OctaneRender® pre-Beta 2.42 (win/mac) [OBSOLETE]

[abstrax]

Hi everyone,

Refractive Software® is proud to announce the availability of the beta 2.42 intermediate release.


IMPORTANT NOTE: Regarding CUDA toolkit use and multi-GPU support

During our migration to CUDA 3.2 we have noticed that due to changes to the CUDA toolkit by NVIDIA, our approach to multi-GPU rendering on Geforce products has been handicapped. As a result using more than one GPU for rendering does not offer a speed increase with the CUDA 3.2 releases.

We are rewriting the multi-GPU feature to resolve this issue, also adding some new features, so as an intermediate solution we will be supplying both CUDA 3.2 and CUDA 3.0 solutions.

• CUDA 3.2: Recommended version with better support for modern GPUs (like GeForce GTX 4xx/5xx), which should be used if you are not rendering on more than one GPU.

• CUDA 3.0: Legacy version for correctly functioning multi-GPU support.

Provided below are the CUDA 3.0 and CUDA 3.2 builds for Windows. We will release Linux and Apple Mac OS X builds as soon as they become available.


Please note this version requires you to enter your OctaneLive® license information. These can be found as explained here:
http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... =24&t=3095


New features and fixes since beta 2.41

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- fixed black borders during sub-sampling render mode
- fixed thin vertical lines in multi-GPU mode (that was a good one :) )
- fixed reproducible crash, when an internal material node, that has been selected by the material picker, gets replaced by an external material node
- fixed update of camera node, when camera is updated

New Features and fixes since beta 2.4

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- higher precision for edit fields of float texture nodes (for example roughness of specular materials)
- made alpha channel output work for all resolutions
- made alpha shadows work for mesh emitters, too
- (internal) during the construction of a new project, all split and work panes got added twice to the node graph. that's fixed now.
- added project file name to window title bar
- the current project directory and file name is now updated in all situations (which wasn't the case before)
- 2D viewport zoom/pan while viewport is locked is possible now
- fixed not working inverse zoom
- fixed placement of zoomed viewport to lock correctly to the mouse
- MTL material names are now made unique while loading, non-unique material names in OCs files caused a lot of confusion while loading and then later incorrect behaviour in Octane

New features and fixes since beta 2.3 v5

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RENDERER

- Black vertical areas on GTX460 and GTX5xx cards is fixed.
- Alpha Channel output support
- Alpha mapped material now cast correct shadows. (Only pathtracing integrator currently, can be enabled/disabled in pathtracing kernel options. If not needed, switch it off for slightly better performance)
- Gradient Mapping Node for more advanced procedural materials
- Shift lens option with configurable X and Y offset in camera (Usefull for architectural renderings)
- Opacity channel value of zero could crash the engine, which is now fixed.
- Crash when creating a new file while activating a node is fixed.
- Display of correct amount of cores used for GTX460 and GTX5xx series cards.

USER INTERFACE

- Node Graph Editor can be panned to edit large node networks
- Tooltips that display nodepin names when hovering over them. Hover with the mouse over the pin icon in the Node Inspector and you will see the name of the input pin.
- Node Inspector panel is compactified for better use of screen real-estate, and uses a fixed width on all displays.
- Render Preview Configuration preview buttons have been moved to the top of the Node Inspector panel to make better use of screen real-estate.
- Lock button to lock renderviewport during rendering.
- OBJ MTL use of textures with alphachannel will create an alphatexture node on the material's alphatexture channel.
- Bug where some nodeconnections are not drawn is fixed
- Nodepin connection bugs fixed which would cause assert errors and crashes 
- Moving a node in the node graph editor rebuilds the node system and restarts the render process, is fixed.
- Recenter view button added to reset the image view in the render viewport, and the pannable nodegraph view.

IO / CONTROL

- Material relinking and emitter relinking from plugins bug is fixed.
- Image, FloatImage and AlphaImage textures now have a reload button to release an image in use.
- command line -g flags causing a crash is fixed.
- Selecting a different device in the CUDA device info dialog, throws an assert, is fixed.
- load 2 mesh nodes, select one then other causes crash, is fixed.
- Command line width and height flags maximum raised from 4096 to 8192.

How to connect to OctaneLive® through a firewall/router

If you have a firewall/router, and you cannot log into the octanelive® service (e.g. the server cannot be contacted), configure your firewall or router to allow outbound connections to the URL named 'live1.refractivesoftware.com'.


CUDA drivers/toolkit requirements for Windows

To use this release you should install the latest Nvidia drivers for your GPU. It was built and tested with driver versions 260.99 (GeForce), 266.45 (Quadro) and 266.58 (GeForce).


CUDA driver requirements for Macintosh

The CUDA 3.2 release was built and tested with CUDA Toolkit 3.2.17. To use it you should install the latest NVIDIA drivers for your GPU, plus (in that order)

• the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 3.2.17, http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda ... html#MacOS
• the NVIDIA CUDA Driver 3.2.17, http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-cud ... river.html

The CUDA 3.0 release was build and tested with CUDA Toolkit 3.0.14. To use it you should install the latest NVIDIA drivers for your GPU, plus (in that order)

• the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 3.0.14, http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda ... html#MacOS
• the NVIDIA CUDA Driver 3.0.14, http://www.nvidia.com/object/MacOSX-CUDA-3.0.html
• (fallback in case the CUDA driver 3.0.14 does not work: NVIDIA CUDA Driver 3.2.17, http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-cud ... river.html)

Download


MS Windows

ZIP file archives:
CUDA 3.2: 32bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda32.zip (32.6 MB)
CUDA 3.2: 64bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda32.zip (33.5 MB)
CUDA 3.0: 32bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda30.zip (32.5 MB)
CUDA 3.0: 64bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda30.zip (33.4 MB)


GNU/Linux

Gzipped/tar archives: Coming soon


Apple Mac OS X (10.5/6)

Installer package:
CUDA 3.2: 32bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda32.pkg (36.5 MB)
CUDA 3.0: 32bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda30.pkg (36.5 MB)


Please post your experiences and issues with this release in this thread. Your help is much appreciated.

Yours,
The OctaneRender® Team.

[face]

Every day an update, looks like 3d coat
Thanks guys, great work again...

face

[abstrax]

That will be the last one for a while, because we will now focus again on stuff that takes a bit more time. We have heaps of stuff to do and even more ideas. And originally this release was meant to be only a bug-fix release...

Cheers,
Marcus

[andrian]

Very nice. Great progress..
I just bump on a blog, it might be interesting for people to read what we can expect of Octane once the MLT core is implemented..
Link
PS: Don't forget guys about instance support !!
Cheers...

[Synthercat]

Damn! It's like a 100 times better!!!

[andrian]

Try switching from PT to DL and see whats happens, it closes the tab... annoying...

[radiance]

Try switching from PT to DL and see whats happens, it closes the tab... annoying...

What tab are you referring too andrian ?

Radiance

[matej]

Since I can't test it, I'll just ask;

* I hope that saving & loading .ocm's now works (there was a bug that complained about not finding images embedded in .ocm, when you re-opened a scene that has been saved with imported .ocm's) - so we can start to build our personal material libraries and more efficiently re-use stuff.

* There was a bug with macro input pins which would turn red at scene re-load, if it was saved with no input connected to the pin. See this post

* The ability to duplicate macros would be of much help. As wold the ability to move nodes between tabs (macro nodes) in the Graph editor. This actions are quite important when building your material networks and shouldn't be that difficult to implement, either.

* It is possible now to create multiple camera nodes (inside preview configuration), that would actually act as different camera setups? ie. you plug the new node and camera setting change. Doing so in v5 has no effect.

* I hope that disappearances of shader parameters from the NI, when you disconnect input from that parameter in GE, has been resolved.

* A better camera navigation system has been requested by many users, months ago. It's hard to reach some POVs with the current camera, because you hit "invisible walls", the camera is leaning on sides when you want it to rotate perpendicular to world (you have to constantly tweak the up vector), when you want to move away of something it actually slides upwards, etc... A simple "first person shooter" style camera (rotation & translation center = camera center) would be much more useful. Maybe put a toggle for people to choose between different styles.


I ask this (as a reminder) because it seems that Win users will do all the testing, before the final versions of 2.4 will be made. And I suppose that complaining then won't be of any good. This workflow issues should be polished, considering that the next update is probably months away.

[suhail_spa]

i tried to save a camera node, then rotated the view slightly.
then imported the saved camera node. and when i join this camera node, the view does not get updated. i need to tweak the previous camera setting slightly, then the view updates (as per the imported camera node) in version 2.42.

- fixed update of camera node, when camera is updated

have i correctly understood this?
what does it mean exactly?

[abstrax]

- fixed update of camera node, when camera is updated

this is exactly what i was looking for..now we can easily jump between different camera angles..
thank you

Sorry, that wasn't meant with it. The change fixes the incorrect behaviour that when you reset your camera, the nodes in the node stack editor don't get updated. We didn't have time to look into the reconnection problem. Sorry. There are always gazillion thing to improve/fix/change, but we had to draw the line and focus on building the other platforms. I reckon Mac and Linux users will appreciate it.

But that's not the end of the development or the world

Cheers,
Marcus