development update

[niuq.cam]

Very great news.
Thank you for the communication.

[smicha]

Image texture transforms! Thanks guys.

I just hope it is compatible with instancing using material map node...

[abstrax]

Just wondering..
Can't you add this new direct light sampler as an experimental kernel?
Could it still be useful for some of us who don't do much architectural work?

If it speeds up scenes like this car animation you've posted, then it can be an option for some cases...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4k0sOCf- ... etAKlv1Z2A

Suv

For now, we have put it aside, but I think we will look at the concept some time in the future again. I, too, would like to see it tested on more scenes so we might release it as a test, to see how it copes with your scenes. But even if it works, the main issues are:

- it introduces a lot more complexity and we are not sure how well it will work with motion blur
- when you just add it to the kernels, it would slow them down, even if the feature is not used. we have an idea how to solve it, but that will require some major work on the build system, for which we don't have time right now.

-> We are still keen on improving performance, and we still think there is room for improvements. We also have a bunch idea which we still need to try out. ... when we get to that. And we will probably also have a look at the light sampling again.

[abstrax]

One question i have: You showed in the picture about textures "transforms.png", in the chapter Border mode: wrap arround, black/white/clamp. I assume this is the mapping right? will there also be spehre, cubic, planar, and some more?

The border modes define, what happens, when we are outside of the [0..1] UV range. "Wrap around" enables tiling, "black" makes everything outside of this range black (useful for the opacity channel), "white, makes everything outside white and "clamp" just clamps the UV coordinates.

Currently we don't have any other texture mappings than UV (for images) and world coordinate space for noises.

Also i would wanna know - will there be better controls of an HDRI image. scaling and especially moving in x and y!

Kind regards Chris!

I probably didn't get your question, but you can already shift HDRI textures in the texture environment using the "rotation" pin, which is actually a shift of the lat/long coordinates.

[abstrax]

Marcus, thank you so very much. This was getting somewhat overdo, but we all understand a little better now. I'm excited.

However, like Gabe, I am wondering about:

visible in refractions?
visible in reflections? <-- specifically, this one!

Or were you lumping everything into Caustics?...

And it sounds like you can set an emitter to have no effect other than providing light (not cast shadows or block hdr bg etc)... is that about right?

With the current object properties you can't modify visibility in reflections and refractions. If it's not too hard to implement, it may be added in the not too distant future, now that the basic infrastructure is in place.

To your last question: Yes, that's correct.

[abstrax]

Will the visability feature work with the a diffuse plane (ground) with the "matte" feature to work? with a alpha background
So we can grab the caustics, AO and shadows into separate render passes?

I'm not sure, what you mean, but you can make object invisible to the camera and still have their indirect effects (like reflections, caustics, shadows) visible. It's definitely not a full blown render passes system, which is hard to do in a path tracer anyway, since most effects are just side effects. Everything is just reflections and refractions and emissions.

I may be a bit of a noob with lua but what could this be use for to the average user?
create custom made nodes like a uber shader? or some sort of 10 clicks in one node?
With there also be documentation with a command library and examples?

For the average user there will be not much use initially, but we plan to provide the ability to share scripts via the LiveDB. We hope that the script repository will then eventually have some gems that will be useful for most users. But yes, this is very much work in progress.

There will be some documentation as an HTML page and you can print the description of nodes, attributes, pins, node graphs, functions, modules in the script editor via some command (Thomas can probably tell you more).

[abstrax]

Hope 1.21 bring some of those features, but please take in consideration some others.

like Undo and region Rendering

Please remember, that version 1.5 won't be the last one for Octane

Would be nice if for some "simple features" that we don't have yet you guys could make a statement, for example:

Undo - Not possible for this and that reason
Region Rendering - possible but still need this and that to be available.
etc

Both features are on our TODO list and they have moved up a bit. The node system rewrite was a requirement for the undo system. Region rendering is not a small feature, but do-able and in the not too distant future we will have a look at it.

[FrankPooleFloating]

D'oh!.. Marcus, now I really wish I would have worded that better... I will be very specific:

If you turn off Camera Visibility for an object, will it still be reflected on other objects?

I just want to make sure that I am clear on this. My understanding (and hope) is that making objects invisible to camera still allows an object to affect the scene in every other way.

[abstrax]

D'oh!.. Marcus, now I really wish I would have worded that better... I will be very specific:

If you turn off Camera Visibility for an object, will it still be reflected on other objects?

I just want to make sure that I am clear on this. My understanding (and hope) is that making objects invisible to camera still allows an object to affect the scene in every other way.

Yes, that's the case. The object is just ignored in camera rays, but visible on all other rays (reflections, refractions, shadows).

[oguzbir]

Marcus Hi,

I wonder If you're aware of the problem.
Any self illumunated materials visible in the scene slows down render by half..

I use self-illumunated planes to add reflection on product shots.
I do use a HDR with them as well.
But those illumunated planes with emmisive diffuse materials tend to slow down the render a lot. Even though it's a just blackbody shader. Renders immidiately slows down by half.

Is there a way to overcome this. if not, will there be an optimization for that with the upcoming releases?

I just want to add a bit bright reflection plane thats all.. I do not want to light the scene with that.
I'm using diffuse kernel.