Due to the switch to CUDA 6.5 you will need a current graphics driver of version 344.x or higher.
On Mac OSX you will need a CUDA driver of version 6.5 or higher (see http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html).
This build includes the release of the LightWave 2015 plugin, with support for the FiberFX hair systems.
http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Lightwave3D/?page_id=602
Production release 2.16.0
http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... indows.zip
http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... .0_OSX.zip
Standalone version for the network rendering nodes
http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... _win64.zip
http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... _macos.dmg
Documentation
http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Lightwave3D/
These are all the new features of the plugin in this release:
- Reduced the brightness of the daylight environment by a factor of 0.6 for the new daylight model and 0.8 for the old model. This way there is a better match between the texture environment and the daylight environment. Or in other words: Exteriors rendered with the default exposure settings are less overexposed than before. Older scenes will be converted automatically and should render the same.
- Changed the default turbidity of the daylight environment to 2.4 to reduce the contrast between the sun and sky light.
- Improved object motion blur on objects with translation + rotation and only two key frames.
- Added option "Cast illumination" to emitter nodes. Disabling this option will disable emission, i.e. it won't be visible in diffuse reflections, but still be fully visible in specular reflections. It will also be excluded from the direct light calculation.
- The emission sampling rate can now be set to 0, which means that the emitter will be excluded from the direct light calculation.
- The ISO and FStop parameters are deprecated in the imager node. The exposure/iso/fstop settings of the old scenes are converted internally to the new exposure value.
- Added option "Surface brightness" to emitter nodes. Enabling this option will cause emitters to keep the surface brightness constant independent of the emitter surface area, i.e. the total emitted power will be dependent on the emitter surface area. The scaling is done in a way that a texture emitter will produce the same colour in the rendering (if the diffuse channel is black), when the camera response curve is set to "Linear/off", exposure to 1, gamma to 2.2 and vignette to 0. Disabling the option will keep the total emission power constant, i.e. the surface brightness will become dependent on the emitter surface area.
- Added option "Surface brightness" to the Octane light.
- Scaled exposure in the camera imager so that a texture environment produces the specified colour in the rendering, if the camera response curve is set to "Linear/off", exposure to 1, gamma to 2.2 and vignette to 0. The exposure of older scenes will be converted automatically.
- Added pin "Invert" to the polygon side texture, which will flip its behaviour.
- Automatic default sequential UV map for the FiberFX hair systems without UV data (base objects without UV maps, or hair systems from guides). This UV map can be used for example to random shade the hairs without problems in an animated sequence.
- Added new texture node "PolygonSide" which renders white on the front face and black on the backface of a polygon. You can use this to do backface culling (by putting this texture into the opacity channel) or to allow double-sided materials (placing it into a mix material) and textures (placing it into a mix texture).
- Added diffuse roughness parameter to the diffuse material node.
- New parameter in the Debug tab of the plugin options panel "Enable Statistics Collection". If enabled, anonymous render statistics are collected. See the 2.14 Standalone release notes.
- New parameter in the render passes node to export the passes as EXR half precision floats (16bit floating point numbers).
- Replaced "coherent mode" with a float parameter "coherent ratio", which allows you to blend between non-coherent rendering (0) and "super-coherent" rendering (1). Please be aware that for values above 0.4 you will usually need a few thousand samples per pixel to get rid of visible artifacts and values above 0.5 hardly ever make any sense.
- New plugin release for LightWave 2015.
- Support of the Layout FiberFX rendering in LightWave 2015. Support of the hair shading using the FiberFX node editor, linking the Octane materials to the root node hair "Material" input.
- In LightWave 2015, support of rendering sequences by range using the native LW range global settings. The old workaround to support range rendering with the settings in the rendering target has been removed in the 2015 plugin build.
- Alembic exporter now has a new option to export also a complete animated .orbx file to be used in the Standalone, including animated cameras, animated objects transformations and deformations and all material settings.
- Support of animated UV maps and animated parameters in the UVMAP node without reload the scene for each frame.
- Switched to CUDA 6.5
- Improved performance of Maxwell 2 GPUs (GTX 970 and GTX 980)
- Speed up processing of HDR textures which should reduce the delay when a scene with many HDR textures is loaded on the GPU.
- Added motion vector render pass.
- Added new option "AO alpha shadows" to info channel kernel. If enabled, opacity is now taken into account in the AO calculation.
- Added option "AO alpha shadows" to the render passes node.
- New feature to export the scene to an alembic .abc file while rendering the sequence with F10. This alembic file can store all the geometry information, the geometry animation and the camera parameters and animation. There is a new tab in the render target root node panel to support this new export feature. The export to .abc file is only avaliable in update scene mode.
- New tool in the render passes node to configure the file name while rendering sequence files.
- Coherent mode is now always disabled for the IPR rendering.
- Full support of deformations motion blur in "Update scene" mode. Frame reloading is no longer needed to render objects with deformations motion blur.
- New render passes node in the render target node editor to control the render passes feature. In this node you can set the file name or prefix for the output file/s, the output format, and the beauty/info passes enabled. 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)
- New information in the main rendering preview window about the render passes rendering status.
- New code in the main preview window to display the pass that is currently being rendered.
- Improved sampling in the direct lighting and path tracing kernels. This becomes very important after specular reflections / refractions and in scenes with emitters.
- Replaced the path termination strategy with a new one. The parameter "RR Prob" got replaced by "Path Term Power" in the kernels. The default setting should be good in most cases. If some dark patches stay too noisy too long, you can lower the value, which will slow down rendering, but cause Octane to spend more time on those areas.
- The direct lighting and path tracing kernels also have a new option "Coherent mode", which increases the render speed, but causes some "flickering" during the first samples/pixel and should be mainly used for the final rendering and if only if you plan to render 500 samples/pixel or more.
- The turbulence node got a new option "Use turbulence" which is on by default and when disabled, makes the noise variation more "symmetric" around medium brightness. Hard to explain, just try it out with a low octave number and you will see.
- New invert and gamma parameters in the turbulence node
- 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"
- 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.
- Shift parameter in the displacement node is now working in distance units to have more precision.
- New "Mirror Tile" parameter in the Image Texture node. This parameter enable the mirror tiling of the LightWave procedural textures to allow seamless texturing or displacements.
- Get "T" layers function now imports the "invert" parameter of the texture layer. In case of transparency layers, the "invert" parameter is inverted to match the LW transparency and the Octane opacity inverse behaviors.
- Get "T" layers function set the opacity and bump texture nodes to "float" by default to save GPU memory.
- New "render arbitrary frame ranges" feature in the render target root node options panel. The syntax for the frame ranges is the same than in LightWave (something like "10-30,35,40,50-70" for example)
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/97941224[/vimeo]
Enjoy it
-Juanjo
