We have made substantial progress towards the first stable release of V4, and along the way we are happy to report we have added more improvements on top of numerous fixes.
Introductory material on V4 can be found here: first release post of V4.
As with all experimental and test releases, please do not use this build for production work, and please note that we still classify this as an experimental release. We cannot guarantee that scenes saved with this version would be compatible with future releases.
Important notes:
- NVIDIA Driver version 387 or higher is required on Windows and Linux, and any CUDA driver for Mac should work that supports CUDA 9.1.
- Octane no longer supports Fermi GPUs.
- Network render is now reinstated, but without AI Light updates, while it is being finalised.
- AI Denoiser will not denoise volumes and hairs yet.
Changes since OctaneRender V4 XB3:
Light linking
With light IDs set in the emitter nodes, you can exclude them by material in object layers, and also globally in the kernel settings. Currently we have 8 light IDs and you can also choose whether to enable the sun and environment separately.
As an example, here is a scene rendered with some number of emitters:
We then add another emitter:
But we would like to suppress the highlight of the emitter on the spheres, but keep the ground lighting and shadows, so we exclude that light on these objects' materials:
In the case that we want to suppress the highlight on only two, we can do that as well:
Global light exclusion
With the same light IDs used by light linking, you can enable/disable your light IDs globally in your kernel settings.
Universal material
Added transmission, dispersion, thin film interference, emission and medium to universal material. This means the universal material is now complete.
You can now have coatings, such as this:
Universal material now incorporates multiple BXDF lobes extended from the previous version of universal material, going from base layer to top layer in order:
- Specular transmission
Diffuse BRDF
Specular reflection
Coating
Sheen
The universal material now has a transmission pin, which gives you control over the base layer of the material, simultaneously reducing the diffuse reflection weighting, thus letting more light transmit through the material. Working in conjunction with albedo color, the universal material can then render what we called the specular material in Octane as shown in the image.
Likewise, the metallic pin stays consistent with the previous iteration of universal material and allows you to specify conductor materials. The increasing level of metallic reduces the amount of light gets to the lower diffuse / transmission layers, so that when metallic is 1.0, there won't be any diffuse or transmission contribution.
The roughness parameter controls both layers of specular reflection and transmission, and hence it does the same for the metallic settings.
An emission pin is also added to the universal material to allow emission of light like the diffuse material.
Improved AI Light
For many scenes, especially those with many directional lights, and fixed several other smaller issues.
A test scene below containing 1247 emitting quads - without AI Light on the left, and AI Light enabled on the right, for a total of 50 samples per pixel.
Added UDIM support
You can now create an Image Tiles texture node, which you can use to set up your tile grid.
Fixes and smaller additions
- Out of core geometry and textures is now automatic, you don't need to set any VRAM limits for these anymore. If enabled in preferences, Octane will automatically start using system memory when VRAM runs out.
- Reinstated network rendering, without AI Light updates, which is being finalized.
- Added option in preferences to turn on/off the native window title bar.
- Added full material preview on planes.
- Added ability to capture direct and/or indirect light for light passes.
- Added a cropped sphere as an option to the application preferences for the default object to use for texture previews.
- Improved processing speed for AI Light.
- Lua API: added
imageTexturesSize
field to the table returned fromoctane.render.getDeviceProperties()
. - AI Light now works with sphere emitters.
- Improved AI Light processing performance.
- To avoid confusion, the render view will now only show the number of enabled render devices, as opposed to the number of devices being used in total (eg for denoising and rendering all together).
- Small reduction in memory consumption when using AI Light.
- Added near clip plane support for Z depth pass.
- Added support for point sampling in OSL
texture()
calls. - Added options in texture and blackbody emission nodes to keep emissive power constant when applying uniform scaling (if surface brightness is disabled).
- Fixed a jump when starting to drag a node in the node graph editor.
- Fixed denoiser blend option not working properly when using hot pixel filter.
- Fixed render failure when denoiser output render pass is enabled, and the denoiser is disabled in the imager node.
- Fixed display of partially transparent images in node preview component.
- Fixed layer shadow pass.
- Increased the maximum number of OSL nodes in one texture node tree from 500 to approximately 30,000.
- Fixed crash when rendering some meshes that have multiple materials where one or more have displacement.
- Fixed a bug where alpha values were written into the output image buffer when the alpha channel was disabled.
- Fixed two problems with the render layer shadow pass: shadows when there was no emitter, and shadow strengths being incorrect.
- Fixed crashes when rendering simple scenes that contain an emitter.
- Fixed render failure on some simple meshes.
- Fixed render failure on some meshes that happens after caching is complete.
- Fixed incorrect memory consumption reporting sometimes.
- Fixed a possible hang when using AI Light and modifying other settings.
- Fixed some unintended behaviour when using gizmos, including drawing a render region while dragging, or activating material/object picker when selecting a mini frame.
- Fixed a crash when using AI Light in a scene with no emitters.
- Fixed render failures when AI Light processing is interrupted with either emission changes or other changes in the scene.
- Fixed some extra memory consumption when switching from a scene with emitters to one that has none.
- Fixed a case where device memory stats returns total memory as unavailable memory.
- Fixed a case where sometimes recompiling OSL will cause a pin to get disconnected when it should not be.
- Fixed a crash when using AI Light if all lights in the scene have a sample rate of zero.
- Fixed a case where SSS data is accidentally added into the transmission pass.
- Fixed camera coordinate space in previews.
- Fixed AI Light crash if an emitter is moved immediately before mesh caching begins.
- Fixed clay mode for universal materials.
- Fixed normal passes to record incorrectly sometimes.
- Fixed the export of raw buffers when the resolution is not a multiple of 4.
- Fixed a crash and incorrect motion blur that happens sometimes when making changes in placement nodes.
- Fixed handling of int[2] and int[3] input parameters for OSL shaders.
- Fixed a very random render failure.
Downloads for users with a regular license
regular version for Windows (installer)
regular version for Windows (ZIP archive)
regular version for Mac OS X (DMG image)
regular version for Linux (ZIP archive)
Downloads for users with a subscription license
subscription version for Windows (installer)
subscription version for Windows (ZIP archive)
subscription version for Mac OS X (DMG image)
subscription version for Linux (ZIP archive)