaces render smooth when the file includes normals.
- Progress first. The Progress section now sits at the top of the sidebar.
- Sidebar footer. Copyright and a language menu (English, 中文, 日本語, Español, Deutsch) sit at the bottom of the sidebar. Translations are on the way; for now the interface stays in English.
- If the app loses its connection while reading a file, it now says so instead of blaming the file.
- Checks grow to 17: the Cornell box is saved as GLB and as OBJ, imported back, and must still match pbrt-v4.
Physical sky
A third sky choice next to Scene and Panorama: a real daylight sky and sun from the Hošek–Wilkie model, the same one pbrt-v4 uses. Set Sun height, Sun direction, Haze and Ground and the light follows: long warm shadows near the horizon, crisp blue noon. The sun's brightness stays exact at every quality setting.
- Quality section. "Stop at" and "Max bounces" now live together under Quality, and when folded it shows a summary such as "1,024 spp · 8 bounces". Progress shows only the meter, time and speed.
- Easier-to-read light mode. Text uses deeper slate greys, so small labels and descriptions are crisper on light backgrounds. Dark mode is unchanged.
- Checks grow to 15: the physical sky is compared texel by texel against pbrt-v4.
The Auddomate brand arrives
The knot mark and the Auddomate wordmark sit at the top of the sidebar (just the mark on phones), with a matching browser icon.
- New type. The interface is set in Hubballi, the brand typeface, and every number uses SF Mono on Apple devices so readouts stay steady as they change.
A trend line that lines up
The small line under Samples per second, which shows how fast Opal has been rendering over the last few seconds, now ends at the right edge of the sidebar in line with every number above it, instead of stopping short. The Progress section reads as one tidy column.
Check counter
The Checks window shows a live count beside its close button, such as "4 of 14 done • 8 queued • 2 failed", with failures in red. Before a run it reads "14 checks • not run yet". On phones it moves under the description.
Progress dots fixed
The dots were drawing solid black instead of the accent color, and the folded meter ran a few pixels past the sidebar's edge. They now show their real colors (green when finished) and end exactly where the dividers do.
Feels like software, not a web page
Clicking a control no longer leaves a highlight outline on it, anywhere in the app. Keyboard users still see a clear focus ring when they move with Tab or the arrow keys.
- Progress stays visible when folded. With the Progress section collapsed, its dot meter sits right beside the title (or the sample count, with no stop limit).
Panorama skies
Drop an .hdr or .exr panorama onto the sidebar or the render, or choose one, and it lights the whole scene. Turn it with Rotation and brighten or dim it with Intensity. A built-in Dusk panorama is there to try.
- Know when a render is done. Pick a Stop at target and watch the progress dots, elapsed time and time left. The render stops by itself, says Finished, and offers Render again.
- Tidier sidebar. Every section folds away with the small triangle next to its name. Your choice is remembered.
- New test scene: Dusk panorama (T07). Checks now include a pbrt-v4 comparison under a rotated, brightened panorama, and a check that panoramas import correctly.
Much cleaner renders
Every bounce now aims a sample straight at the lights and the sky, and blends it with the usual bounce using multiple importance sampling. On the Cornell box, noise is about 10× lower at the same sample count, and a clean image arrives roughly 30× sooner.
- Image skies. Scenes can be lit by an image sky. The renderer finds its brightest parts, like a small sun, directly, so sun shadows come out sharp and clean.
- Better sample patterns. Samples now follow a scrambled Sobol sequence instead of plain random numbers, spreading them more evenly.
- New test scene: Sky and sun (T06).
- Checks grow to 13. Comparisons against pbrt-v4 now run at 4,096 samples instead of 65,536, so a full run is much faster.
- The sidebar's geometry readout now uses plain words ("32 triangles", "4 triangles, 6 spheres").
Metals
A new conductor material with GGX microfacet roughness, from mirror to fully rough, and exact Fresnel per wavelength, so gold and copper shift color towards the edges as real metals do.
- Two new test scenes: Roughness ramp (T03) and Metal ramp (T04).
- Checks grow from 7 to 10: both new scenes are compared against pbrt-v4, and the GPU is compared against the CPU reference on metal.
- "Copy results" now says "under 0.1 s" for very fast checks.
Spectral rendering
Light in Auddomate is now light, not three numbers. Every path carries four wavelengths, and every color you pick is turned into a smooth spectrum, so colors mix, reflect and bleed the way they do in the real world. The Cornell box now matches pbrt-v4 on every channel.
- The sidebar shows "Color: Spectral · 4 λ".
The renderer, first light
The first release of the renderer under the Auddomate name: a path tracer that runs on your graphics card through WebGPU, right in the browser, with nothing to install. It follows light as it bounces around a scene, the way film renderers do. A second, slower renderer on the processor double-checks it, and the Checks window measures both against pbrt-v4, the reference renderer, so you can see the results for yourself with Copy results.