This is the second public experimental build of 2021.1. It fixes plenty of bugs and adds a few more features. We have a couple more features in the works for 2021.1, but the plan is to wrap up feature development beginning of July and then stabilize it soon after.
As mentioned in the previous release, we are still planning to release an Octane X version of 2021.1 later this year.
As with all experimental builds, we advise to not to use this release for production purposes. We are trying to, but we can't guarantee that scenes saved with this version will be compatible in future releases.
Please make sure to use a NVIDIA Studio driver with version at least 456.38 on Windows or 455.23 on Linux.
Changes since OctaneRender 2021.1 XB1:
New features:
- Added STD BRDF (using the "Student's t-distribution" to control the shape and slope of the falloff) to the glossy, specular, metallic and universal materials. This BRDF allows you to control the distribution/spread of reflected rays via the also new parameter Spread. Below you can see the material ball with the STD BRDF with roughness 0.2 and 4 different spread values and one version with a GGX BRDF for comparison:
- Added option Smooth shadow terminator to all materials, which modifies the ray offset locally to avoid terminator artefacts due to too coarse geometry. When enabled it has a tiny performance penalty but most importantly the projected shadow can slightly shift in certain circumsstances. Here is an extreme example showing the problem this option tries to fix:
- Added initial a first implementation of an USD importer. There is still plenty of work to be done and we are planning to add USD export as well, and it comes with these limitations:
- Motion blur is not supported.
- Camera import isn't really working yet.
- Only
USDPreviewSurface
materials are imported.
- Added various new texture nodes, adapted from the "OTOY - Pattern" category of the Live DB:
- Chainmail
- Color squares
- Flakes
- Fractal
- Glowing circle
- Hagelslag
- Iridescent
- Moire mosaic
- Procedural effects
- Stripes
- Tile patterns
- Smooth Voronoi contours
(While setting up the above images I noticed that some of the textures don't work with other projections than Mesh UV. This will be fixed with the next release. The affected textures are: Flakes, Glowing circle, Hagelslag)
The front row of the image below are the different types of the Tile patterns texture and the back row are the different types of the Moire mosaic:
And last but not least the different types of the Procedural effects texture - all of which can be animated via the time parameter:
Improvements:
- Reduced banding when extreme values are passed through an OCIO LUT.
- Changed the default for IES load preferences back to "Normalizing peak to 1.0", which seems to be the most used option.
- Allow rendering of small dense volumes inside large volumes which usually have very different step lengths.
- Added support for the Random texture to volumes.
- Updated to OpenVDB 7.0.
- Various improvements for Volume to texture (/Read VDB):
- Changed category and default name from Read VDB to Volume to texture.
- Improved handling of inputs that are not regular VDB volumes.
- Placements and grouping of volumes and SDFs is now taken into account.
- Added VDB channel ID selection.
- The background value is returned for parts of the texture that are outside of VDB grids.
- Improved VDB export by always writing a background value.
- Various improvements and fixes to saving ORBX packages, including a workaround for the situation that on Windows a file may stay locked for a couple of seconds after its file handle has been released.
- Brought the selection of presets in the Image resolution node into the 21st century.
- Authentication via dongles works again.
- When running Octane Standalone using
--no-gui
and you don't have any render devices, a warning message is printed to the console so you don't wonder why it doesn't render and is hanging. - OSL:
raytype("camera")
andraytype("shadow")
work now in emission textures. - OSL:
getattribute("hit:t", var)
will return the hit distance of the ray the triggered the texture evaluation. This works for path and shadow rays. - OSL: Added meta data
string variant
to point inputs which, if set to"image"
, indicates that the input is to be treated similarly to a projection of image texture. I.e. rotations are around (0.5, 0.5) and not around (0, 0). - OSL: Added meta data
string type
to matrix inputs which, if set to"uvw
, indicates that the input is an UVW transformation. I.e. all UVW transform nodes encountered up to the OSL texture node will be premultiplied to the input matrix (similar to the UVW transformations of other texture nodes). - Lua: Added
useImageProjection
toPROPS_PROJECTION_PIN_INFO
to indicate if a pin will treat projections similar to projections of image texture nodes, where rotations are around (0.5, 0.5) and not around (0, 0). - Lua: Added
isUvwTransform
toPROPS_TRANSFORM_PIN_INFO
to indicate if a transform pin is for UVW transformations, i.e. UVW transform nodes up to this texture node will be be applied to the UVW transformation of this input. - Lua: Added
movableInputCountAttribute
andmovableInputPinCount
toPROPS_NODE_INFO
. Those two fields describe whether dynamic pins of a node can be moved and how many of these pins are grouped together. - Lua: Updated
PROPS_RENDER_PASS_INFO
to provide thedescription
,nodeType
andsubType
for a specific render pass ID. The latter two are necessary for the overhauled render AOV system.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed crash in material preview after disconnecting a VDB from a Volume to texture node.
- Fixed crash in geometry update if an animated scene changes specific attributes (see viewtopic.php?p=400615#p400615).
- Fixed crashes in the Alembic importer due to invalid/unexpected data.
- Fixed render failure when dirt rays hit a plane object.
- Fixed misaligned address CUDA error in specific scenes when RTX is enabled.
- Fixed potential CUDA error in animated scenese when instance counts change.
- Fixed render failure when RTX is enabled and a stereo panoramic camera is used that has a focal depth of 0.
- Fixed incorrect rendering at the poles of panoramic cameras when RTX is enabled.
- Fixed incorrect total internal reflections when a microfacet specular transmission model is mixed with a diffuse reflection.
- Fixed reddish tint on denoised output when the D65 white light spectrum is used (see viewtopic.php?p=401179#p401179).
- Fixed blue tint on toon materials when the D65 white spectrum is enabled (see viewtopic.php?p=401713#p401713)
- Fixed various conversions from RGB to greyscale to better match sRGB.
- Fixed clean up of OCIO profiles after a render stop, which could result in black image textures when rendering is started again.
- Fixed unnecessary render restarts after a change in the OCIO preferences.
- Fixed incorrect wrapping at the border of image textures under certain circumstances.
- Fixed missing render update when the UV transformation of a plane geometry node is changed.
- Fixed motion vector AOV for moving triangles.
- Fixed alignment of VDB bounding boxes instead of shifting the VDB grid.
- Fixed order of volumes returned by picking.
- Fixed incorrect internal data type in the Binary math texture in mode Dot product, which might cause problems when used as input in other textures.
- Fixed material masks to custom AOV 1 not to being written (see viewtopic.php?p=401965#p401965).
- Fixed broken invert of the Color correction output AOV (see viewtopic.php?p=401593#p401593).
Downloads
Downloads for Enterprise subscription users:
OctaneRender Enterprise 2021.1 XB2 Standalone for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Enterprise 2021.1 XB2 Standalone for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Enterprise 2021.1 XB2 Standalone for Linux
OctaneRender Enterprise 2021.1 XB2 Node Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Enterprise 2021.1 XB2 Node for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Enterprise 2021.1 XB2 Node for Linux
Downloads for Studio subscription users:
OctaneRender Studio 2021.1 XB2 Standalone for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio 2021.1 XB2 Standalone for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Studio 2021.1 XB2 Standalone for Linux
Happy rendering
Your OTOY team