OctaneRender 2025.1 for Houdini production (2025.1.0.0)

[galleon27]

There is a really neat feature in the old IPR, where you can pick materials in the IPR with "Shift + Click". It would be cool to bring back that functionality

[dom_otoy]

You can still do this. Not with a shortcut but there is a button on the IPR that is a material picker.
We're going to rework the icons soon, we're aware they're not great...

[galleon27]

You can still do this. Not with a shortcut but there is a button on the IPR that is a material picker.
We're going to rework the icons soon, we're aware they're not great...

I know but the shortcut was really cool. I still shift click sometimes

[lavrenovlad]

Hey Bruce,
Thanks for the release!

Do you think it would be possible to improve IPR launch in Houdini? Basically, I have just a simple grid with a few 8k megascan textures, when I launch IPR it takes a few seconds to start, alright, maybe Octane compresses the image files the first time I launch IPR. I stop it fully, then launch again, and it's the same slow launch just for 3x 8K textures with pretty much no geometry in the scene. I tested a similar scene in Blender, and the first launch takes a few seconds there too, but after that every other IPR launch is very quick. If you want I can send you a video demo of the comparison.

Let me know!

Hey lavrenovlad!
Thanks for the suggestion! We will have a look at this and talk to the Blender team on how they handle it!
I don't think this would be a quick fix, and might take rewriting some of the main code, so don't expect anything soon, but if we can improve this we will!

Awesome! Please don't forget about this fix, IPR reload speeds are quite important, especially for people that work with the engine on a daily basis!
Wanna report a bug too. It's probably core related, idk, but I noticed that HDRI maps in the DayLight Environment node behave incorrectly when you rotate them, need to reload IPR to actually see how the lighting from that HDRI map looks.
To explain further, I have an HDRI map that has a very wide intensity range, so the map looks different depending on the bit setting, if I set it to 16bit in the Image Texture Node the HDRI's sun looks less bright, if I switch it to 32bit, it become more sunny and casts sharp shadows. So basically when I rotate the map and preview it in the IPR while it's set to 32bit bit depth the result it gives me is incorrect, in order to see the correct lighting I need to full reload the IPR. So basically the minute I rotate the HDRI the lighting breaks and looks incorrect until I reload the IPR. And this bug only appears when I use RT Environment Daylight node with an HDRI map plugged into it. I was so baffled by this yesterday to be honest.

[Aszyk]

I'm getting a hard crash of Houdini 20.5.522 when turning on the Denoise options and then trying to render in the IPR. It hangs for about 20sec before closing the app with no error pop up.

Is there any particular log file I should be observing or a hardware monitor (like GPUZ) that would be good to run in this case?

The scene renders fine without the denoising enabled.

[dom_otoy]

I'm getting a hard crash of Houdini 20.5.522 when turning on the Denoise options and then trying to render in the IPR. It hangs for about 20sec before closing the app with no error pop up.

Is there any particular log file I should be observing or a hardware monitor (like GPUZ) that would be good to run in this case?

The scene renders fine without the denoising enabled.

Hey Aszyk!
What GPU are you on?
Does this happen on an empty scene too? I would give that a try.
Then what I would do is update to the latest NVidia drivers. I just tested it on my system and was not able to reproduce this issue, so my guess it's probably GPU/driver related?
If that doesn't fix it try exporting the scene to orbx and open it in octane standalone. If the crash happens there too, it might be an Octane core issue and I can pass it to the core devs.
Let me know how it goes, and we can go from there!

[dom_otoy]

Awesome! Please don't forget about this fix, IPR reload speeds are quite important, especially for people that work with the engine on a daily basis!
Wanna report a bug too. It's probably core related, idk, but I noticed that HDRI maps in the DayLight Environment node behave incorrectly when you rotate them, need to reload IPR to actually see how the lighting from that HDRI map looks.
To explain further, I have an HDRI map that has a very wide intensity range, so the map looks different depending on the bit setting, if I set it to 16bit in the Image Texture Node the HDRI's sun looks less bright, if I switch it to 32bit, it become more sunny and casts sharp shadows. So basically when I rotate the map and preview it in the IPR while it's set to 32bit bit depth the result it gives me is incorrect, in order to see the correct lighting I need to full reload the IPR. So basically the minute I rotate the HDRI the lighting breaks and looks incorrect until I reload the IPR. And this bug only appears when I use RT Environment Daylight node with an HDRI map plugged into it. I was so baffled by this yesterday to be honest.

I created a ticket for this, and we'll definitely take a look at it, we just have a few higher priority things in the list we'll address first. I wouldn't expect it to be in a 2025 update, but we can try to get it in for 2026 (no promises though )

I'll take a look at the HDRi thing tomorrow. We still need to add the env map to the daylight mode to the updated Render Target!

[lavrenovlad]

DEVS CAN YOU FIX THE TRASH GARBAGE UPDATE MODE IN THIS STUPID PLUGIN?
I was told update mode was fixed and that "full reload" was deprecated, alright now I am rendering projects and I get some geometry just disappearing in some frames, what is this trash? At this point maybe fix the instancing bugs I reported for full reload mode and just remove update mode completely? If you can't make shit working properly.

[dom_otoy]

DEVS CAN YOU FIX THE TRASH GARBAGE UPDATE MODE IN THIS STUPID PLUGIN?
I was told update mode was fixed and that "full reload" was deprecated, alright now I am rendering projects and I get some geometry just disappearing in some frames, what is this trash? At this point maybe fix the instancing bugs I reported for full reload mode and just remove update mode completely? If you can't make shit working properly.

Hey Iavrenovlad!
Sorry for the issues you're encountering!
We'd love more info on this so we can improve this problem. I sent you a dm!

[dom_otoy]

DEVS CAN YOU FIX THE TRASH GARBAGE UPDATE MODE IN THIS STUPID PLUGIN?
I was told update mode was fixed and that "full reload" was deprecated, alright now I am rendering projects and I get some geometry just disappearing in some frames, what is this trash? At this point maybe fix the instancing bugs I reported for full reload mode and just remove update mode completely? If you can't make shit working properly.

So looks like I was able to reproduce this issue.
It seems to me that this issue happens when you have keyframes early in the timeline but not later on. It seems to me that adding a keyframe on a parameter later in the timeline seems to resolve this issue? Will keep testing and see if that's it.
EDIT: Nevermind, this seems to help it somewhat but does not fully resolve the issue.
A safe workaround for now is to set the rendering mode to full scene reload. I'm also checking the beta2 and this issue seems to not be present there, so reverting to that version for now might be a good solution.
I apologize again for this bug... Will have our dev work on this, as soon as he's back from vacation!