We are happy to announce the release of Octane 4 RC1, having added several features and addressed many issues in the XB stage.
Please note that this build will expire in 60 days, this is now shown on the bottom right of the standalone release.
As before, some introductory material on V4 can be found here: first release post of V4.
Whilst we have reached the feature lock milestone, we consider this a non-stable release, as we expect to stabilise in preparation for the first stable. Until then, please do not use this for production purposes.
Please make sure you have NVIDIA driver 387 or newer on Windows and Linux, and any CUDA driver for Mac that supports CUDA 9.1. Please also note that architecture improvements mean we can no longer support Fermi GPUs.
Changes since OctaneRender V4 XB4:
New volumetric AI denoiser
A second AI denoiser system is now exposed in the denoiser panel, specifically trained to denoise volumes (and volume passes) that may have required many many thousands of samples to become completely or nearly noise free in Octane 3 (note that AI light also helps AI volumetric denoising even more in scenes with many point light sources). Because volumetric passes have very low frequency details, the Volumetric AI denoiser should not be used with less than 1000 samples in the goal is to preserve details for final render quality that would be expected from a 2K to 10K sample render of the scene. Future versions of Octane will continuously improve volumetric lighting and denoising in through the already successful ongoing user submissions of ORBX test scenes (or ORC jobs) where denoising could be improved due to a corner case the AI has not yet been trained on.
New IOR texture input for Materials
Material IOR in the base layer of Universal Materials is no longer limited to scalar values, and can now be controlled procedurally with textures nodes and OSL shaders connected to a new 1/IOR texture input pin.
New 8:1 GPU texture compression
You can now compress RGB or greyscale image textures for rendering via the image import preferences. Compressed textures use just 1/3 to 1/8 the VRAM of normal RGBA textures while rendering. Compressed textures incur zero speed loss, and are often visually and perceptually identical to their uncompressed counterparts in many cases. Octane can now also load compressed DDS files directly into texture nodes where they will automatically preserve their specified compression settings when stored in GPU memory.
Import of individual layer from multi-layer EXR
Added support for loading an individual layer of a multiple layer EXR input file in image texture node import preferences. This can be used to re-load the multi-layer EXR output file of a render target or render job into an OSL post processing and compositing node graph in Octane. Such a system can further perform granular per render layer beauty and lighting pass compositing, denoising, blending, filtering, relighting/multi-light and color correction - with the full power and flexibility of OSL shader nodes.
New scene exporter
With this new "Render To Mesh" script node in the context menu under "Other" you can use Octane's internal ORBX scene translation system to flatten and export scene geometry connected to this node to FBX / Alembic files with one click. Note that this system does not yet export volumes or other primitives which are not supported directly in the FBX / Alembic formats. We are working on adding the FBX material export but that work isn't finished yet.
Fixes and other additions:
- Improve OBJ loading speed by between 15-25%.
- Fixed AI Light update for Network Render.
- Fixed baking camera.
- Universal material: Removed metallic influence on calculation of sheen.
- Universal material: Fixed incorrect fake shadows with colour even when transmission is black.
- Universal material: Fixed some incorrect darkening when using Octane BRDF.
- Universal material: Fixed incorrect attenuation.
- Universal material: Added 1/IOR setting to the base layer (see above).
- Universal material: Fixed artefact on coating layer of universal material when changing roughness of the base specular layer.
- Universal material: Split transmission colour from albedo colour into the new transmission pin.
- Fixed a GGX sampling error.
- Nishita sky: Fixed some very bright sunlight from Nishita sky model when the sun is just below the horizon.
- Planetary environment: Improved appearance of star field
- Planetary environment: Fixed rendering of sunset at high altitudes
- Fixed a couple of issues with gizmos operating on scatter nodes.
- Fixed scaling of gizmo handles on some camera projections.
- Fixed a crash on the roughness info pass.
- Fixed a crash when attempting to render hairs with zero vertices.
- Fixed rendering of meshes with an opacity map inside the environment medium.
- Updated OSL library to 1.9 and add support for the hash() function.
- Fixed integer overflow in GUI library if images with very large resolutions are displayed.
- Note nodes are now resizable.
- Added CTRL+A shortcut to select all nodes in the node graph editor.
- Fixed a hang when using some special characters in the text editors.
- UI improvements for picking image files in the image tiles texture node.
Downloads for users with a regular license
OctaneRender for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender for Windows (zip)
OctaneRender for Mac OS
OctaneRender for Linux
Downloads for users with a subscription license
OctaneRender for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender for Windows (zip)
OctaneRender for Mac OS
OctaneRender for Linux
Happy rendering,
Your OTOY Team