This is a beta release, so please consider this more a test or development release which may not be stable enough for a production environment.
Download link build 2.11.1 beta - 10/Oct/2014
Windows: http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... indows.zip
OSX: http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... .1_OSX.zip
* NEW FEATURES:
- Pick surfaces function disabled for the objects unseen by camera or full dissolved.
- IPR support and display of the render passes enabled in the render target passes node.
- New option "update instancers" in the render target root node options panel. It is disabled by default to make the scene updates a lot faster while rendering. Should be enabled if you are rendering the sequences in "update scene" mode and you have animated instancers in the scene.
- Complete rewritten scene update functions. Now the plugin should be a lot faster updating GPUs while rendering sequences in "update" mode, specially in complex scenes or scenes with a lot of instances.
- The default "Objects motion blur steps" parameter is now 2. Complex scenes with the old default 6 MB steps needs a lot of time to be updated among frames, and 6 steps are only needed in scenes with fast rotating objects. Two MB steps are enough to get a right MB effect in a lot of scenes.
- The default film response in the camera imager node is now the same than in Standalone, the "Agfacolor_HDC_100_plusCD"
- Restructured beauty render passes: The main beauty pass is split into render passes which - when all added together - result in the main beauty pass. We distinguish now by the type of BRDF: diffuse/reflection/refraction where the difference between "diffuse" and "reflection" is that "diffuse" is a pure Lambertian reflection while "reflection" is all the rest (i.e. specular and glossy reflections)
- Added the "distributed tracing" feature to the render passes node. This has the same functionality as in the info channel kernel node, i.e. if enabled, motion blur and DOF are sampled in the info passes.
- Added new compression parameter for the multilayer EXR files to the render passes node.
- Added highlight compression option to camera imager node. Using this option, the user can reduce burned out highlights by compressing them (which decreases their contrast). This works similar to the Reinhard tone mapping.
- Added three new parameters to the color correction node: "Hue", "Saturation" and "Contrast". They do what their names say: controlling hue, saturation and contrast of the input texture. Since Octane textures are sampled spectrally, hue and saturation work not too great. But as long as you use them not too aggressively the y should do the trick. We might have an idea how to improve that, but that requires some more work. (We also removed the "brightness scale" and the "dark level" parameters since we ran out of fields in our color correction shader node)
- Added new noise texture node which currently has 4 noise types: perlin, turbulence, circular and chips. "perlin" is like the turbulence node with "use turbulence" disabled. "turbulence" is like the turbulence node with "use turbulence" enabled. "circular" is a Worley noise and "chips" is a Voronoi noise.
- The plugin has their own settings now. As expected, there has been a lot of confusion of users that work with the plugin and the Standalone and want to use network rendering only in one of these. As the application settings (including the network render settings) have been shared this was hard to manage.
- Displacement amount is now configured as real units distance parameter to have more precision for very low displacements.
- The IPR now uses the native Octane picking functions to select the materials/objects with the mouse. This functions suports new features like pick surfaces on the instances or picking over cameras with any kind of configuration (orthograpic, perspective correction, lens shift, etc.)
- Added option "static noise" to the direct lighting and the path tracing kernels, which is disabled by default. When enabled, the noise is static, i.e. doesn't change between frames. Well, currently it still changes a bit, because some parts are still using random sampling, but we will improve it in the future. For now, we want to bring back the possibility to have dynamic noise, i.e. noise that changes every frame.
* BUGS FIXED:
- The main beauty pass is not exported while working with the render passes system. Fixed.
- Fixed hot-pixel filtering in beauty passes.
- Fixed the object ID render pass
- Fixed broken AO info channel kernel / render pass (AO was affecting both sides of a surface)
- Fixed incorrect tone mapping in the info passes.
- Fixed broken saving of EXR files, when the image width isn't a multiple of 4 pixels.
- Fixed slow loading of large images.
- When the user press abort in F9/F10 preview window, Octane doesn't stop the rendering and continue working with the infochannel passes. Fixed.
- Fixed bug in network render settings dialog where daemons on the master's computer were not filtered out, but displayed as "unknown".
- Fixed a backslash problem in the OSX file names.
- Fixed some problems in the IPR window (scale, supersampling, etc.) while rendering infochannel passes.
- Render stops at 99%. Firt try to fix this issue. To be checked.
- The limited region doesn't work in the IPR if the "Half Res" option is enabled. Fixed.
- Fixed incorrect saving of HDR images at specific resolutions.
* NOTES:
- Please, be aware that the frame complete "by time" feature is not compatible with the render passes. Render passes must be rendered only in "max. samples" mode.
Enjoy it
-Juanjo
