OctaneRender™ 3.0 for Houdini™ alpha build 3.00.4.0

[juanjgon]

Hi,

This is a new alpha release of the OctaneRender™ 3.0 for Houdini™ plugin. This 3.00.4.0 build is available for the Houdini 13.0/14.0/15.0 last production builds for Windows x64, Linux gcc4.8 and OSX 10.10

This build adds the support for the Houdini volume primitive objects and for the Octane native OpenVDB rendering, among other improvements.

Alpha and beta version disclaimer
In contrast to v2 we want to do the alpha and beta testing publicly, to get more feedback earlier and to have changes tested more thoroughly. The plan is to let all users with a valid v2 license use the v3 alpha and beta versions until we decide that the beta period has ended and we release the first stable v3. After that you will have to upgrade to v3 or will not be able to use any v3 versions (including alpha and beta versions) anymore. We don't know yet, when that will be, but we will give you a warning a few weeks in advance so you can prepare.

This is an alpha release, so please consider this more a test or development release which may not be stable enough for a production environment. All the new 3.0 features are under development.


Alpha release 3.00.4.0
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... indows.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _Linux.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... ni_OSX.zip

Standalone version for the network rendering nodes
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _4_win.exe
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _macos.dmg
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _linux.zip

New features of OctaneRender™ 3.00
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=51679

Documentation (not updated with the new Octane 3 features yet)
http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Houdini/


=============================================
RELEASE 3.00.4.0
=============================================

* NATIVE HOUDINI VOLUME RENDERING:
- Support of the Houdini volume primitives.
- Support of the Houdini VDB primitives if they are converted to volume primitives using the CovertVDB SOP node.
- New "Volumes" tab in the OBJ spare parameter to enable the volume rendering and set the grids export options.
- New input in the material output VOP node to link Octane medium nodes to be used with the volume objects.
- Volumetrics medium materials real time update in the IPR.
- New option in the ROP node to enable/disable the volume objects update while rendering in update mode.
- New "V" switch in the IPR window to enable/disable the volume objects update while time scrubbing.

* OCTANE OPENVDB RENDERING:
- Support of the Octane native OpenVDB files rendering.
- New "OpenVDB" tab in the OBJ spare paramaters to enable the OpenVDB from files rendering and set the grids and other settings.
- The OpenVDB from file rendering can be enabled over any kind of OBJ nodes, for example an empty Geometry node, but the Null node is not allowed.

* OTHER NEW FEATURES:
- Upgraded OpenSubDiv to version 3, which should be more robust than the previous version.
- Added support for large amounts of geometry, i.e. you can render now scenes with more than 19.6 million triangles. Please be aware though that it still needs to fit into GPU memory.
- Volume emission works now different depending on which emission node is used: The temperature channel of a volume will modulate the temperature if a black body emission node is used and the emission power if a texture emission node is used.
- Exposure and hot pixel removal also work with the baking camera now.
- Improved baking edge noise removal.
- Improved compilation of acceleration structure for texture baking.
- Gamma now is applied after the camera response curve to eliminate errors when recalculation of the rendered image to different gamma is needed.
- Added support for displacement textures when using the baking camera.
- Hopefully improved the handling of scenes with many material/texture/geometry nodes (>100,000).
- Allowing a zero AO distance, with which you can emulate the old GI mode "Sample environment" which got removed with version 3.00.
- Added the possibility to render volumes without absorption or scattering but with emission.
- Enable/Disable states in the sets of the OBJ spare parameters.

* BUGS FIXED:
- The material is not updated after remove texture links from inputs without parameters (like bump or normal). Fixed.
- Fixed out-of-core memory setup on Linux.
- Fixed a bug which would render the inverse normal when a position is specified for the baking camera.
- Fixed rendering of volumes with small gaps.
- Fixed volume export from regular grid.
- Fixed size of network preferences dialog.
- Working around some weird CUDA driver issue by keeping buffers page-locked for longer. Hopefully this improves the refresh rate when many GPUs are used.
- Fixed multiple volume intersections having emission artifacts.
- Fixed shadow artifacts on surfaces when rendering nested meshes with volumetric media (fully transparent specular material with IOR=1 and "fake shadows" enabled) and daylight environment.
- Fixed missing shadows if render layers are enabled and "visibility only" is ticked.
- Fixed cosine mix texture.
- Fixed issue with noise in some info channels when using the baking camera
- Fixed wireframe render when using the baking camera.


Thanks,
-Juanjo

[sekow]

nice!

do I understand it right that we are able to render volumes as:
- houdini volume primitives
- or as a vdb but from disk

its not possible to render vdbs directly out of houdini (without having them cached on disk), only when converted to classic houdini volume prims.
is that right?

I cant figure out how to change the density value. it seems that it does not matter if its 1 or 1000, its seems to be clamped at 1.
if I change the scale value in the medium scattering, it does change from 0 - 1 but not above.

[eyeonestudio]

Could you make VDB Sample Scene?

[juanjgon]

You can render any native Houdini OpenVDB object. You only need to add a ConvertVDB SOP node to convert it to a "Volume" object.

-Juanjo

[juanjgon]

I cant figure out how to change the density value. it seems that it does not matter if its 1 or 1000, its seems to be clamped at 1.
if I change the scale value in the medium scattering, it does change from 0 - 1 but not above.

I suppose that this is the normal behavior, because I think that 1.0 means full opaque. The problem can be the "Volume step length" parameter in the render target kernel node. You need to decrease it if you want to render full opaque volumes, as you can see in the last attached image.

-Juanjo

[lukasvojir]

Hi, I can't get it to run - I get (126) error - Could not load - probably because file was intended to use with different version of Houdini - even though I am using the 15.0.347 build with the corresponding version of Octane - not sure what am I doing wrong...

[juanjgon]

Hi, I can't get it to run - I get (126) error - Could not load - probably because file was intended to use with different version of Houdini - even though I am using the 15.0.347 build with the corresponding version of Octane - not sure what am I doing wrong...

This means that the plugin lib can't be loaded. Are you working in Windows?

-Juanjo

[lukasvojir]

Hi, I can't get it to run - I get (126) error - Could not load - probably because file was intended to use with different version of Houdini - even though I am using the 15.0.347 build with the corresponding version of Octane - not sure what am I doing wrong...

This means that the plugin lib can't be loaded. Are you working in Windows?

-Juanjo

Yes - W10 - I have the latest Standalone installed and also the Visual C++ 2012

[juanjgon]

The problem can be the variables in the houdini.env file. Please, check the PATH variable to be sure that it is pointing to the bin folder of the plugin directory, something like this:

PATH = "C:/path/to/octane/bin;$PATH"

-Juanjo

[lukasvojir]

Ah, thank you! I typed the PATH incorrectly...