This is the first production release of the OctaneRender™ 4.00 for Houdini™ plugin compiled with the Octane 4.00 core. This 4.00.0.21 release is available for the Houdini 16.0/16.5/17.0 latest production builds on Windows x64, Linux gcc6.3.1 and OSX 10.12. This plugin is also compatible with Houdini Indie (While working inside the Indie version, the plugin will have a 4k limited resolution while rendering sequences and the scene export and cloud rendering features disabled)
This version matches OctaneRender Standalone 4.00. To learn more about the new features and improvements of OctaneRender 4, please check out our blog post.
License upgrade
Unless you have a subscription license, you will have to upgrade your version 3 licenses to version 4. This upgrade is free and can be done via these 4 steps:
- Go to https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/purchase/
- Select "Upgrade" in the top menu.
- Click on "UPGRADE NOW" next to "Upgrade existing licenses to OctaneRender 4".
- Select the licenses you want to upgrade and confirm.
To use this version, you need a GPU of compute model 3.0 or higher. Support for Fermi GPUs (like GTX 4xx and 5xx) has been dropped. Also make sure you use a driver of version 387 or higher and if you are working on Mac OS that have a CUDA driver installed that supports at least CUDA 9.1.
New features
To learn more about the new features and improvements of OctaneRender 4, please check out our blog post, but this a quick list of the main new features that have been added:
- Overhauled geometry engine that dramatically reduces compilation times.
- Support for out-of-core geometry.
- AI Light: Improved sampling of emitters, which is a lot more effective than the old method if you have many small emitters that have only a fairly local effect.
- AI Denoiser: Cleans up your render, which can dramatically cut render times.
- Global light inclusion/exclusion.
- Light linking: Allows the inclusion/exclusion of light IDs in the object layer nodes, which can be used to control the direct influence of emitters on objects.
- Universal material: Merges the properties of the diffuse, glossy, specular and metal materials into one material.
- Dirt support in the info channel passes / kernel.
- Overall performance improvements in the render engine and in loading HDR and OBJ files.
- Support to capture direct and indirect light separately in the light render passes.
- Support for emission on sphere primitives.
- Planetary environment based on the Nishita sky model, simulating the scattering of sun light in the atmosphere to render the sky.
- UDIM support via the new image tile texture node.
- Image texture compression.
- Layer selection in the OpenEXR image export.
Release 4.00.0.21 regular license
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _Win64.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _Linux.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... ni_OSX.zip
Release 4.00.0.21 subscription license
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... n64_vr.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... nux_vr.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... OSX_vr.zip
Release 4.00.0.21 demo builds
https://render.otoy.com/plugindownloads ... 4_demo.zip
https://render.otoy.com/plugindownloads ... x_demo.zip
https://render.otoy.com/plugindownloads ... X_demo.zip
Standalone 4.00 version for the network rendering nodes
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... 00_win.exe
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _linux.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _macos.dmg
Release Notes:
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RELEASE 4.00.0.21
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* PLUGIN FEATURES AND FIXES:
- Fixed a memory leak related to the tonemapped passes used for the IPR deonising or saving functions.
- Fixed a problem saving images from the IPR when the denoiser is disabled.
- Fixed several crashes in the H17 non-GUI tools, like hython.
- Fixed the H17 Octane lights scale paramer lock issue.
- Fixed the UDIM (and UVTILE) image texture node. The tiled filename is now configured adding the <udim> or <uvtile> tags, for example "myTexture_<udim>.jpg"
- The material flag is set automatically for the Octane material nodes and the material builder inside the /mat context
* OCTANE FEATURES AND BUGS FIXED:
- Fixed darkening of the planar material preview rendering when a glossy, meetal or universal material is being rendered.
- Fixed artifacts in the sheen / coating layers of the universal material.
- Fixed fireflies when sheen and coating are both enabled in the universal material.
- Fixed clear coat of universal material to have no effect if its IOR is 1.
- Fixed energy gain at glancing angles when the clear coat roughness is low.
- Fixed excessive usage of system memory during the compilation of heavily overlapping geometry.
- Added support for dirt in the info channel kernel / passes (see viewtopic.php?p=349787#p349787).
- Refactored the way how we manage image textures on the GPU and in out-of-core memory. This should reduce the stress on the CUDA driver and solve update issues when out-of-core memory is being used for textures.
- Trying to make out-of-core memory amanagement more robust in conjunction with the denoiser: Octane makes now sure that enough memory is reserved for the denoiser if out-of-core memory is enabled. We also re-allocate out-of-core memory if an update fails due to a lack of GPU memory.
- Disabled shadow catcher when being used in the inactive layer geometry, i.e. it records side effects similar to a regular diffuse material.
- Fixed missing effect of turbidity when the Nishita daylight model is being used.
- Fixed out-of-core usage in the simple mesh case, i.e. if the scene contains only 1 mesh without a transformation.
- Fixed failure to compile geometry with super long and thin triangles.
- Fixed error message if the signature of an OSL shader doesn't match the node type.
- Fixed missing render data update if the motion vector channel is selected / deselected in the info channel kernel node.
- Added net render support to the OctaneRender Studio subscription version and changed the maximum number of allowed GPUs to 20.
- The regular (i.e. non-subscription) version now allows up to 40 GPUs.
- Switched to a newer version of the cuDNN library on Windows and Linux.
- Simplified CUDA texture handling to reduce stress on CUDA driver.
- Fixed spurious CUDA error 700 caused by an inconsistent render data state.
- Fixed incorrect scene bounds when you have a single volume in the scene that isn't at the origin.
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RELEASE 4.00.0.16 RC6
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* PLUGIN FEATURES AND FIXES:
- The vopnet HDAs are now dected as Octane HDAs if they have "Octane" as a vopnet mask.
- Fixed several crashes in the Houdini 17 Octane vopnet and shops.
- Possible fixes for the crashes related to the save image on about feature, and for the passes saving on Linux.
* OCTANE BUGS FIXED:
- Fixed random failure of first synchronous tone-map task
- Reverted changes to the volume rendering in the direct lighting kernel when the AO mode is being used which were made in 4 RC 3. We will address the original problem and other volume render issues again in a future update.
- Lowered the minimum exposure of the camera imager node from 0.001 to 0.00001.
- Improved sheen of the universal, glossy and metal materials: In glossy and metal materials it was too bright and didn't conserve energy and in the universal material it was too dark/subtle.
- Improved handling of emitting primitives that have no area.
- Fixed missing statistics for emission primitive and instance counts.
- Fixed AI light crash when you scale an emitter down to 0.0f.
- Fixed resource leak every time the denoiser is disabled and enabled again.
- Fixed missing motion blur when an OSL camera is being used.
- Fixed incorrect inclusion of the environment in the denoised main pass if render layers are enabled and keep environment is on.
- Fixed number overflow in denoiser in certain situations.
- Fixed issue that coating and sheen channels of the universal material were missing in the reflection filter pass.
- Fixed partial shadow on ground planes when using the render layer shadows passes, if there is any light from the environment reaching the plane from below (see viewtopic.php?p=347350#p347350).
- Fixed render system freeze when a greyscale value texture is used as input of a displacement node.
- Fixed interactive region rendering not properly resetting the tone-map intervals. The tone-map interval is now also limited to 4sec when active.
- Trying to work around CUDA error 2 (out of memory) by using a different / slower method to clear GPU memory (see above).
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RELEASE 4.00.0.15 RC5
=============================================
* PLUGIN FEATURES:
- New option in the Octane ROP node, Properties tab, to fully disable the DOF rendering.
- Added support for Houdini 17.0 (Windows/Linux)
* OCTANE BUGS FIXED:
- Octane is now trying to prevent the computer to go to sleep.
- Made a change in the render pipeline that hopefully increases the refresh rate at the beginning of rendering.
- Octane prints now a warning in the log if the environment variable CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES or CUDA_LAUNCH_BLOCKING is set. The effect of these is that not all GPUs are visible, causing rendering to be slower.
- Added support for emitters with "surface brightness" disabled to hair geometry.
- Fixed bug causing hair geometry emission to not to work at all.
- Fixed a bug where denoised alpha causes artifacts in denoiser output.
- Fixed a crash of an OSX net render master when a slave connects with it.
- Fixed incorrect alpha weight of beauty passes causing noisy, aliased edges.
- Fixed incorrect transition of the shadow passes to the background and between active and inactive layers.
- Fixed crash or incorrect normal import of subdivided, deformed meshes.
- Fixed crash of the net render master (on OSX) when a slave connects with it.
- Fixed incorrect values displayed in the not-enough-memory error message of the denoiser.
- Fixed incorrect behaviour when more than 64 render passes are enabled, which also caused a lot of error messages.
- Fixed texture preview.
- Fixed a crash when loading very small images.
- Fixed light linking passes 7 and 8.
- Fixed volume rendering when there are multiple volumes in the scene.
- Fixed some specular material differences from 3.08.
- Fixed denoise results when affect alpha option is enabled .
- Fixed AI Light with animated triangles in the scene.
- Fixed random colour texture.
- Fixed a performance issue when using direct light kernel with a medium or volume where absorption is very low.
- Improve OSL compiler performance.
- Fixed denoiser output when using affect alpha without an alpha channel.
- Fixed a case where network render GPU count was incorrect.
- Fixed artefacts when using high roughness on brdfs other than Octane.
- Fixed displacement crash on some meshes.
- Fixed Beckmann sampling for the specular case.
- Fixed some artefacts in compressed textures.
- Fixed some memory not being deallocated sometimes when using AI Light.
- Some performance optimizations for AI Light processing
- Speed up loading of .hdr files
- Improved how Octane deals with running out of memory, which fixes some cases where caching fails and then a render failure occurs.
- A small volume rendering performance improvement of between 5-10%.
- Fixed a significant performance regression from 3.08, where scenes with hundreds of unique meshes rendered significantly slower.
- Render speed improvements - in general v4 is now faster than v3, and info channel kernels are between 15-25% faster.
- Fixed crash caused by invalid primitives with emission.
- We no longer distribute the cuDNN library with Octane - when octane first loads, we download cuDNN if it has changed.
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RELEASE 4.00.0.9 RC2
=============================================
* PLUGIN BUGS FIXED:
- "Create intermediate directories" enabled by default.
- Fixed a crash while working with the MPlay IPR.
- The Octane lights mesh is no longer rendered if the light shader is disabled.
* OCTANE FEATURES:
- Light linking and global light exclusion. New spare params and render target options to configure the light masks.
- Added UDIM support using the new "Texture Image UDIM" node.
- Updated universal material. This means the universal material is now complete.
- Out of core geometry and textures is now automatic, you don't need to set any VRAM limits for these anymore. If enabled in preferences, Octane will automatically start using system memory when VRAM runs out.
- Reinstated network rendering, without AI Light updates, which is being finalized.
- Improved processing speed for AI Light.
- AI Light now works with sphere emitters.
- Improved AI Light processing performance.
- Small reduction in memory consumption when using AI Light.
- Added ability to capture direct and/or indirect light for light passes.
- Added near clip plane support for Z depth pass.
- Added options in texture and blackbody emission nodes to keep emissive power constant when applying uniform scaling (if surface brightness is disabled).
- New volumetric AI denoiser.
- New GPU texture compression options in the texture nodes.
- New option in the texture nodes to import of individual layer from multi-layer EXR.
- Improve OBJ loading speed by between 15-25%.
* OCTANE BUGS FIXED:
- Fixed denoiser blend option not working properly when using hot pixel filter.
- Fixed render failure when denoiser output render pass is enabled, and the denoiser is disabled in the imager node.
- Fixed layer shadow pass.
- Increased the maximum number of OSL nodes in one texture node tree from 500 to approximately 30,000.
- Fixed crash when rendering some meshes that have multiple materials where one or more have displacement.
- Fixed a bug where alpha values were written into the output image buffer when the alpha channel was disabled.
- Fixed two problems with the render layer shadow pass: shadows when there was no emitter, and shadow strengths being incorrect.
- Fixed crashes when rendering simple scenes that contain an emitter.
- Fixed render failure on some simple meshes.
- Fixed render failure on some meshes that happens after caching is complete.
- Fixed incorrect memory consumption reporting sometimes.
- Fixed a possible hang when using AI Light and modifying other settings.
- Fixed a crash when using AI Light in a scene with no emitters.
- Fixed render failures when AI Light processing is interrupted with either emission changes or other changes in the scene.
- Fixed some extra memory consumption when switching from a scene with emitters to one that has none.
- Fixed a case where device memory stats returns total memory as unavailable memory.
- Fixed a crash when using AI Light if all lights in the scene have a sample rate of zero.
- Fixed a case where SSS data is accidentally added into the transmission pass.
- Fixed AI Light crash if an emitter is moved immediately before mesh caching begins.
- Fixed clay mode for universal materials.
- Fixed normal passes to record incorrectly sometimes.
- Fixed the export of raw buffers when the resolution is not a multiple of 4.
- Fixed a crash and incorrect motion blur that happens sometimes when making changes in placement nodes.
- Fixed handling of int[2] and int[3] input parameters for OSL shaders.
- Fixed a very random render failure.
- Fixed AI Light update for Network Render.
- Fixed baking camera.
- Fixed a GGX sampling error.
- Nishita sky: Fixed some very bright sunlight from Nishita sky model when the sun is just below the horizon.
- Planetary environment: Improved appearance of star field
- Planetary environment: Fixed rendering of sunset at high altitudes
- Added an approximation for ozone absorption to the planetary environment.
- Fixed a crash on the roughness info pass.
- Fixed a crash when attempting to render hairs with zero vertices.
- Fixed rendering of meshes with an opacity map inside the environment medium.
- Fixed crash due to (unsupported) AVX instructions in the denoiser.
- Fixed crash due to failing to page-lock the result buffer of the denoiser.
- Fixed crash in the denoiser if the film resolution is not a multiple of 4.
- Fixed render failure if the scene doesn't contain instances.
- Fixed a network render crash when AI light is disabled.
- Fixed incorrect UV mapping of on-the-fly compressed image textures.
- Fixed artefacts in some image compresison formats (when done on-the-fly).
- Fixed missing Volta support on OSX.
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RELEASE 4.00.0.8 XB3
=============================================
- Denoiser options in the Imager node.
- Several new denoised passes in the Passes node.
- Denoiser device options in the plugin options panel, GPUs tab.
- New "Show Denoise" button in the OpenGL IPR window to swicth on/off the denoised beauty pass.
- New "Octane_IPR_showDenoise" hscript command to control the IPR denoised beauty pass show state.
- AI Lights options in the kernel nodes.
- AI Scene and Out of core geometry improvements (no new options to control these features yet).
- New option in the kernels to set the toon shading ambient light.
- Support for the "cast shadows" feature in the toon lights.
- New Nishita daylight model.
- New "Universal" material node.
- New "Planetary" environment node.
Happy rendering,
Your OTOY Team
