!!! THIS IS THE BETA VERSION OF OctaneRender PLUGIN, IT IS RELEASED FOR INITIAL BUG HUNTING ONLY !!!
!!! DON'T USE IT FOR PRODUCTION, DON'T SAVE THE SCENES FROM THIS BETA VERSION FOR FUTURE USE, BE READY TO LOSE THEM IF YOU DO !!!
!!! SCENES SAVED IN THIS BETA VERSION ARE NOT GUARANTEED TO WORK IN SUBSEQUENT VERSIONS !!!
Otoy® is proud to announce the availability of a new version of OctaneRender™ for Maya®
The world's fastest and most feature-rich unbiased render engine that integrates completely into Autodesk® Maya®.
Maya® Version Requirements
This release will work with Maya® Versions 2016, 2016.5, 2017 and 2018 64-bit on MS Windows operating systems.
COMPATIBILITY AND OCTANERENDER STANDALONE REQUIREMENT
To run OctaneRender™ for Maya®, you need to also have an activated OctaneRender™ Standalone copy activated on the machine you wish to install the plugin onto.
You cannot purchase and use only the Maya plugin and use it without also owning an activated copy of Octane Render™ Standalone on your machine.
For network slave and daemon please download the Standalone installer here:
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=65686
Please read the new features implemented from Octane Standalone 3.08 RC1 version HERE.
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NEW FEATURES OF THE REFACTORED VERSION
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- - Fully reworked the internal scene and animation processing, to make it conformant with nowadays Octane engine's capabilities ('cause engine's structure changed significantly since the initial development of the plugin). Now the processing is more efficient, scalable, and more easily extendable by new complex features.
- - Parts of Octane global settings are now re-implemented as separate Maya nodes' links (you can have many of these nodes in the scene, and use them as presets):
1. Kernel node.
2. Passes node.
3. Imager node.
4. Postprocessor node.
5. Environment node.
6. Environment node used for Visible Environment. - - Implemented the new caching scene translation mechanism. Keep in mind the new global setting "Frames to pre-cache" in Octane global settings. This setting allows to set up the frames span to be pre-loaded. New plugin structure now allows to pre-load the chosen animation span into Octane engine, only changing the current frame after that when you move the animation slider or progress towards batch rendering sequence. Without reloading the data every time (if no objects were changed). This allows to only fully translate the scene before the very first rendering session, and re-translate only changed objects after that, even when changing the current timeline position within this span range. For interactive mode this span will evenly surround the current frame, dynamically adopting to the current frame position and the length of the timeline. E.g. for value of 100: 50 frames before and 50 after the current timeline position if there are enough frames around the current frame. For the frame 5 on the [0:200] timeline - 5 frames before and 95 after. For the frame 5 on the [0:10] timeline - 5 frames before and 5 after. Etc. For batch rendering it will pre-cache only the frames after the current time. When the current frame pointer goes beyond the currently loaded frames span, the span gets re-loaded basing on the current frame pointer position. If your animation is long and heavy, and you are getting errors about out of GPU memory - then lower this setting. If you working on a still image or just one current frame for a long time - setting this value to "0" will speed-up the re-translation phase of rendering when objects are getting changed.
- - After the first render is started (the scene data gets loaded), all subsequent renders will not reload the scene again and the render will start immediately. Only the objects that were changed will be reloaded, if any. If you want to force-reload them all (interactively) - use the "Reload" button of Maya's render view. Thus you only will experience the longer delay before rendering starts during the very first start of rendering session (if nothing significant was changed in the scene between sessions or course).
- - Improved the performance of batch rendering. If "Frames to pre-cache" setting is set to high value - you will experience longer delay before the first frame starts rendering, but all subsequent frames will be rendered much faster, without re-translation of the scene for every frame...
- - The geometry type attribute is now not needed with the new plugin structure. The plugin now tries to determine if an object is animated or not. For the cases where the plugin was not able to recognize it - there is a new "Animator data" setting in the objects, which allows to force the animation data of the object to be loaded or not loaded into the engine.
- - Implemented the new more flexible objects' sampling mechanism. See the new "samples per frame" settings in both global and object's settings. Usable to smooth the motion blur of only chosen fast moving objects. If object's setting is "0" - then the global setting is used for this object.
- - Implemented the new "ORBX material" node. Those who like to work directly with Octane shading nodegraph can now define the whole shading tree inside this material node (or import it from ORBX or OCS file), and use it the same as any other Octane material nodes in Maya scene...
- - Implemented the new "ORBX proxy" node. Those who like to work directly with Octane nodegraph can now define the whole geometry with its shading tree inside this node (or import it from ORBX or OCS file).
- - "Unpack ORBX resources" global setting controls how the resources of imported ORBX files are handled. If set, when importing ORBX files into ORBX materials and proxies - the internal resources (if any) will be unpacked into separate files which will be referenced by imported nodes directly. Otherwise - the imported nodes will have references to the imported ORBX file (which in this case will be automatically copied into "assets" section of Maya project during import).
- - Script graph materials are now imported from LiveDB as ORBX material nodes.
- - Implemented Octane rendering directly into Maya viewport (Maya 2016.5 and above). Now you can run Octane rendering session directly inside Maya viewport. You need to select the new "OctaneRender" mode in "Renderer" menu to start Octane session inside the viewport. Settings for that mode are available by selecting the square icon next to "OctaneRender" item in "Renderer" menu. Octane engine allows you to have only one rendering session active, so only one viewport can have active rendering session inside it. If you start IPR rendering inside Maya's RenderView - this will take over the session from the active viewport. After stopping the IPR session - the session will be returned back to viewport.
- - Maya camera's image plane is now translated into rendered image's background. You need alpha channel setting enabled and "keep environment" setting disabled for that have any effect on the image being rendered.
- - Implemented preview swatches for all Octane textures.
- - Implemented the new "Max. MV displace" setting in geometry objects. This sets the max. displace value for normalized motion vectors loaded into the object's MV channel.
- - Implemented the new normals-autosmooth settings for geometry objects.
- - Reworked output image formats setup UI in global settings.
- - Integrated the 3.08RC1 rendering engine, implemented its feature-set support. New OSL nodes, OSL camera, etc...
- - Implemented uploading of the current scene to Octane cloud directly from inside Maya (menu "Octane -> Upload to Octane cloud").
- - Implemented saving of render state of IPR and Interactive modes. If render was going on for time period more than set threshold ("State save threshold" in Octane global settings, in munutes), then after stopping the render you will be offered to save the render state. Next time when IPR or Interactive rendering is started (even after Maya or computer reload), if there is a saved render state for that scene, you will be offered to continue with the saved state or start rendering from scratch. This way you can e.g. start rendering in IPR session, then if you liked the result, stop it (saving render state), and later continue with this state in Interactive rendering session.
- - Implemented indication of GPUs used for OS display (Windows only so far). It's better to avoid using these for rendering.
- - You can now render several Octane layers in one batch render session - just specify the coma-separated list of layer numbers in Octane global "Batch render layers" setting.
- - A couple of other improvements...
Known issues:
- Octane engine has a bug with scene export. Mostly the scene export will work correctly, but in some special cases some file attributes of some nodes could be linked to non-existing files.
- Octane engine SDK currently has issues with its callback system on OSX, which makes it not working correctly in Maya's batch mode. The engine team will look into this later, but currently the batch rendering does not work on OSX because of it.
- Maya API's native UI gradient control is not flexible enough to support Octane data type for gradient texture UI, so this node still has "color-array-like" UI. I'll look into possible workarounds for it later. You can use Octane ORBX material if you like to use the native Octane UI gradient control.
- Autodesk developers are working on a new context-driven API for plugins. It started with Maya 2018, and in theory it must dramatically improve the scene translation performance for Octane when this API gets completed and polished. But in current state it is just partially implemented, and even those parts implemented are buggy and do not work correctly (even lead to Maya crashes sometimes when the plugin tries to use this new API).
So, Octane plugin now uses this new API whenever it is possible, but only in aspects where it works correctly. It already allowed to eliminate scrolling the timeline back and forth during scene translation for some particular objects that did not support context-driven data output earlier. But some Maya objects (like nHair for example) still don't support any kind of context-driven data output - neither old approach nor the new Autodesk API. And some objects which now (with Maya 2018) show some signs of starting to be supported by the new API (like e.g. instancer) - still don't work correctly with the new API and even crash in some cases.
Thus for now: for the scenes having such objects in them, expect the timeline is still scrolled back and forth during translation of the scene (this happens only when "Frames to pre-cache" is set to some noticeably-high value and only during the first translation or when such objects got changed during rendering session). This does not affect the rendering quality, it is mostly the matter of visual attraction of how Maya API supplies the plugin by objects' data from different time-contexts...
- Maya has few matrix data bugs in its API happening when moving a camera in a viewport. Currently I've implemented workarounds for Octane to make it work properly, but it might slightly lower the efficiency of movements during viewport rendering session. Autodesk confirmed these bugs after I reported them. So after they fix it - Octane will work even more efficient in the viewport rendering mode.
Windows
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OctaneRender for Maya 12.9
For Octane for Maya Studio subscription users, please download it from the Subscription Tab Here.
,speed is everything! 