We're very proud to announce the availability of a stable version of OctaneRender™ SE 1.50.
OctaneRender™ SE 1.50 introduces support to the Alembic file format for animation import. This version provides scripting capabilities and a time slider to seamlessly load animated geometry and camera data. It eases grouping nodes, hides complex node setups, presents a primary visibility feature that defines an object's visibility to the camera, offers more shadow casting options and offers new texture transforms with border rendering.
New features since 1.20:
- The New Node System
- From simple input/output linker nodes, complex node graphs may be created with ease
along with an option to hide complex set ups. A versioning system in this node system
allows converter code for older files, which makes backward compatibility possible for
scenes created across versions. - Image Texture Transforms
- The scale float pin in the previous versions is replaced by a texture transform pin,
and an additional border mode. This allows more control over how image textures are
mapped through the application of a matrix texture coordinate. The border mode provides
one tile of the image, with the option to set adjacent tiles as mirror images of each other.
Adjusting the position, rotation and scale of the image texture is made easier having been
integrated into the UI. - Texture Projections
- Mapping modes (or texture projections) supplementing texture transforms have
been added. The spherical, cylindrical, flat, box, and perspective mapping modes
allows extensive manipulation of the UV transforms and world space coordinates used
in image textures, procedural textures and camera mapping. - Object Visibility Properties
- Visibility properties for objects or object groups may be specified through
the UI with on/off options for shadow casting and camera visibility, along with an
overall visibility slider. - Alembic Support
- Alembic files may now be loaded as a node graph into OctaneRender™ SE 1.50.
The render engine now supports animated geometry and camera data loaded from Alembic
files including camera motion blur. While for plugin editions, an interface in the
API stores a geometry archive as an Alembic file, eventually allowing the integrated
plugins to export animated scenes as Alembic files. - Time Slider
- Loading, compiling and rendering animated geometry from an Alembic file is
simple with the new time slider integrated into the UI. This aids scrubbing through
the camera animation in preparation for the final render. - Lua Scripting
- The added Lua scripting support allows everyone to add some functionality to
OctaneRender™ SE 1.50 without touching the actual code base. - Packaging
- Support for storing a scene as a package is added, i.e. saving an .ocs file
plus all used external files into one archive. This feature replaces embedding
images in .ocs files by packing the whole scene instead. This enables its movement
across applications, and to the cloud. - Improved API
- Improvements in the API increases the commonality between the OctaneRender™
Integrated Plugin Editions and the Standalone Edition. All functionality that is
available in the Standalone Edition will be available to the Plugin Editions via the API.
Download
Licensed customers can download the new release in the Downloads section of the Customer Area (log in required) and can also find more details about this release in the Commercial Product News & Releases forum.
The OctaneRender™ SE 1.50 demo version will be available soon.
Cheers,
The OctaneRender™ Team