Weekly Dev update [12/12/2016]

[BK]

Hi everyone,


Thank you, for the feedback and all your support.

My apology for not answering to few post and threads on the forum.

We are still working hard on your request, fixes and finding ways to make improvements in our future updates.

Our OctaneRender for Maya 3.05t3 - 9.11 is now fully compatible with OctaneRender Standalone 3.05 with Rounded Edges features.

Just a quick as, weekly update...

The following is the changes since the 05th of December.


~ Fixed multimaterial crash in cases when some material gets deleted.
Minor fixes and improvements...

~ Integrated 3.05 test 3 engine. The LiveDB bug must be gone now, as well as OSX batch rendering must be working now. This engine version tests rounded edges functionality changes.
Minor fixes and improvements...

` Fixed baking camera issues.

~ Fixed a rare UV-mapping bug.

[glimpse]

nice! That's awesome idea to make those! =) Thanks for sharing!

[calus]

nice! That's awesome idea to make those! =) Thanks for sharing!

Yes but this could be done in a more useful way,
as for now "weekly dev update" are just copy-pasting of the release logs of the week (but loosing release version number),
furthermore JimStar's release notes are the less informative of all plugins.

For example, the nParticle motion-blur bug has been fixed ( this was a major issue asked to be fixed for years)
but the release note was just - Minor fixes and improvements, which doesn't tell us anything ...


For comparison here is only one release note by Juanjgon for the Houdini plugin (how it should be done for the Maya plugin):

=============================================
RELEASE 3.03.2.0
=============================================

* NEW PLUGIN FEATURES:
- New option in the particle rendering to pack a color and alpha attributes into the particle UV map. In the plugin there is a new folder "tex" that has the two maps that can be used to unpack this information using the texture image node.
- Support the new H15.5.523 production build.
- Support of rendering multiple ROP nodes frame by frame.
- Support of parameters promotion in the Octane VOP nodes.
- Support of the Houdini internal VDB primitives.
- Swithing among tabs no longer updates the IPR.
- Support of OTLs with multiple subnet levels.

* NEW OCTANE FEATURES:
- Experimental Pascal GPU support. We haven't done any specific Pascal tweaks/optimizations yet and the performance isn't where we would expect it to be.
- Added far clip plane to thin-lens/panoramic camera nodes.
- Added option to the thin-lens/panoramic camera nodes to swap eyes when stereo rendering is used. This option is used during tone-mapping, i.e. doesn't restart rendering, with the exception of anaglyphic stereo rendering which requires a render restart.
- Only one Octane process can now authenticate with the SSO server at the same time. Other processes will wait until the authentication is finished.
- Empty volume nodes are allowed now. This should help with aligning VDB sequences with the rest of an animation. Empty volumes will be excluded from the compiled scene geometry.
- Daemon scan networks are now identified via sub-net address and adapter address, which allows us to distinguish between multiple adapters connected to the same sub-net.
- Added volume step length to the absorption and scattering medium nodes. This parameter will only be used by volume nodes.
- Fixed degradation of direct light calculation of transparent light sources.
- Fixed the diffuse render pass which wasn't rendered correctly for glossy materials.
- Various other small tweaks to the rendering.

* PLUGIN BUGS FIXED:
- The RGB and Float texture nodes output type is unknown. Fixed.
- Fixed the tab level problem adding the Octane object spare parameters to nodes with other spare parameters tabs.
- Fixed some issues with the volume object space transformations.

* OCTANE BUGS FIXED:
- Fixed bug causing the baking camera to render regions of the output with a lower number of samples when network rendering is being used.
- Fixed incorrect rendering of sphere primitives.
- Fixed artifacts when an emitter is rendered inside a mesh with a medium (which was the root cause for viewtopic.php?f=30&t=54763 ).
- Fixed incorrect rendering of absorption medium used in the environment.
- Fixed incorrect rendering of media with a black absorption channel and with enabled "invert absorption".
- Fixed shadow passes for volumes.
- Fixed crash when baking the 2nd or 3rd UV channel amd it contains invalid numbers (NaNs).
- Fixed "invert absorption" option of the scattering and volume medium nodes.
- Fixed baking camera if a negative scale is used for a baked instance.
- Fixed version number display in daemon list of the net render configuration dialog.