Changelog

The key new feature in this release is support for Pulsar as an alternative backend for point cloud rendering. Pulsar is a highly tuned backend with better scaling performance than the default backend but with less flexibility: it does not have support for custom rasterizers and compositors. It can be used for scenes with millions of spheres and up to 4K resolution and supports opacity optimization.

• CUDA/C++ implementation | commit
• PyTorch interface | commit
• Examples and Demos | commit

Additional new features

• Plotly functions for visualization | commit
  • Support for rendering batches of meshes/cameras/pointclouds
  • Support for viewing plotly plots from PyTorch3D Cameras point-of-view
  • plot_scene function
• Extend sample_points_from_meshes to support sampling textures | commit
• corresponding_cameras_alignment function that estimates a similarity transformation between two sets of cameras | commit
• Support for variable size point radius in the pointcloud rasterizer | commit
• save_ply now by default saves to binary instead of ascii. An option makes the previous functionality available | commit
• Functions to convert to and from axis-angle representation of rotations | commit
• Visualization functions for the TexturesUV class | commit

New tutorials

• Rendering DensePose Data with PyTorch3D | commit1, commit2
• Updates to Pointcloud and Mesh rendering tutorials | commit

Small updates

• Fixes to support multigpu rendering | commit
• Support texture atlas loading for .obj files with meshes which only have material properties | commit
• Add support for changing the background color in Pointcloud compositors | commit
• Add support for returning the fragments from the output of the MeshRenderer | commit
• Support for axis angle representation of rotations | commit

Bug Fixes

• Fixed corner case in look_at_view_transform | commit
• Fixed softmax_rgb_blend with mesh is outside zfar | commit
• Fixed corner case in matrix_to_quaternion function | commit

Misc

The introduction of Pulsar adds the NVIDIA CUB library as a build-time dependency.