This is a maintenance update of OctaneRender 2.1x. The original plan was to get this version out of the door two weeks ago. But then the render passes work got quite a bit more than anticipated and new features were added which then required some more additional work and more bugs were found which needed to be fixed... The good news is that the change log is quite loooong
NOTE: People have reported that Octane crashes when they try to use Lua scripts. We couldn't reproduce it which is why it isn't fixed in 2.11.1 yet, but with Shakalakapaka's help we were finally able to figure out what's going on: The crashes occur on installations where the script directory is not set. To workaround the problem please go to File -> Preferences... -> Application and select an existing script directory. Then close Octane and open it again. Now the animation scripts should work again.
Changes since version 2.10:
- Restructured beauty render passes: The main beauty pass is split into render passes which - when all added together - result in the main beauty pass. We distinguish now by the type of BRDF: diffuse/reflection/refraction where the difference between "diffuse" and "reflection" is that "diffuse" is a pure Lambertian reflection while "reflection" is all the rest (i.e. specular and glossy reflections).
- Added new pin "distributed ray tracing" to the render passes node. This has the same functionality as in the info channel kernel node, i.e. if enabled, motion blur and DOF are sampled in the info passes.
- Added new compression modes to the OpenEXR export.
- Saving HDR images is now done asynchronously i.e. doesn't block the UI anymore.
- Fixed hot-pixel filtering in beauty passes.
- Fixed the object ID render pass
- Fixed broken AO info channel kernel / render pass (AO was affecting both sides of a surface)
- Fixed incorrect tone mapping in the info passes.
- Fixed broken saving of EXR files, when the image width isn't a multiple of 4 pixels.
- Fixed opacity in the info channel kernels (also used by the info passes).
- Added highlight compression option to camera imager node. Using this option, you can reduce burned out highlights by compressing them (which decreases their contrast). This works similar to the Reinhard tone mapping.
- Added pins "hue", "saturation" and "contrast" to the color correction node to control hue, saturation and contrast of the input texture. Since Octane textures are sampled spectrally, hue and saturation don't work perfectly, but as long as you use them not too aggressively they should do the trick. We might have an idea how to improve that, but that will require some more work.
- We had to remove the pins "brightness scale" and "black level" since we ran out of fields in our color correction shader node. The version conversion takes care of the "brightness scale" by multiplying it into the texture connected with "brightness", but "black level" is hard to convert automatically, so we don't do it. We had a look at the materials in the LiveDB and only 13 materials are affected by the loss of "black level" and in all cases its effect can be approximated by modifying "gamma".
- Added new noise texture node which currently has 4 noise types: "Perlin", "Turbulence", "Circular" and "Chips". "Perlin" is like the turbulence node with "use turbulence" disabled. "Turbulence" is like the turbulence node with "use turbulence" enabled. "Circular" is a Worley noise and "Chips" is a Voronoi noise.
- Plugins have their own settings now which means that if you are using Standalone and a plugin you can now have different network render settings in both.
- Fixed slow loading of large images.
- Fixed hanging render kernels for some displacement cases (causing some of the dreaded CUDA errors).
- Fixed bug in network render settings dialog where daemons on the master's computer were not filtered out, but displayed as "unknown".
- Net render slaves stop if no GPU gets enabled (for example due to an invalid GPU configuration specified via the command line).
- Added more logging to net render master and slave and added additional log flag "logFlushTime" that triggers file flushes by a timer.
- Fixed a bug causing net render slaves to not clear their film buffers after a render data update.
- Fixed a bug causing net render slaves to "lose samples".
- Fixed a bug causing net render slaves with multiple GPUs to not start rendering in some rare circumstances.
- Fixed a bug causing the auto-config setting getting lost.
- Removed cubic filtering in the tone mapping when sub-sampling is enabled to simplify tone mapping and make it more consistent with the info channel kernel renderings.
- CTRL-SHIFT-Z does now redo instead of an undo.
- Fixed random crash in scenes with animated geometry archives (Alembic files) when the timeline is changed.
- Render animation script remembers the last settings.
- Render region isn't reset anymore when you disable the render region tool. This allows you to use other tools like the pickers or the camera navigation while region rendering is enabled.
- Fixed crash when a string input info is set in a Lua script graph.
- Fixed crash when an error in a Lua UI callback handler is thrown.
- Fixed logarithmic sliders in Lua scripts.
- Added file name node which can be used as input of Lua script graphs.
- Default nodes are now created when a Lua script graph defines new inputs.
- Fixed crash when a Lua script graph adds an input linker that doesn't store provide a pin info.
- Fixed crash when a render result is loaded into a Lua image buffer.
- Fixed fetching transform value via
octane.node.getPinValue().
- Added option to use the native file chooser or the version of our UI toolkit (useful for Linux users that don't use Gnome).
- Added option "static noise" to the direct lighting and the path tracing kernels, which is disabled by default. When enabled, the noise is static, i.e. doesn't change between frames. Well, currently it still changes a bit, because some parts are still using random sampling, but we will improve it in the future. For now, we want to bring back the possibility to have dynamic noise, i.e. noise that changes every frame.
- Fixed normals of animated hair.
- Fixed render restart when render region is disabled while sub-sampling is enabled.
- Don't apply highlight compression when the image is saved untonemapped.
- When an .MTL file is loaded an empty map_Ka statement doesn't overwrite the diffuse texture name.
- Fixed incorrect saving of HDR images at specific resolutions.
Windows
- 32-bit archive
- 64-bit archive
Mac OS X
- 64-bit installer image
Linux
- 64-bit archive
Happy rendering,
Your OTOY NZ Team
