OctaneRender™ 4.0 for Houdini™ - beta build 4.00.0.15 RC5

[juanjgon]

Hi!

This is a new build of the OctaneRender™ 4.0 for Houdini™ plugin compiled with the Octane 4.00 RC5 core. This release is available for the Houdini 16.0/16.5/17.0 latest production builds on Windows x64, Linux gcc6.3.1 and OSX 10.12. This plugin is also compatible with Houdini Indie (While working inside the Indie version, the plugin will have a 4k limited resolution while rendering sequences and the scene export and cloud rendering features disabled)

This release includes the first plugin build for Houdini 17.0!

Important notes:
- Please note that this build will expire in 120 days.
- As before, some introductory material on V4 can be found here: viewtopic.php?f=33&t=66013
- Whilst we have reached the feature lock milestone, we consider this a non-stable release, as we expect to stabilize 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.
- The OSX Houdini 17.0 build will be available as soon as possible, in an upcoming new release.


Release 4.00.0.15 regular license
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _Win64.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _Linux.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... ni_OSX.zip

Release 4.00.0.15 subscription license
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... n64_vr.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... nux_vr.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... OSX_vr.zip

Standalone version for the network rendering nodes
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... C5_win.exe
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _linux.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _macos.dmg


=============================================
RELEASE 4.00.0.15 RC5
=============================================

* PLUGIN FEATURES:
- New option in the Octane ROP node, Properties tab, to fully disable the DOF rendering.
- Added support for Houdini 17.0 (Windows/Linux)

* OCTANE BUGS FIXED:
- Octane is now trying to prevent the computer to go to sleep.
- Made a change in the render pipeline that hopefully increases the refresh rate at the beginning of rendering.
- Octane prints now a warning in the log if the environment variable CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES or CUDA_LAUNCH_BLOCKING is set. The effect of these is that not all GPUs are visible, causing rendering to be slower.
- Added support for emitters with "surface brightness" disabled to hair geometry.
- Fixed bug causing hair geometry emission to not to work at all.
- Fixed a bug where denoised alpha causes artifacts in denoiser output.
- Fixed a crash of an OSX net render master when a slave connects with it.
- Fixed incorrect alpha weight of beauty passes causing noisy, aliased edges.
- Fixed incorrect transition of the shadow passes to the background and between active and inactive layers.
- Fixed crash or incorrect normal import of subdivided, deformed meshes.
- Fixed crash of the net render master (on OSX) when a slave connects with it.
- Fixed incorrect values displayed in the not-enough-memory error message of the denoiser.
- Fixed incorrect behaviour when more than 64 render passes are enabled, which also caused a lot of error messages.
- Fixed texture preview.
- Fixed a crash when loading very small images.
- Fixed light linking passes 7 and 8.
- Fixed volume rendering when there are multiple volumes in the scene.
- Fixed some specular material differences from 3.08.
- Fixed denoise results when affect alpha option is enabled .
- Fixed AI Light with animated triangles in the scene.
- Fixed random colour texture.
- Fixed a performance issue when using direct light kernel with a medium or volume where absorption is very low.
- Improve OSL compiler performance.
- Fixed denoiser output when using affect alpha without an alpha channel.
- Fixed a case where network render GPU count was incorrect.
- Fixed artefacts when using high roughness on brdfs other than Octane.
- Fixed displacement crash on some meshes.
- Fixed Beckmann sampling for the specular case.
- Fixed some artefacts in compressed textures.
- Fixed some memory not being deallocated sometimes when using AI Light.
- Some performance optimizations for AI Light processing
- Speed up loading of .hdr files
- Improved how Octane deals with running out of memory, which fixes some cases where caching fails and then a render failure occurs.
- A small volume rendering performance improvement of between 5-10%.
- Fixed a significant performance regression from 3.08, where scenes with hundreds of unique meshes rendered significantly slower.
- Render speed improvements - in general v4 is now faster than v3, and info channel kernels are between 15-25% faster.
- Fixed crash caused by invalid primitives with emission.
- We no longer distribute the cuDNN library with Octane - when octane first loads, we download cuDNN if it has changed.


Enjoy it!
-Juanjo

[Angelos]

Damn you’re fast. Thank you!

[Techie]

Thanks Juanjo!

[blobbybarack]

Hey,
Got a problem with this one only with 17.
Freezing then crashing when diving into a octane network into shop ou mat context.
In Shop context > after diving into
In Mat context> after pressing tab to call a node

If you don't dive into those node. No crash. Rendering as expected.

H17,H16.5, Octane and HtoO have been reinstalled.
win 10
Gtx1080i 416.34
H17.352
Octane_4.00.0.15_Houdini_17.0.352_Win64
Octane RC 5

No problem with 16.5.571

[juanjgon]

Hey,
Got a problem with this one only with 17.
Freezing then crashing when diving into a octane network into shop ou mat context.
In Shop context > after diving into
In Mat context> after pressing tab to call a node

If you don't dive into those node. No crash. Rendering as expected.

H17,H16.5, Octane and HtoO have been reinstalled.
win 10
Gtx1080i 416.34
H17.352
Octane_4.00.0.15_Houdini_17.0.352_Win64
Octane RC 5

No problem with 16.5.571

Yes, sorry, I have several reports related to this same issue on Houdini 17. I'm trying to reproduce it here. Can you please share your houdini.env file to check your paths configuration?

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[blobbybarack]

h17 .env
HOUDINI_PATH = C:/Program Files/Octane_4.00.0.15_Houdini_17.0.352_Win64;&
PATH = C:/Program Files/Octane_4.00.0.15_Houdini_17.0.352_Win64/bin;$PATH



h16.5 .env
HOUDINI_PATH = C:/Program Files/Octane_4.00.0.15_Houdini_16.5.571_Win64;&
PATH = C:/Program Files/Octane_4.00.0.15_Houdini_16.5.571_Win64/bin;$PATH

[juanjgon]

I've found the source of the problems with the vopnet and shop nodes in Houdini 17. I'll try to release a new plugin build tomorrow including this fix and the latest RC6 Octane core.

Thanks for reporting this issue!
-Juanjo

[blobbybarack]

[blobbybarack]

there is few silly questions i keep asking myself at each release. It's maybe a little bit of topic but..i'm curious about you Juan.

What append if someday you loose patience, you quit or anything else ?
The contract between Otoy and Plugin dev is kinda blury to me.
From what i understand you own all the code you write for the plugin right ?
Are you working alone ? Is there any backup plan just in case something get wrong ?
Or a more personnal side. I'm quiet impressed by your reactivity and talents. Is it a full time job ? If not, how do you split your time between plugin dev and others activity ?

Acccording to an imaginary ratio between the time you spend on the plugin and the money you won with license, do you consider yourself in an long/middle term valuable project working on this plugin ?

I hope this is not intrusive questions.

Thanks for your work.

[juanjgon]

If something gets wrong, somebody else will continue my work, like always has happened in the software development history But well, I'm still young, and I have no plans to leave this project, so don't worry

Thanks,
-Juanjo