We have made several fixes, and some of them took longer to sort out towards the end. We're happy to bring you all of these and some general improvements in this update.
Important: if using macOS, we strongly recommend that you update to version 13.3. Prior to 13.3, there is an OS related issue that causes a render failure consistently if you render for long periods of time.
Changes since Octane 2022.1
Rendering improvements
- Added perspective correction to universal camera.
- Improved performance on macOS across most hardware.
- Added input "Static noise" to the info channel kernel node.
- Photon mapping now takes GI clamp setting into account.
- Light linking can be used with the shadow catcher material.
- In irradiance mode we no longer try to generate transparent areas where objects intersect the ground.
- Changed the Circle spiral texture so that it does not output negative color values and rename its color inputs.
Rendering fixes
- Fixed shadow catcher not being transparent if all types of light sampling are disabled.
- Fixed precision loss causing artefacts when calculating face weights for vertex normals/tangents.
- Photon mapping with light from environment maps now works correctly on materials with 0 roughness.
- Fixed incorrect VDB volume appearing as input of a Vectron. This happened with volumes that show up multiple times in the scene, behind different material map nodes.
- Fixed some problems with calculated vertex normals and tangents for certain meshes.
- Fixed noise introduced in shadow passes in 2021.1. This restores the appearance of shadow passes to that in 2020.2. Affects scenes using an environment with importance sampling, in combination with the shadow pass or render layer shadows.
- Fixed invalid tangents in cases like sphere poles.
- Fixed emission that is too dark when seen through a transmissive material with fake shadows enabled in combination with importance sampling and roughness greater than 0.
- Fixed subtle artefacts in shadow ray calculations.
- Fixed an issue where sub-diving a part of geometry through vertex displacement settings was producing incorrect output.
- Fixed large volume rendering.
- Fixed portal materials not working when connected to a mix material node.
- Fixed nested dielectrics not working as expected for universal materials that are treated as medium-only materials.
- Fixed some materials rendering incorrectly when nested dielectrics was enabled.
- Fixed UV projected textures on displacement triangles.
- Fixed bug causing render regression when nested dielectrics were enabled in the kernel settings.
- Fixed incorrect interactive render region borders for various info channel kernel modes.
- Fixed large volumes rendering incorrectly on MacOS.
- Fixed sluggish/delayed tone-mapping if AI light is enabled.
- Fix noise rendered on light sources with an opacity of exactly 0.
- Fixed upsampler rendering white screens and sometimes causing render failures.
- Fixed reordering layers of a composite output AOV having no effect.
- Fixed having multiple Vectron primitives of the same type but with different materials and settings in a scene.
- Fixed the wrong normal map being used when a universal material's bump and sheen bump inputs are connected to the same texture node and the coating layer is active.
- Fixed nested dielectric behaviour around Null materials.
- Fixed material emission not working correctly with stacked material layers.
Stability
- Fixed render failure when instances switch between valid and invalid transformation, the total number of instances doesn't change and you quickly scrub the timeline.
- Fixed crash when deleting a node item while doing some other UI gesture.
- Fixed crash when a node item is deleted while a menu for it is open.
- Fixed crash when connecting a Vectron Union node to a material map.
- Linux: Fixed a crash on Octane startup when running on a high resolution display.
- Fixed a render failure on MacOS when rendering volumes.
- Fixed a render failure when using a toon material as the base material of a layered material.
- Fixed render failure if using motion vector pass with Vectron primitives.
UI improvements
- Limit slider ranges for inputs in the "Brightness adjustment" group of the Image adjustment texture node.
- Changed the slider limit range for the hue shift of the "Image adjustment" texture to [-180,180].
- Limited the slider range of the "Fan spiral" texture's "Spin" and "Arc count" inputs.
- Added the unit used for film width to the label and tooltip on all materials. This is in micrometers for all materials except standard surface, which uses nanometers.
- Allowed rotation values to be greater than 360.
- Disallowed collapsing output linkers.
- Avoid slow redrawing of the node graph with 'Select all' and with the lasso.
- Connection cutter now works at any zoom level.
- Dragging a connector from a pin now only happens with the left mouse button.
- Show tooltip on node pins immediately.
- Fixed the height of the out-of-core preferences component.
- Fixed the height of the common geometry import preferences component.
- Added scrollbars for windows too large to fit on the screen.
- Scroll bars and numerical boxes respond properly to smooth scroll wheel input.
- Added icons for the built-in Geometric primitive node.
- Fixed white boxes around floating components with custom shapes on macOS.
- Fixed drag and drop of LiveDB materials into the render viewport.
- Changed the file suffix of log files saved from the Standalone log window to .txt and set the file extension of the save dialog from * to *.txt as well.
Loading and saving
- Improved loading speed in most scenes.
- Saving items into an ORBX in the Standalone will not switch the file paths of saved file assets anymore.
- Fixed version conversion of spotlight nodes saved in old versions.
- Fixed an issue where rendered images were no longer saved and this message appeared in the log: "Received result with higher change level than our current render change level."
- Fixed some attributes not being saved in the app preferences dialog version of image import preferences.
- Fixed image texture node color space not sticking when exporting scene.
- Fixed HDR image import type changes requiring a restart, if it was cached.
- Fixed issue with RNDR uploads causing incorrect renders due to some animated nodes missing assets.
- Fixed USDC file not loading via drag-drop and from the general import context menu.
- Reduced the peak host memory required when rendering multiple large volumes.
Lua API changes
- Lua: Added new Lua module
octane.rendercloudmanagerwhich provides functionality for interacting with RNDR.
Downloads
OctaneRender Studio+ Standalone for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio+ Standalone for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Studio+ Standalone for Linux
OctaneRender Studio+ Node for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio+ Node for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Studio+ Node for Linux
Octane X Prime for macOS
OctaneRender Demo Standalone for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Demo Standalone for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Demo Standalone for Linux
Happy rendering
Your OTOY team
