NEWS.md
In rayrender: Build and Raytrace 3D Scenes

rayrender 0.42.0

Move EXR white-balance baking controls from the render functions to sky_light_image(). Cache each adapted sky for use in stills and animations, reusing the generated sky when only the target white point changes.
Fix Windows near/far macro collisions in geometry and volume code. Remove unused preview state and signedness warnings in BVH construction and spline interpolation, and make haze-cut sorting bounds explicit. Correct RGB-to-HSV conversion to include blue when finding the maximum channel and initialize hue on every path.
Automatically select the NEE integrator for scenes containing native atmospheric skies or attached media, including clouds and instanced media, instead of requiring an explicit integrator_type = "nee" selection. Recognize emitting media when deciding whether to add automatic ambient illumination.
Fix Windows macro collisions in atmospheric lighting and preview test builds using X11. Emit the transform error-bound overloads needed by volume boundaries explicitly so optimized GCC builds load reliably.
Select finite lights with a spatial light BVH in the NEE integrator, using distance, estimated power and emission direction. Retain the previous scattering context for matching MIS probabilities and mix in the original distribution to preserve support for textured and animated emitters.
Accelerate eligible opaque NEE shadow connections with early-exit BVH traversal and reduced triangle intersection work. Select explicit emitters with matching MIS weights, avoiding full light-mixture PDF scans and supporting multiple and instanced lights. Preserve ordered visibility for media and alpha masks, and retain the directional-mixture estimator for atmospheric transport.
Store BVH4 leaf primitive ranges in compact records, reducing BVH memory use.
Reduce BVH traversal bookkeeping while preserving intersection order, and defer unused medium transforms in surface hit records.
Split the interactive preview status bar into camera information and rendering flags on separate rows.
Reuse rendering workers across samples and wake on task completion, removing fixed polling delays from beauty and denoising feature passes while retaining preview cancellation and R interrupt handling.
Reduce the default Moon disk resolution to 256 pixels in moon_light() and automatic sky lights, retaining the Moon renderer's 2x antialiasing.
Skip grid emission lookups for media with zero RGB emission and no temperature field, or with emission disabled by a zero scale.
Keep interpolated camera-up vectors at keyframes to avoid brief roll wobbles when damping camera motion. Keyed positions and lookat targets are retained.
Allow sky_light() below a Sun elevation of -4.2 degrees. Prague contributes black sky and no solar haze, while enabled Moon, stars, and planets retain their light, atmospheric transmission, and Earth occlusion.
Add continuous local evolution to cloud() with t and an independent animation_seed. Broad and fine noise evolve smoothly while position remains controlled by x/y/z. Time zero preserves existing clouds exactly.
Expose sky model settings directly in sky_light() and sky_light_image(). Both accept altitude, visibility, and other named settings instead of a sky_args list. Image resolution and Hosek settings belong to sky_light_image(); native atmospheric sampling uses sampling_resolution.
Add cloud(), a procedural cumulus/stratus volume centered at the origin, with standard position, rotation, and scale controls. The density field and its boundary transform together. Sky examples now use the exported constructor.
Correct the Z rotation matrix used by R-side group and animation transforms to match the positive-angle convention of direct objects and instances.
Enable altitude-dependent lighting, finite haze, and deferred haze sampling by default in sky_light(). Expose haze and query_altitude controls, and reduce horizon bands with haze_filter, sampling one nearby atmospheric path per haze query. Reuse exact spectral queries and precompute transmission reconstruction with cache_spectra, transmission_table, and transmission_table_max_mb.
Exclude haze from volume interiors by default with haze_in_volumes = FALSE. Individual media also support haze and haze_density_threshold; clouds default to haze off, with a density cutoff of 0.05 when enabled.
Add capsule terrain, trees, and cloud examples comparing altitude-dependent lighting and haze, with additional atmospheric controls described in the help.
Fix Moon disk and legacy sky preparation in skymodelr so the upper limb remains visible after the center sets. Normalize the complete disk before horizon clipping, with continuous horizon attenuation and color.
Add sun_light() and moon_light() scene elements using skymodelr positions, apparent sizes, Prague solar radiance, and detailed phase-dependent lunar textures. Dedicated disk sampling preserves detail independently of sky-map resolution, with consistent solid-angle PDFs and light-selection weights. Both lights use the public skymodelr disk generators for radiance and geometry.
Add image-based infinite_light() scene elements, named light management, and additive sampling of multiple environments. Existing environment render arguments remain supported.
Add sky_light() for native Prague location/time skies, with automatically sampled Sun and Moon disks. Add sky_light_image() for cached skymodelr EXRs shared across still renders, animation, and preview.
Make animation environment rotation use the same direction as still renders, and isolate its preview environment transform from geometry transforms.
Preserve preview RGB colors when exporting snapshots through rayimage.
nee now traces surfaces and RGB participating media with null scattering and path-space MIS. Its images change; rtiow remains the default and legacy fog remains available in rtiow and basic.
Add reusable homogeneous, dense-grid and uncompressed float NanoVDB medium descriptions, independent medium attachments, nested containment, anisotropic scattering, and RGB or normalized blackbody emission.
Add volume transmittance alpha, alpha-aware adaptive sampling, color-only denoising for participating media, and consistent RGBA animation and snapshots.
Correct NEE light PDFs, sampler dimension reuse, segment-based dielectric absorption, deterministic volume boundary intersections, and realistic-camera shutter-time preservation.