OctaneRender® 2024.1 Beta 1

[haze]

Hi all,

We are happy to bring you the first Beta of 2024.1. Thanks to all those who reported issues, and sent us feedback. It is greatly appreciated.

For details on the features added in 2024.1, please see the 2024.1 Alpha 1 release post.

Some important notes about these builds:

The minimum NVIDIA driver version that is required by this version is 522. You can launch Octane with an older driver version, but it will fail to render and it will produce an error message in the log.

The GPU version of Open Image Denoise is supported on CUDA compute model 7 and later. We use to the CPU version on machine with older models. On macOS, only the CPU version is supported.

As with all experimental builds, we advise to not use this release for production purposes.

Changes since 2024.1 Alpha 4

• Fixed z-depth pass when saving a deep EXR
• We now cache used OCIO transforms in ORBX files. This allows the project package to be copied to and rendered with the same results on a machine with no matching OCIO config (e.g. RNDR nodes).
• Fixed black pixels on metallic objects with rounded edges enabled and using a baking camera.
• Added support for hardware accelerated triangle and instance motion on macOS.
• Added octane.file.getCurrentWorkingDirectory() to the Lua API.
• Added built-in json encode and decode functions to Lua API.
• Fixed getattribute("color:wavelengths", wl) in OSL camera shaders
• Fixed crash if you use getattribute() with an attribute that is unavailable in OSL camera shaders
• Fixed OSL camera shaders with more than one write to the throughput
  (setmessage("octane:throughput", c))
• Added _spectrum(float[]) version to OSL API, this accepts
  an array with one intensity value per sampled wavelength. This matches
  with how getattribute("color:wavelengths", wl_array) returns the
  sampled wavelengths.
• The color2, color4, vector2 and vector4 structs defined in standard OSL headers can be used as inputs and outputs in OSL shaders.
  If used as input, a single pin will be created. If used as ouput, the vector types are currently always converted to color.
• Added filterwidth() OSL function
• Updated USD library version to 22.11.
• Added support for vertex colors sometimes found in OBJs.
• Fixed broken smooth shadow terminator correction of rotated objects.
• Compositor memory usage is now separately listed in device preferences. This shows how much GPU memory is being used for the output AOV compositor.
• Added a crash handler to optionally send crash reports to us so that we can investigate.
• Fixed render artifacts while updating instance transforms on macOS
• If updating a scale factor with aspect ratio locked, it will no longer unlock when setting the value to 0. This avoids that the aspect ratio unlocks if you change from positive to negative scale values.
• Fixed error displayed on the log on macOS when rendering was stopped during the scene preparation
• Fixed incorrect USD camera animation.
• Fixed incorrect evaluation of the brightness input to a color correction texture node when the texture is being converted to an image projection.
• Fixed an issue where pins on node graphs could sometimes be re-created
  in the wrong order when undoing the deletion of a linker node.
• Nodes collapsed into the input pins of output linkers are no longer lost
  when the graph they are in is ungrouped.
• Fixed undoing the ungroup operation of an empty graph (now correctly
  recreates the empty graph).
• Back-facing geometry is now shaded the same as front-facing geometry when a toon material is used.

Downloads

Downloads for Studio+ subscription users:

OctaneRender Studio+ 2024.1 Beta 1 Standalone for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2024.1 Beta 1 Standalone for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2024.1 Beta 1 Standalone for Linux

OctaneRender 2024.1 Beta 1 Standalone for macOS

OctaneRender Studio+ 2024.1 Beta 1 Node for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2024.1 Beta 1 Node for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2024.1 Beta 1 Node for Linux

Downloads for the Demo

OctaneRender Demo 2024.1 Beta 1 Standalone for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Demo 2024.1 Beta 1 Standalone for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Demo 2024.1 Beta 1 Standalone for Linux

Happy rendering
Your OTOY team

[renderingz]

Is this feature locked? We’re halfway through the year and still none of the features that were supposed to come in 2023 aren’t even in 2024?

Why is it that every year there is a flashy GTC presentation which promises features and every year without fail none of them make it into a release? Still waiting on rest position support for Houdini for multiple years.

Where are all these?

Also in our plans:
Volumetric user data
Additive materials
Rest position input
Spectral fabric material
Motion blur for HDRI environments
Motion blur for texture displacement
Adaptive subdivision for vertex displacement
New parametric spline and curve primitives
UVW packing for compiled DCC primitives (instead of UV). This can be used by plugins to "pin" procedural textures to deformed textures.
Multi-stream: headless and live linked render across DCCs.
Multi-render: swap to any other engine in seconds.
Multi-engine: for example the full C4D application (with plugins) in Octane core, and also World Creator
Photon tracing / irradiance caching

[SSmolak]

Where are all these?

As I remember there were plans for adding instances scattering system too...

[pxlntwrk]

What about Brigade engine ,at least Brigade Temporal Denoiser ?

[nuno1980]

...at least Brigade Temporal Denoiser ?

Or NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction (RR) for better denoiser as more focus, better accuracy... for Brigade Octane and for OctaneRender.

[lavrenovlad]

Okay so pretty much all we get are some pointless AOV and post-fx features and some potential speed/geometry improvements. I was excited for fog post fx in 2023 first when it released, after trying to use it for a bit, got an impression that it can be useful in like 1-2% scenarios where it doesn't break the scene with its deficiency. Can't even comp it properly in post 'cause it doesn't comp properly apparently and doesn't look like beauty pass.
Octane still cannot export Volume AOVs properly too for later compositing (I tested the same workflow against Arnold CPU where everything works great in that regard). As I remember even holdouts for volumes don't work properly in Octane.
The CEO promised Brigade like 2 years ago on Facebook to be right here around the corner, I don't even care about Brigade, but the fact that it's always a feature to come is a joke.
I'd rather prefer for Octane to just work on stability and improving what it already has (including the horrendous Houdini plug-in) and adding what it lacks in some small aspects like rest attribute, maybe some instancing features: properly working attributes for instances and so on. It has many small important feature skips that were implemented in Redshift many years ago.

[J.C]

I have a feeling Star Trek became a priority now. Correct me if I'm wrong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlY3K2T ... l=CGCookie

[noldo]

In the 2024 beta 1 version, the object movement gizmo has disappeared from the viewport

[bepeg4d]

In the 2024 beta 1 version, the object movement gizmo has disappeared from the viewport

Hi noldo,
about gizmo, everything seems ok here:

ciao,
Beppe

[noldo]

https://1drv.ms/f/s!AuJBOGWzbPfe-r0jB8L ... A?e=jUYiaT