v25.08 Beta

This release includes major support for macOS using Metal ray tracing, dependency upgrades, and various bug fixes. See Doc/Build.md for detailed prerequisites and build instructions.

Metal Ray Tracing

The Metal backend has rough parity with the DirectX and Vulkan backends, including:

• Standard BSDF & Reference BSDF.
• Image-based lighting.
• Background environment map.
• Interactive sample app (Plasma).

Bug Fixes

• Fix crash when loading Autodesk Telescope using usdview
• Fix crash when loading large size image with HgiRenderer.
• Fix Image Resolver Plugin.

Dependency Upgrades

• OpenUSD 25.08
• MaterialX v1.39.3
• OpenImageIO v3.0.7.0
• Slang v2025.12.1
• Boost 1.88.0
• OneTBB v2022.0.0
• etc.

Known issues

• The Vulkan backend is not working due to recent changes; it will be fixed in the next non-beta release. In the meantime, use release v23.07.

v24.08

This release includes some bug fixes and several dependency upgrades, including OpenUSD 24.08 and MaterialX 1.38.10.

• Bug fixes.
• Dependency upgrades:
  • USD: v24.08;
  • MaterialX: v1.38.10;
  • boost: 1.85.0;
  • TBB: v2020.3;
  • libjpeg: 2.0.1;
  • libpng: v1.6.38;
  • GLM: 1.0.1;
  • TinyGLTF: v2.9.2;
  • TinyEXR: v1.0.8;
  • OpenEXR: v3.1.11;
  • OpenImageIO: v2.5.11;
  • OpenSubdiv: v3_6_0.

v24.08 macOS Beta

This pre-release version adds support for MacOS using Metal ray tracing, with a limited subset of Aurora features. A future main release will expand features available on MacOS. See Doc/Build.md for prerequisites and build instructions.

Other platforms are not supported in this pre-release. Please use the v24.08 release for Windows and Linux.

v24.03

March 2024 release includes, new non-recursive rendering architecture. Expected speed up of around 2x versus recursive rendering.

Also includes upgrade to support MaterialX 1.38.8 and USD 23.08.01

v23.07

A variety of new features and improvements including:

• Support for multiple distant lights (see TestMultipleLights unit test)
• Changes in the MaterialX code generator to support "data driven materials". Rather than assume a fixed set of material parameters, Aurora will generate a set of material properties based on the contents of MaterialX file that can be modified directly without changing the MaterialX document. (see TestMaterialX unit test)
• Added a custom USD ARResolver for doing some asset processing operations. The ImageProcessingResolver will accept URIs with the imageProcessing and pre-process the resulting data before passing to the Hydra render delegate.
• Implemented material emission (see TestMaterialEmission unit test)
• Transfer buffers via temporary upload buffer on upload heap for faster performance.

Aurora release v23.03

Aurora release v23.03

Various build script improvements including:

• Builds the usd_view Python application which can be run directly from the build folder with the Aurora render delegate
• Added version detection to installExternals.py
• Refactoring externals folder layout
• Support multi-configuration builds with CMake
• Linux build fixes
• Security updates in externals versions

NOTE: Requires rebuilding the installed externals with the installExternals.py script as described in README.md