OctaneRender™ 3.0 for Houdini™ - test build 3.07.0.0 Tweet

[juanjgon]

Hi!

This is a test build of the upcoming OctaneRender™ 3.07 for Houdini™. This release is available for the Houdini 15.0/15.5/16.0 latest production builds on Windows x64, Linux gcc4.8 and OSX 10.11. This plugin is also compatible with Houdini 15.5/16.0 Indie. In this case, the plugin will have a 1080p limited resolution while rendering sequences, and the scene export and cloud rendering features disabled.


Release 3.07.0.0 test4
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _Win64.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _Linux.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... ni_OSX.zip

Standalone version for the network rendering nodes
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... t4_win.exe
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _macos.dmg
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _linux.zip


New features
New Octane 3.07 features: viewtopic.php?f=33&t=62395
The plugin manual is being updated to cover most of the changes. https://docs.otoy.com/Houdini_Plugin_Ma ... Manual.htm


=============================================
RELEASE 3.07.0.0
=============================================

* NEW PLUGIN FEATURES:
- New options to encode color and alpha primitive attributes for the hair rendering, with the same workflow used by the particles tool.
- Improved the extraction time in scenes with a lot of shared materials.
- Improved multi-thread extraction code, that also fixes several deadlock issues.
- New options in the Octane OBJ spare parameters to set the object level instance ID and the instancers instanceIDs extraction mode.
- The instancers instanceIDs mode can be set to packed RGBA values from the "Cd" point attribute or raw integers from the "id" point attribute.
- The instances packed RGBA instanceIDs is designed to be used with the new "Texture Instance Color" VOP node and the included tex/rgb4k_map.ppm texture map.
- Updated the spare parmeters light options, the light material HDA and the Octane Light with the new light options.
- Fixed the color and the distribution filename parameters in the light material HDA texture emission tab.

* NEW OCTANE FEATURES:
- Added option "double-sided" to the emission nodes to allow mesh emitters to emit on both sides.
- Added option "visible on specular" to the emission nodes to allow you to hide emitters on specular reflections / refractions only.
- Re-labelled "cast illumination" of the emission nodes to "visible on diffuse" because that is what this option effectively does.
- Added option "cast shadows" to the emitter nodes to allow you to disable direct light shadows for mesh emitters. Please note that this option only has an effect if the emitter is actually included in the direct light calculation, i.e. the "sampling rate" is > 0.
- Added option "Transparent emission" to the emission nodes to explicitly enable/disable transparent emission.
- Improved rendering of transparent mesh emitters, to make them appear exactly like they would if they were not transparent and had a black diffuse channel. This solves some longstanding issues where transparent emitters create weird effects like darker areas near the emitter or incorrect glossy reflections.
- Overhauled and fixed the way we handle non-uniformly scaled emitters.
- Added new texture node "Instance color" and "Instance range" to use the instance IDs in textures/materials.
- Added new node "Baking texture", which takes any input texture and bakes it into an internal greyscale or RGB texture, which can then be used in the material system and especially in displacement mapping.
- Added new node "UVW transform texture" which allows you to apply an additional UVW transformation on top of the complete input texture tree that is connected with its input.
- Added support for importance sampled texture environments, even if the texture is not a simple image. Octane tries to figure out if the input texture is actually constant over the environment and implicitly disables importance sampling of the environment if it is, but it's probably best to not enable "importance sampling" if you don't want to use importance sampling or it doesn't make sense.
- Treating specular materials with "Fake shadows" enabled as transparent on diffuse paths if the direct lighting kernel is used in the diffuse GI mode (see viewtopic.php?p=318819#p318819).
- Added the possibility to configure net render daemons outside of the subnet(s) the master is attached to, by specifying them directly as host name / IP address.
- Improved ray-tracing speed for hair primitives.
- Overhauled and simplified the net render daemon discovery and tried to make it and its configuration more robust.

* OCTANE BUGS FIXED:
- Fixed CUDA failure if a scene contains a portal material and it is the last material collected in the scene graph.
- Fixed offset of 1 during counting instances, to recreate the same random colour values as in 3.06 when no material map/object layer map nodes are used (see viewtopic.php?p=316240#p316240).
- Fixed kernel hang during volume rendering in some special cases.
- Fixed hanging preview material rendering when no render devices are enabled.
- Fixed bug causing the baking camera to splat incorrect color information in beauty passes outside the UV geometry if padding was set to 0.
- Fixed aliased edges in the beauty filter passes.
- Fixed rendering of the shadow catcher material using the direct-lighting and path tracing kernels.
- Fixed a few cases where texture mapping produces unexpected results: Box mapping used the wrong transformation to local space and triplanar mapping didn't work for emitter distribution textures.


Thanks,
-Juanjo

[Techie]

Nice, thanks Juanjo!

[WhyGee]

Hi,
Thanks for the new release!
When trying to activate the license for the new plugin, Houdini crashes immediately. Any idea why that might happen?

Houdini 16.0.633

Thanks
Yaniv

[juanjgon]

Hmm, I don't have other reports about this issue. What kind of license do you have, and what happens exactly when you try to activate it?

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[WhyGee]

Not sure what are the license options, but it's a standard single license I guess.
as soon as I click Activate, houdini crashes. When I revert to the previous plugin version and need to reactivate, it works fine.

[juanjgon]

Are you using the correct plugin for your Houdini version?

-Juanjo

[WhyGee]

pretty sure. attached is a screenshot of the houdini.env file.
Currently the newer plugin is commented out but you can see the paths.

[juanjgon]

Hmm, yes I see ... I think that I can reproduce this problem here. I'll investigate it ASAP. Meanwhile, can you enable the license with the old plugin and work later with the new one?

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[juanjgon]

Hey, WhyGee. Are you trying to enable the license from the plugin options panel, License Management tool? I'm not sure if this tool should be used now to enable the plugin licenses. In theory, if the license is disabled on your machine, it should be enabled automatically once you try to render anything, and if needed, the licensing window should be opened at this point to request the login/password data.

In short, don't use the License Tool that you can open from the plugin options panel for now.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[juanjgon]

In any case, I've fixed the crash for the next build. Thanks for reporting this issue!

-Juanjo