If you know the viewer, you know it is an experimental viewer. The author of it tries all sorts of things. Like Benjamin Franklin and others NiranV has lots of what I label failures. But, the gems that do work out make it worth it.

Dragon Warrior

A current feature Black Dragon has is Volumetric Lighting, previously labeled GodRays. This is a rendering process that reveals light interacting with air… the atmosphere. The feature makes for dramatic images. I think this is going to be an awesome features for those using Oculus Rift type displays.

Also a release or two ago Niran added controls for video memory. If you’re as tired of texture thrashing (render crisp, go blurry, re-render, ad nauseam…) as I am, this memory feature is a welcome addition. As it is now I restart my viewer every hour or so to stop the thrashing. Turning off group chat will significantly delay the start of thrashing.

Niran says, “System Memory: This is a tricky one. Previously we only had a Texture Memory slider, this System Memory slider [makes it so you are] able to split the actual Global Viewer Texture Memory and the Current Scene Memory and change them individually, this is good because: it allows you to set as much permanent texture memory as you might need without increasing all other internal memory values to crazy highs, theoretically you should now be able to set 1gb of System Memory and something like 400mb scene memory, that should drastically increase the amount of textures that can be loaded without causing “texture trashing” some of you might have already seen.” (Reference – see for more info on this feature)

This new release has fixes to Volumetric Lighting. Glow and SSAO have been changed. Niran is recommending you go into your preferences and set Ambient Occlusion / SSAO and Glow sliders to their default values and see how things work.

There is new slider for Volumetric Lighting, it adjusts the length of GodRays.

This release has a long list of fixes and changes. See: Black Dragon Viewer – Update 2.4.2 (BETA)