It’s been awhile so I figured it was about time to give Element V2 a spin around the block. With the release of Video Copilot’s Element 3D Version 2 comes a wealth of new features. Andrew Kramer has stepped up the game for this game engine-inspired GPU plugin with raytracing, mirror and spherical reflections, shadows, new enhanced multisampling, and an animation engine that gives the user the hooks he or she needs to push the boundaries of this ever immersive plugin.
Here is one of my first tests trying out the depth of field and how it impacts the render times (image below left). I was pleasantly surprised that if sampling is set to 0,0 while one designs and animates then leaving depth of field on doesn’t cause much of a performance hit. At final render time I upped the samples to 8,8, and used enhanced multisampling. For organic scenes there's not much of a drastic change in quality, however I was working with a car model and in order for the curves to be smooth I had to up the quality to at least 8,8. The second image below utilizes one of the new BackLight environment maps.
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