OctaneRender™ for LightWave™ 2.0 DAILY BUILD

[juanjgon]

In this post you have the last daily build of the LightWave plugin, available to all commercial license users. The advantage of this is that users can update as often as they like to the latest versions of Octane. Bug fixes and small enhancements are continually committed to the current versions of of the Lightwave plugin.


This is the link to the last plugin build (Windows and OSX): RELEASE 2.6.4 - 25/Sept/2014
http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... _build.zip


Changes from the last production release (2.0.10):

* NEW FEATURES:
- Exposure is now independent of the gamma. I.e. Changing the gamma does NOT change the whitepoint anymore. Old pre-2.5.2 exposire is corrected by the plugin at loading time, so the old scenes should be rendered without changes in luminosity.
- AO Distance parameter in the infochannel kernel
- The Texture Image node now displays the RGB, float or alpha image data in the preview.
- Scene statistics in the LWSN log information.
- Ray Epsilon parameter in the InfoChannel kernel.
- The "SwitchToLW" option now saves the render targe file in the project content directory.
- Added a warning message if the Lightwave color space functions are not set to lineal when the user press F9/F10 or open an IPR window. (not available in the LW10.x release)

- New context menus in the Octane nodes (not available in the LW10.x release):
* New "Default setup" feature and all the render target nodes in the Render Target Root node
* Get "Texture Image node" in the DayLight and Texture Environment nodes
* Get "Projection node" in the TextureImage node
* "Link to Surface" option in all the Octane Material nodes ouput pins
* Material nodes in the Octane Material Mixer materials input pins
* Texture, Texture Tools and Procedural nodes in the Octane Materials texture input pins
* Displacement, Emission and Medium nodes in the Octane Materials input pins
* Texture, Texture Tools and Procedural nodes in all the Octane tool nodes

- Improved displacement rendering speed in those cases where the displacement texture does not change much over the surface of a triangle.
- New "Update Lights Parameters" option in the render target root node panel to update the animated lights parameters without reload scene while rendering a sequence. This feature can be slow in complex scenes, so should be used only when you have lights with enveloped parameters.
- "Load Image" button in the Octane Texture Image node
- New gradient node ("Octane Gradient2 Texture"). This node support up to 24 inputs, it is easy to configure without key positions and support a "step" mode to get not interpolated colors.
- Added new parameter "GI Clamp" to the path-tracing and the PMC kernels. It clamps the contribution for each path to the specified value. By reducing the "GI clamp" value, you can reduce the amount of fireflies caused by sparse but very strongly contributing paths. Reducing this value reduces noise by removing energy. On the other hand, "caustic blur" reduces noise by blurring caustics, but conserves energy.
- Get texture nodes from the material "T" texture layers in the Octane material nodes. This new feature helps with the Octane material conversion of the available Lightwave objects that have "T" texture layers. This function search for the first texture map available in the "T" texture layers, adds it to the current node editor as a Octane texture image node and link it to the material input. For the Octane diffuse and glossy material nodes, if the surface doesn't have a transparency texture, the plugin search in the currently selected object for a clip map, and if there is a clip map available, link this texture to the opacity channel of the Octane material.
- Removed the limitation on the number of textures, the amount of textures in a scene is limited only by available GPU memory.
- Improved rendering of motion blur on rotating objects
- Support of Windows XP



* BUGS FIXED:
- Override materials crash Layout if you select the (none) object. Fixed.
- Layou crash rendering scenes with a external render controler. Fixed.
- Polygonal hair materials are broken while rendering. Fixed.
- Render by max. samples can stop at 99% and hang Layout or LWSN, specially using the network rendering feature. Fix to be tested.
- LWSN can't load the IES files in relative paths. Fixed.

- 2.6.1 Black body emission node is broken. Fixed
- 2.6.1 The "Get T texture layers" option in the materials context menu crash Layout. Option removed from the node.
- 2.6.1 Octane native network rendering is now always disabled in the LWSN rendering nodes.
- 2.6.1 Layout crash while saving scene with the Infochannel Kernel in the render target. Fixed

- Objects with only one point polygons crash IPR if used as istancers point clouds. Fixed.
- Octane lights parameters update problems in the IPR, corrupted data, OSX crashes. Fixed.
- Fixed a minor display problem in the preview window progress bar.
- Fixed a bug in the old non OpenGL IPR preview code that crash Layout while scaling the IPR window.
- In OSX fixed a problem while rendering sequences by time.
- OSX crash due to a thread problem with the preview window. Fixed with new thread safe code in the preview refresh functions.
- Resize the IPR preview window breaks the diffuse/glossy scene lighting. Black renders after resize the IPR window. Fixed.
- Fixed shading artifacts on objects with a lot of deformation motion blur with heavily rotating triangles, like waving flags.
- Fixed a rounded edges issue with the vertex order of triangles.
- Fixed incorrect update of emitter data, causing the kernels to crash in some cases.
- Exported .orbx files can't be loaded by the Standalone. Fixed de-duplication for file data in packages created from in-memory attributes.
- Slow IPR performace, slow scene updates and even wrong materials rendering of scenes with objects that have a lot of layers with a lot of materials. Fixed with a new not used materials in each layer filtering.
- The new feature to load images from the Octane texture node does not refresh IPR. Fixed.
- Scale the IPR window with supersamplign and fix aspect options enabled corrupt the rendered image. Fixed
- Emitter power can now be set higher than 1000000.

- Polygonal hair deformations are not updated in the IPR or final rendering. Fixed
- Aperture camera parameter is now 0.0 by default, so DOF is disabled by default
- Box projection in local space are now the default values of the projection node
- In the render target now the default render update mode is "Update scene"
- In complex scenes update the materials in the IPR is really slow and not interactive. Fixed with new functions to update only the current material and image maps. Updated the delay loop from 250 to 50 ms.
- Black surfaces in objects with normal maps but with polygons without normals in the map. Fixed.
- Crash loading scenes with LW nodes like "Instance Info" in the Octane surfaces. Fixed.
- Fixed various displacement render issues (e.g. black triangles on the eye lids of characters).
- Fixed kernel hangs due to displacement mapping.
- Fixed kernel failure when a mesh emitter with zero scale and non-zero translation is rendered.
- Fixed some visible gaps between displacement triangles.
- Disabled implicit alpha channel that was used in the info channel kernel, fixing weird borders when alpha channel is disabled.
- Fixed incorrect sampling of the material preview, which should cause it to clear up much faster.
- Increased maximum path depths in the PMC kernel to 2048.
- Layout crash if the first clone of an object is disabled and rendering LW clones as instances is enabled. Fixed.
- Crash in scenes with deformations motion blur. Fixed.
- Fixed crash in the geometry compilation if degenerated triangles were used for displacement mapping
- Fixed a dead-lock in the geometry compilation.
- Fixed broken asynchronous tonemapping over net rendering.
- Fixed a displacement corner case that was resulting in black borders around triangles.
- Fixed kernel fail in case a scene contains only image texture nodes without an image.
- Fixed bad convergence in direct lighting kernel, when glossy materials are used
- Fixed incorrect report of texture usage
- Fixed a bug in the net render daemon that didn't stop the slave correctly if the master just disconnects.
- Support of vertex normal maps is broken. Fixed.
- Scanning for network daemons uses less network resources and is faster.
- Parameter "parallelism" goes now up to 8, which increases render performance by a couple percent, but you should render at least 500 samples per GPU, because caustics will take longer to appear.
- Fixed a kernel failure when an empty image texture node is rendered.
- Fixed a bug in displacement.
- Fixed two potential issues on OSX that may cause black seems in displacement mapping and an invalid projection if perspective projection is used.
- Removed the "Tangent U" mode in the Infochannel kernel, not supported now.


-Juanjo

[geo_n]

Wonder what is this error? I didn't get this when testing the demo. Now its there when starting up lightwave for the first time. Its gone after closing layout and launching again.

[juanjgon]

Wonder what is this error? I didn't get this when testing the demo. Now its there when starting up lightwave for the first time. Its gone after closing layout and launching again.

I think that you are mixing the Octane.dll and Octane.dat files from one version and the .p plugin file of other version. Please, download the .zip file again and be sure that you have the .dll/.dat files in your LW/bin folder and the .p file all from the same .zip file.

-Juanjo

[gordonrobb]

Thread has confused me. I had a notion that it meant every day I could come here and get a new build. That isn't the case I'm now guessing.

Is the front post changed when a new build has been added? I'm easily confused I know.

Also, if this is going to be how it is done, can we have a link to an archive of changes, so that I can try to keep track of that if I miss an update?

[juanjgon]

Daily build is a concept that means that this is the last build I have with the last Octane API and with the last critical bugs fixed. But there is not a new build each day ... it only has critical bugs fixed and minor new features, but you don't need to update your plugin if you don't have problems, or if you are in a middle of a project.

Every time I update the daily build, you will see the changes on this thread. Check it from time to time if you want, but you can skip this builds if you don't have problems, there is nothing new really important on them.

-Juanjo

[geo_n]

Wonder what is this error? I didn't get this when testing the demo. Now its there when starting up lightwave for the first time. Its gone after closing layout and launching again.

I think that you are mixing the Octane.dll and Octane.dat files from one version and the .p plugin file of other version. Please, download the .zip file again and be sure that you have the .dll/.dat files in your LW/bin folder and the .p file all from the same .zip file.

-Juanjo

Double checked. I think its caused by using intel hd 4000 for display while my puny nvidia card is assigned for rendering. Anyway its no biggie.

Is mdd motionblur supported? Does it need to be world space? I have an mdd mesh parented to a null but its not getting any motionblur in F10.

[juanjgon]

Is mdd motionblur supported? Does it need to be world space? I have an mdd mesh parented to a null but its not getting any motionblur in F10.

Do you have the deformations motion blur enabled in the render target root node options?

-Juanjo

[gordonrobb]

Daily build is a concept that means that this is the last build I have with the last Octane API and with the last critical bugs fixed. But there is not a new build each day ... it only has critical bugs fixed and minor new features, but you don't need to update your plugin if you don't have problems, or if you are in a middle of a project.

Every time I update the daily build, you will see the changes on this thread. Check it from time to time if you want, but you can skip this builds if you don't have problems, there is nothing new really important on them.

-Juanjo

ah, so you will also have the normal new build threads when you update versions? This one is more for quick bug-fix builds?

[juanjgon]

ah, so you will also have the normal new build threads when you update versions? This one is more for quick bug-fix builds?

Yes, for the main releases there are going to be the normal build threads like before.

-Juanjo

[geo_n]

Is mdd motionblur supported? Does it need to be world space? I have an mdd mesh parented to a null but its not getting any motionblur in F10.

Do you have the deformations motion blur enabled in the render target root node options?

-Juanjo

Yep it was off. Any reason why this is off by default?
Also when I turned it on why is the render status saying MB disabled?