This is a first build of the upcoming 3.07 release. There has been a lot going on during the last months and we aren't finished yet with the work for 3.07. The main unfinished features for 3.07 are FBX and bones support. Since this is an early test build, please use it your own risk.
To get an overview of the main changes, please check out the new features post.
Looking a bit further into the future: We changed our plans regarding OSL. Originally we were planning to release the complete OSL material and texture functionality in version 3.10. Although the development has progressed quite a bit, we ran into a whole bunch of problems (like compilation speed and render performance) and the development has taken much longer than we were hoping for. So we started to investigate different approaches how we can roll out OSL in smaller steps and release OSL textures first and complete OSL material support later. We think we have a workable solution for OSL textures and although not all work is done yet, things are really looking promising at this time and we hope to have them implemented in 3.08 plus some additional improvements in the material system. Of course, all this comes with the caveat that there may still be major problem waiting for us, which we don't know yet.
We also plan to have a shorter gap between 3.07 and 3.08 than between 3.06 and 3.07. Regarding programmable materials things a bit more fuzzy, since we implemented OSL materials via a different approach than what we are now using, we will have to port the old implementation to the new system and we hope to get this done some time after version 3.08. We will let you know as soon as things are a bit clearer.
Changes since version 3.06.4:
- Added handles to move/rotate/scale objects.
- 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 support for user defined instance IDs in all geometry nodes, except the volume node. User instance IDs are also included in the import/export from/to Alembic.
- Added support for the definition of user instance IDs in .csv files, by introducing an (optional) header with matrix columns
M00
toM23
and an instance ID columnID
. - 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 new pin "Baking UV transform" to the object layer node. This transformation is applied to object layers when the baking camera is used.
- 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.
- Added better support to access files in packages via the Lua/plugin/module APIs.
- Added Texture render job which renders a render target into an image that can be used by other render targets. This is a workaround for the limitation that we can have only one render target and there is no system in place to render render targets as inputs of other render targets, which is something we would like to develop in version 4. Of course, you have to run the texture render job first before you can use its result in a meaningful way.
- Rendering of large material/texture preview images is now done in slices, to avoid that the preview kernel timeouts.
- 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.
- In the node graph editor a lock icon is rendered on non-deletable node items.
- Improved rendering of the LiveDB component on high-DPI displays and material preview images are now cached.
- 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 incorrect preview rendering of an texture input linker, which now renders black instead of light grey.
- Fixed crash when input linkers got replaced as a side-effect of their evaluation.
- Fixed crash when you try to group items when only linker nodes are selected.
- Fixed incorrect order evaluation of Lua script graphs when their parent graph is copied. This caused for example the batch render script and job to render black, if a Lua script graph was controlling the camera node.
- Fixed crash when string arrays are animated.
- Fixed missing initialization of the viewport tool after loading a new project. This bug caused you to turn off a viewport tool, if the project was saved with this tool enablec and you just loaded it.
- Fixed crash when a Lua script was loading a new project while the script editor is open.
- Fixed broken batch render scripts.
- Fixed long closing times of larger projects with long item names.
- Lua: Added new meta tag
@node-registry-category
which allows you to insert Lua script graphs in the node registry of the node graph editor, if the script is stored in the Lua scripts directory. - Lua: Added new module page
Overview
to the Lua API browser, which gives an overview about the various Lua script types and also describes all meta tags you can add to your script. - Lua: Added modules
octane.package
andoctane.packagefile
to access packages via Lua. - Lua: Added table
octane.file.PROPS_PACKAGE_PATH
to handle package file name + asset file name in one place. - Lua: Added
octane.node.hasAttribute()
andoctane.nodegraph.hasAttribute()
to check if an attribute with the specified ID or name exists. - Lua: Added
octane.node.hasPin()
to check if a pin with the specified ID or name exists. - Lua: Added
octane.render.previewHdr()
to render an HDR texture or material preview. - Lua: Added
octane.scriptgraph.getAssetCount()
to fetch the number of assets stored with the script graph. - Lua: Restore the behaviour of older Lua APIs where a floating point number would be implicitly rounded to an integer if the value is supposed to be an integer.
- Lua: Fixed broken
octane.[nodegraph|scriptgraph].insertInputLinkers()
when used without theix
parameter.
Downloads for users with a regular license
regular version for Windows (installer)
regular version for Windows (ZIP archive)
regular version for Mac OS X (DMG image)
regular version for Linux (ZIP archive)
Downloads for users with a subscription license
subscription version for Windows (installer)
subscription version for Windows (ZIP archive)
subscription version for Mac OS X (DMG image)
subscription version for Linux (ZIP archive)
Photoshop workflow plugin download
You can download and install the current Photoshop workflow plugin (1.0.5) either via the Adobe Exchange platform or you can download it from the link below and manually install it.
Windows and Mac OS X
Photoshop extension (v1.0.5) (ZXP archive)
Happy rendering,
Your OTOY NZ Team