Today we release the first stable of OctaneRender 2018.1. Thanks to all who tested the XB and RC builds - your feedback was vital. Of course it doesn't end there, we will always be open to more feedback.
To use Octane 2018.1, you need to have a Studio or Enterprise subscription license.
Important: we recommend that you upgrade your NVIDIA driver to version 419.17 or newer. There has been some critical fixes in this newer version.
Changes since 2018.1 RC6:
- Fixed undo after pasting a node into a node pin via the node inspector.
- Fixed undo after camera rotate with alt+left mouse button drag.
- Fixed noise in shadow pass when using uniform color environment.
- Fixed there sometimes being dark pixels on the top left of the denoiser output.
- Fixed inconsistent labelling of color vertex attribute node.
- Fixed UV set 2 not working on displacement triangles.
- Cryptomatte
- Deep render passes
- Vectron (analytic geometry)
- Vertex Attributes
- Spectron (procedural volumetric light system)
- Much less volume render noise
- NV Link support on RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti (Enterprise only)
- Direct Levelset surface rendering from VDB (can be fed into Vectron)
- Scatter depth limiting (i.e. fast fog rendering)
- Cached compressed textures
Cryptomatte
A Cryptomatte pass contains the masks for all object layers or for all materials in a scene. These masks can be used in post-processing to select one or more materials. The masks will be correctly anti-aliased, taking into account motion blur and DOF.
Vertex Attributes
You can now use vertex colors or other vertex attributes directly in Octane while rendering materials. Octane will load and interpolate automatically both real numbers and colors over the triangles in the scene, and provide them directly to your OSL shaders.
NVLink on consumer GPUs: RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080
NVLink gives you the ability to effectively double GPU VRAM by combining two cards into one pool of fast shared (not mirrored) memory. NVLink will currently only work with 2 cards, which either need to be both Quadros, or RTX cards.
SLI mode needs to be enabled for non-Quadro GPUs (TCC mode for Quadros). Ensure you use the bridge over your cards, or you may experience a large performance drop.
Vectron
Octane Vectron (Vector-Polygon) is a new procedural ‘uber’ primitive, providing infinite procedurally generated scenes, volumes, and geometry which bypass meshes and volumes. Vectron is revolutionary in that it has zero memory footprint, driving increased efficiencies when compared to meshes or volumes generated on CPUs. This enables Vectron to provide procedurally generated scenes entirely on the GPU without using GPU VRAM. Vectron provides awesome new tools in an artist’s workflow - and render triangle-free geometry using all of Octane's built in OSL and texture shaders and more.
Procedural Primitives using OSL [Open Shader Language] vector geometry nodes enable artists to create complex shapes, surfaces, volumes, warps, operators and effects. By ‘vectorizing’ meshes and volumes into Vectron objects, artists can now manipulate Vectron nodes in revolutionary new ways. Examples include: spheres, strands, sound waves, infinite planes, liquids, clouds, oceans, flow field and more.
Geometric Operators allow the procedural OSL geometry node graphs workflow to follow the same structure as OSL texture node graphs with 4D mixing, blending, and boundary operator nodes for skinning, Metaballs, and procedural resurfacing. Finally, Boolean operations are also enabled in Octane Vectron.
Octane will render SDF surfaces defined using OSL shaders directly without the need to mesh them first. You can change the surfaces with input variables without having to wait for any processing, and you can also create networks of set operations such as unions, subtractions, intersection, and their smooth variants also. None of which need to be meshed before rendering, and all compiled using OSL.
You can also easily take samples from shadertoy and feed them into the OSL Vectron geometry node like this:
Here is an example of an SDF smooth union with a material mix implemented as part of the union:
Less Volume Noise with Fast Fog (new scatter depth limiting)
We have modified the way we integrate over volumes and also introduced a new mechanism that allows you to limit the scattering depth in kernel settings. Often a good result needs only a scatter depth of 2 or 3 bounces, and if you limit the scatter depth to this, you should see a good gain in performance.
We have also improved our integration which results in less noise, particularly near the boundaries of volumes. For this we keep a legacy volume rendering setting in the kernel settings, because volumes look slightly different, but render faster with less noise.
Spectron and Procedural Volumetric Lights
Octane Spectron is a procedural lighting system enabling artists to create procedurally driven volumetric lighting - like spot lights - with blockers, barn doors, gels (in the distribution pin) and more.
We introduce a basic procedural light node type in 2018.1 XB1 which can be used for quick volumetric effects and spot light generation.
Direct Rendering of Levelset Surfaces
Octane can now render level set surfaces, including those from VDBs, such as this example below without first converting them to meshes.
These level sets will also work with Vectron, so that you can add procedural effects over surfaces defined by VDB level sets:
Downloads
Downloads for users with a Studio subscription license
OctaneRender Studio for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio for Windows (zip)
OctaneRender Studio for Mac OS
OctaneRender Studio for Linux
Downloads for users with an Enterprise subscription license
OctaneRender Enterprise for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Enterprise for Windows (zip)
OctaneRender Enterprise for Mac OS
OctaneRender Enterprise for Linux (updated*)
Demo downloads
OctaneRender Demo for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Demo for Windows (zip)
OctaneRender Demo for Mac OS
OctaneRender Demo for Linux
*Linux Enterprise build updated to include missing
libsenseEIV.so.
