If you're anything like us, you're always on the lookout for tools that not only make your work easier but also help you create jaw-dropping visuals without breaking a sweat. Well, good news—D5 Render 2.9 is here, and it's packed with 19 new features and 320+ new assets that are going to make your life a whole lot easier. Let's take a look at what's new and why you'll love it.

What's new on 2.9

Terrain

D5 Render 2.9 features an advanced Terrain tool, enabling seamless landscape sculpting directly within the software. You can easily design everything from smooth plains to rugged hills.

With an intuitive brush tool, you can easily shape terrain, apply textures, and enhance details. Select from preset heightmaps or import custom maps, and combine these with D5 Scatter to create realistic and diverse natural environments. The new terrain sculpting modes, including Upward, Downward, Smooth, and Flatten, offer precise control over landscape shaping, while texture painting lets you blend materials for organic effects across different terrain types like slopes and peaks.

Phasing Animation: Present Like Never Before

The new Phasing Animation feature simplifies the creation of step-by-step visualizations, perfect for architectural presentations, product demonstrations, and landscape growth sequences. With pre-designed templates such as Drop/Rise and Ascend/Descend, you can quickly illustrate construction stages or installation processes without complex keyframes. The feature allows easy multi-selection and object grouping, letting you build dynamic animations with precision and creativity. Customize movement, timing, and visual effects to bring your projects to life, ensuring clients and stakeholders clearly understand the process.

Post-AI: Enhanced Realism & Artistic Style

Upgraded from AI Enhancer, the new Post-Ai tab combines advanced image processing with AI Style Transfer. Enhance lighting, materials, and character details up to 6K resolution, and now, transform your render into unique styles like watercolor, sketch, or photorealistic seasonal effects. Fine-tune clarity with sharpening and denoising, or control blending with transparency adjustments. Post-AI allows you to add artistic flair or realistic touch-ups to your rendered images, all in a seamless post-processing workflow.

Random Placement: More Natural & Efficient Scene Building

Create natural, random patterns in your scene setup with the new Random Placement feature. Adjust size, rotation, and location parameters to add a dynamic touch to your environments, especially for assets like plants and natural elements. With simple shortcuts, you can instantly achieve variations, ensuring that repeated assets don't look uniform. This tool is perfect for scenes requiring organic, non-repetitive layouts and can be customized in Preferences to fit your workflow.

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FPS Booster for Complex Geometry: Smooth Real-Time Rendering

Tackle complex scenes effortlessly with the new FPS Booster for Complex Geometry. When enabled, it optimizes performance for intricate meshes and densely populated scenes, providing smoother real-time interactions and rendering. This ensures that even with heavy models, you can maintain fluid navigation and efficient edits. Please note that this feature currently does not support AMD graphics cards, focusing on NVIDIA compatibility for optimal results.

Asset Info Page: Enhanced Asset Management

With the new Asset Info Page, managing assets in your library has never been easier. View thumbnails, properties, and file sizes at a glance, and streamline your selection process. Toggle visibility of the details page with a shortcut, ensuring you always have access to essential information without disrupting your workflow. This update enhances asset management, making it more intuitive and accessible.

Added Voxel Style to 'Text to 3D': Playful & Creative 3D Modeling

D5 Render 2.9 introduces a playful new addition to 'Text to 3D'—the voxel style. Generate blocky, pixelated models with ease by combining text prompts and voxel styling, perfect for stylized renders or conceptual designs. This feature opens new possibilities for unique, creative projects, adding a touch of nostalgia or simplicity to your 3D creations.

Optimizations

Enhanced Controls & Interface: Smoother Workflow Experience

D5 Render 2.9 brings several updates to improve user control and interface interactions. The Orbit View Control has been refined to prevent objects from shifting unexpectedly when clicking on the background, ensuring a stable viewpoint. Continuous camera rotation is now possible, even when the cursor reaches the screen edge, eliminating disruptions. Object List management has also been enhanced, with new shortcuts for quick navigation, object arrangement, and selection. The double-click rename feature is disabled when selecting multiple items, preventing accidental changes and making object management smoother.

Optimized Asset & Scatter Management: Efficient Scene Building

Version 2.9 introduces improvements to Asset Update Reminders and Scatter tools, enhancing workflow efficiency. Users can now manage asset updates without being interrupted, with options like Close, Hide, and Update All providing more control. Scatter tool updates include better-organized parameters, a new bar chart for adjusting vegetation probabilities, and bulk adjustments across multiple plants, simplifying the setup of complex scenes. Additionally, scatter update reminders can be disabled, making the process even more streamlined.

Customizable UI & Improved Performance: Tailored & Faster Experience

D5 Render 2.9 offers a scalable UI for Video Mode, allowing users to adjust the bottom sidebar and asset library layout for a more personalized workspace. Light management is enhanced with a new shortcut (Alt + L) to hide or show light range indicators, decluttering the scene for more precise adjustments. Performance has also been optimized with hardware-accelerated ray tracing, reducing memory usage and loading times, especially in complex scenes, ensuring a smoother and faster rendering experience.

Workflow updates

The latest D5 Render updates bring smoother, more efficient integration with Rhino, 3ds Max, and Blender. The Rhino Live Sync plugin now allows exports by selection or layer grouping, includes a single-send feature, and offers refined material mapping, with improved installation for easier setup. In 3ds Max, a new 2-layer group structure and optimized export settings enhance workflow fluidity. Meanwhile, the Blender Sync plugin supports Blender 4.2, adding features like camera animations, external file linking, and compatibility with curves, surfaces, and text objects, including geometry nodes and instancing. These updates streamline the design process, enabling users to create high-quality visualizations seamlessly across platforms.

New Assets

New Character Models: Elderly & Children

D5 Render now includes a diverse set of Elderly and Children character models, adding depth and variety to your scenes. These new assets help bring a more realistic and inclusive touch to visualizations, allowing for more accurate representations of public spaces, residential projects, and family-oriented designs.

Expanded Indoor & Outdoor Material Library

With over 160 new materials added, D5 Render enriches both indoor and outdoor design options. The expanded library features a range of indoor materials, such as tiles, flooring, and fabrics, along with outdoor elements like wall tiles, cobblestones, and natural surfaces. These additions provide more flexibility and creative possibilities, enabling users to easily achieve the desired look and texture for any project.

Ready to Dive In?

D5 Render 2.9 isn't just an update—it's a leap forward in creativity. Whether you're crafting detailed landscapes, bringing animations to life, or fine-tuning your final renders, this version equips you with the tools to work more efficiently and creatively.

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