Since 2019.1 XB1 a lot of problems were found and fixed. We're adding the last few things and approaching the feature lock point quickly. As this is still an experimental release, please do not use this for production purposes.
Please ensure that you have a NVIDIA driver version 419.x or newer.
What's new in 2019.1 XB2
AI Up-sampler
Octane 2019.1 now includes a built-in AI up-sampler in Octane Imager. The AI up-sampler works similar to the AI denoiser first introduced in Octane 4, with a progressive and a one-stop up-sampling mode. You can now specify multiple sampling modes (2x2, 4x4) up-sampling for your rendered image, and the AI up-sampling would automatically render at a lower resolution in less time and up-scale to the resolution you specified.
Below are some comparisons of the same scene rendered with different AI Up-Sampling settings:
Kernel: PathTracing
AI Up-Sampling: Off
Resolution: 1920x1080
Samples: 4000
Render Time: 13mins 44 seconds
Kernel: PathTracing
AI Up-Sampling: On
AI Up-Sampling Mode: On completion | 2x2
Resolution: 1920x1080
Samples: 4000
Render Time: 3 mins 49 seconds
Kernel: PathTracing
AI Up-Sampling: On
AI Up-Sampling Mode: Progressive | 2x2
Resolution: 1920x1080
Samples: 4000
Render Time: 4 mins 31 seconds
Spectron Volumetric spotlights
We have improved the rendering of scattering in participating media using the new step length parameter.Reducing the step length in the light medium now reduces the amount of samples per pixel you can render in a given time budget, and it also reduces the noise in the fog.
Below are examples of results with varying volumetric step length and samples per pixel:
Volumetric step length: 20
Samples per pixel: 450
Volumetric step length: 50
Samples per pixel: 700
Volumetric step length: 999
Samples per pixel: 1200
Vertex Displacement Auto-Bump Shading
The vertex displacement feature now includes an autobump option (for height map displacement only currently) to introduce more detail into the mesh without requiring high subdivision levels at all times. As we know, high subdivision levels introduces higher mesh complexity into the scene, and thus increases render time and pre-processing time per subdivided mesh.
We have introduced autobump feature for vertex displacement so that details within a triangle is preserved without excessively subdivide a triangle continuously to get the displacement details you want. Basically the extra detail of a triangle is moved into shading space by generating a bump map from the displacement map, and the normals inside a triangle is perturbed from this automatically generated bump map during render time, similar to the normal workflow of bump map in Octane.
Below are some examples of the feature:
Subdivision level 6 vs Subdivision level 6 + autobump
As shown above, the autobump can introduce extra details for a subdivision level that the particular subdivision cannot provide sufficiently.
Subdivision level 6 vs Subdivision level 3 vs Subdivision level 3+ autobump
In this second image, we can see that a lower subdivision level (level 3) shows poor detail compared to a higher subdivision level (level 6), but the discrepancy can be made up by the autobump feature without introducing a higher subdivision level.
Changes since OctaneRender 2019.1 XB1:
Improvements
- Increase maximum number of alpha intersections to 200. This fixes some scenes that have a huge amount of alpha maps.
- Layered materials: Added material layer pin to the base materials.
- Layered materials: Improved optimization of layer sampling.
- Reduced soft limit of subdivision in vertex displacement node to 6, you can still override it with larger values if needed.
- Allow subdivision to be cancelled if it is taking too long.
- We now remember the last directory when using "Import..." menu item in the node graph editor panel.
Bug Fixes
- Camera: Fixed stereo rendering and camera motion blur for OSL camera.
- Cryptomatte: Fixed Cryptomatte passes for distinct nodes.
- Cryptomatte: Fixed updates to Cryptomatte passes after changing material and object layer assignments.
- Deep Pixels: Fixed incorrect maximum samples rendered when deep pixels is enabled without render passes.
- Displacement: Fixed vertex displacement mid level calculation with displacement offset.
- Displacement: Fixed displacement object layers.
- Displacement: Fixed displacement on UV set 2 and 3 when UV set 1 is invalid.
- Emission: Fixed emission if "keep instance power" is enabled, but sampling rate is 0.
- Emission: Fixed emitters with "keep instance power" when rendering a simple mesh.
- Exporter: Fixed some inconsistent behaviour in Alembic exporter when dealing with zero matrices.
- LiveDB: Fixed LiveDB and LocalDB components not refreshing after loading a scene.
- Lua: Fixed default values being ignored when building pin infos for linkers.
- Lua: Fixed mistake causing the names and labels of some dynamic pins returned by the Lua API to be empty.
- Lua: Fixed stack overflow when using
octane.gui.bind()
. - Material: Fixed wrong orientation for bump maps for triangles mirrored in UV space.
- Material: Fixed roughness not being updated after a scattering in a medium.
- Material: Fixed layered materials' bumps/normals fireflies.
- Material: Fixed specular material GGX issue when using high IOR and roughness.
- Material: Fixed GGX calculation producing nan value when camera is looking directly at the surface.
- Material: Fixed transmission weight incorrectly contributing sometimes.
- Material: Fixed some other layered material inconsistencies.
- Material: Fixed metallic modes switching not causing the right IORs to get updated.
- Material: Fixed universal material when using 0 transmission and 0 diffuse reflection.
- Material: Fixed overexposed transmission in layered material.
- Material: Fixed a case where roughness was contributed to a following layer despite being masked out.
- Material: Fixed material duplications during rebuilds, which sometimes causes crashes with displacement materials.
- Material: Fixed metallic RGB IOR when albedo is black.
- Material: Layered materials: Fixed fake shadow throughput.
- Network Render: Fixed Cryptomatte network rendering.
- Network Render: Fixed vertex attributes not working with network render.
- Network Render: Fixed OSL Camera not working over network render.
- Network Render: Fixed SDF not working over network render.
- Nodegraph: Fixed octane.node.getPinInfoIx(...).name was returning the label instead of the pin name.
- Planetary Environment: Fixed sun disappearing before reaching the horizon in planetary mode when altitude is arbitrarily high.
- Render Pass: Fixed volume Z-depth passes.
- Stability: Fixed multiple deadlocks due to vertex displacement.
- Stability: Fixed a possible crash if the subdivider fails for some reason.
- Stability: Fixed a crash when stopping the render engine and then starting a material preview.
- Stability: Fixed crash and lock happening when rendering is stopped sometimes.
- Stability: Fixed a crash during activation on some machines with RAID setups.
- Stability: Fixed rare crash issue on exit.
- Stability: Fixed a possible crash caused by animated joints.
- Vectron: Allow Vectron nodes to inherit their bounding boxes from their inputs if P_SIZE is disconnected. This lets you create operators which automatically resize bounds as necessary.
- Vectron: Fixed a number of inaccuracies and performance problems related to volume SDFs used as inputs to Vectron nodes.
- Vectron: Fixed a crash when the same volume SDF is used as input in more than one OSL geometry input.
- Vectron: Fixed material and object layers connected beneath some vectron nodes.
- Vectron: Add basic Vectron operators (union and subtract).
- Volume: Fixed volume overlap behaviour for higher step lengths. Note: it is still important to use the same step length for all volumes that overlap each other.
- Volume: Fixed object transforms in OSL for volumes and volume SDFs.
- Volume: Fixed double voxel counts.
- Volume: Fixed volume step length setting not affecting the quality of volume shadow.
- UI: Fixed sometimes negative frame counts.
- UI: Some small layout adjustments to the application preferences panel.
- UI: Fixed clipping of IP address in the network render preference window.
- UI: Clean up login window (links, font).
- Misc: Fixed irradiance and clay mode
- Misc: Fixed autofocus picking when using fast rounded edges.
Downloads
Downloads for users with an Enterprise subscription license
OctaneRender Enterprise 2019.1 XB2 (Windows installer)
OctaneRender Enterprise 2019.1 XB2 (Windows zip)
OctaneRender Enterprise 2019.1 XB2 (Mac OS)
OctaneRender Enterprise 2019.1 XB2 (Linux)
Downloads for users with a Studio subscription license
OctaneRender Studio 2019.1 XB2 (Windows installer)
OctaneRender Studio 2019.1 XB2 (Windows zip)
OctaneRender Studio 2019.1 XB2 (Mac OS)
OctaneRender Studio 2019.1 XB2 (Linux)
Downloads for users with a regular V4 license
OctaneRender 2019.1 XB2 (Windows installer)
OctaneRender 2019.1 XB2 (Windows zip)
OctaneRender 2019.1 XB2 (Mac OS)
OctaneRender 2019.1 XB2 (Linux)
Happy rendering
Your OTOY NZ team