We are happy to announce the release of OctaneRender™ Standalone 1.50. A big THANK YOU to all who gave feedback during the 1.50 development cycle.
EDIT: Superseded by version 1.51.
Main changes since version 1.20
Rendering
- Added support for object properties to control the direct/indirect visibility of objects via object layer map nodes.
- Added general support for various texture projections: UV, spherical, cylindrical, linear, perspective, box mapping.
- Added ability to apply an additional transformation in the mapped UVW space.
- Added ability to apply the texture projection in local object (/instance) space.
- Added border modes to image texture nodes to control the behavior of image textures outside the standard UV range [0 .. 1].
- Added animation support.
- Added time slider, which provides control over the current time, frame rate and the shutter interval time.
- Improved wire frame rendering of the info channel kernel.
- Added new options to the info channel kernel, to disable distributed ray tracing (DOF, camera motion blur, pixel filtering), to highlight back faces in wire frame mode and to enable bump/normal mapping.
- Added the possibility to set the value of greyscale color texture nodes to values > 1, which can be helpful to set higher bump strengths than previously possible.
- Increased the maximum render resolution to 32K x 32K pixels.
- Replaced daylight/turntable animation buttons by Lua scripts.
- Added Lua script to render animations.
- Added the ability to enable asynchronous HDR tone-mapping via the API, reducing overhead if the plugins want to render sub-frame motion blur.
Lua Scripting
- Integrated LuaJIT into Octane and developed an API to access the node system, parts of the render framework and to script user interfaces.
- Provided Lua tutorials in the Lua scripting forum: viewforum.php?f=73
- Added a Lua script menu listing all scripts in a directory specified in the application preferences.
- Added a Lua script editor.
- Added ability to launch a script during the startup of Octane and to run Octane without an UI.
Data Management / Node System
- From the ground up rewritten node system.
- Added versioning to nodes and node graphs, allowing proper conversion when projects are moved between different versions.
- Introduced a new .OCS file format to store more information in a more compact way and to support versioning (still human readable).
- Added ability to animate node data.
- Added node/pin/graph descriptions, which are used by Lua, the API and the Standalone user interface.
- Introduced generic node graphs, replacing specialized macro nodes.
- Introduced generic linker nodes which provide an interface of the content of a node graph to the "outside world".
- Added ability to group/ungroup items in a node graph.
- Replaced the .OCM file format which was specially used for macro nodes by a generic package file format .ORBX, which packs all files used by a project with the project file itself into one file.
- Added support to load animated Alembic files.
- Added support to export animated Alembic files via the plugin API.
- Updated large parts of the API to expose the new node system functionality to the plugins and Lua, allowing the plugins to export scenes into .OCS/.ORBX files so that they can be loaded in the Standalone, too. This also requires a lot of work from the plugin developers which is why this area will hopefully continue to improve over time.
- Added ability to specify image data directly as value via the API, removing the need to always go via image files.
- Added 2D transform and transform value nodes.
- Added possibility to specify rotation order in transformation nodes with 3D rotation.
- Added caching of downloaded LiveDB material which speeds up access to LiveDB materials that are used often.
Other
- Improved UI by having proper pin and node names and by reordering pins to a more logical structure.
- Improved numeric edit fields allowing to control its value by holding the mouse button down and sliding up/down.
- Added the ability to have a larger value range than the slider range.
- Switched to an online manual.
- Added buttons to automatically "unfold" of a node graph to the node graph editor toolbar. It's not perfect, but sometimes quite useful.
Changes since version 1.37
For those people who have been following the release candidates, here is the list of the fixes since 1.37:
- Fixed incorrect Alembic camera import issues (see viewtopic.php?p=175194#p175194 and viewtopic.php?p=175309#p175309)
- Fixed a crash during Alembic import.
- Removed upper limit of the camera scale pin.
- Linker nodes created during grouping of nodes, will be created in the horizontal order of the source pins they are connected to (viewtopic.php?p=175189#p175189).
- Fixed broken Lua shortcuts.
- Added unfold buttons to node graph editor.
- Changed animation scripts to use the shutter interval display mode of the time slider.
- The slider step value of the start/end times in the animation script UI are now updated according to the frame rate.
- Fixed incorrect coloring of numeric edit fields if you enter an out-of-slider-range value per keyboard.
- Fixed a crash bug happening at certain resolutions while rendering animations via the Lua scripts.
GPU Limitations
- We dropped the support of GPUs with compute capability < 2.0, i.e. currently only Fermi and Kepler GPUs are supported.
- Since we have some issues building Octane with the current CUDA toolkit 6.0 RC, we cannot support Maxwell GPUs (GTX 750, 750Ti) yet. We plan to provide an update with Maxwell support as soon as those issues are resolved.
Download
Windows
- 64-bit installer
- 32-bit installer
MacOS X
- 32-bit and 64-bit installer
Linux
- 64-bit ZIP archive
Happy rendering,
Your OTOY Team
