Rayscaper 0.9.36 Beta is available in the SketchUcation store. More fixes and improvements. As always, I recommend upgrading to the latest version.
What Changed?
Improvements
Auto Focus
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).
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).
Make the depth-of-field blurriness slider logarithmic. This gives more control for low blur values.
Bug Fixes
Fix the normal map strength control.
Fix a crash when exporting the scene to an archive.
Spotlights with a falloff of zero would not render on the CPU. This release fixes that.
Help me build the community
I’m on Twitter (X) now: x.com - Please follow the @Rayscaper3d that will help me grow the community and spread the word about Rayscaper!
If you like Rayscaper, please share your renders (final or work-in-progress, it doesn’t matter)! This is super motivating and will help me showcase its capabilities to new users.
hey im confused and cant find any info on ur site…u asked for mac beta testers in one thread but in another thread said not mac compatible…whats the current status? were u just sending it to testers? thanks!
He asked for mac beta testers, but when we first tried it, there weresome files issues, and he decided to focus on the PC version for now instead of handling two dev cycles side by side.
let the PC users beta test all that so mac users get a finished product
What @ateliernab said I’m spending a lot of time on Rayscaper, but it’s still a side project alongside my regular 9-to-5 job, so I do have to be wise with my time.
Although many users are asking about the Mac version, and I had a couple of users accidentally buy the software, assuming it would work on Mac, I think I should get going on this, especially now that the software is maturing on PC.
Apologies, folks, for the radio silence on the Mac version. I could have communicated that better here…
A Mac version is still on the roadmap, and based on this and other channels, it seems that many people are interested in it now. The Mac platform is a bit more challenging, and to be frank, I have been procrastinating a bit by spending more time on the PC version. But maybe I should manage expectations and just put out an initial version and then iterate on it. Perfect is the enemy of good? I don’t want to disappoint
Just to confirm, it’s not Vaporware. We have Rayscaper running on the Mac, but there are still many silly bugs to fix. (NOTE: When I say We, it’s the “royal we”, it’s just me).
Rayscaper 0.9.43 Beta is available in the SketchUcation store. More fixes and improvements. As always, I recommend upgrading to the latest version.
What Changed?
Improvements
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”).
Bug Fixes
Fix a crash when double-clicking the save button in the GUI.
Fixed the saving of the DPI scale application setting.
To avoid confusion, switching between CPU and GPU rendering doesn’t happen anymore in the render tab but via the settings dialog (Menu > File > Settings).
If you like Rayscaper, please share your renders (final or work-in-progress, it doesn’t matter)! This is motivating and will help me showcase its capabilities to new users.
If you like Rayscaper, please share your renders (final or work-in-progress, it doesn’t matter)! This is motivating and will help me showcase its capabilities to new users.
Hi, I’ve just downloaded your ‘try for free’ version of Rayscaper, the software is opened in my Sketchup Pro 2025 now, but when I run the render in any of my scenes, the render window opens and then nothing happens. It crushed my sketchup twice too.
OK, it’s started working now, thank you and apologies for the panic. I will watch your youtube videos to get a better idea how it works, but what I have noticed, which is strange, my ceiling in all of my scenes is not in the render - brown off for some reason even with the ceiling tag on.
OK, it’s started working now, thank you and apologies for the panic
No worries, it sucks when software isn’t working as expected.
but what I have noticed, which is strange, my ceiling in all of my scenes is not in the render - brown off for some reason even with the ceiling tag on.
Nice scene! Could it be that the faces are hidden or that the tag is hidden? Maybe the material is 100% transparent?
If none are the cause, please send me the skp file. It could be a bug in Rayscaper.
Hello Thomas and thanks for the prompt reply. I deleted the ceiling and the tag and re-did it (took 1 minute) - solving the problem. Having a go at rendering now, but to be honest; I am not a rendering expert so apologise for asking silly questions. Can’t work out the camera setting to make sure the whole scene is captured in the render. I haven’t done any work on materials or artificial lights just yet, only using the external environment. I used to use the Twilight Render in the past, which suited me as it was super easy; Rayscaper has far more options it seems.
I’ve tried messing around with the resolution options, not sure where I am going wrong, but the right hand side of the scene is not in the render as you can see.
I’m spending a lot of time on Rayscaper, but it’s still a side project alongside my regular 9-to-5 job, so I do have to be wise with my time.
