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

[yoyoz]

I reckon Mac and Linux users will appreciate it.

Definitely yes! A bonus would be to have them before this WE

[suhail_spa]

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

its OK..this is not such a big issue anyway...

[abstrax]

Hi 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.

That should be fixed now. I did some tests and hope that other people have tested it too.

* 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

That might be fixed now, since we made some serious fixes in the area of node pins. But I didn't know of this problem and I haven't tested it.

* 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.

Not there yet. Currently there is no cut and paste system in Octane, which is a bit more work to implement.

* 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.

Probably not. Didn't get around to verify/test this. I will have a look next week.

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

No, this behaviour has not changed, since there is currently no concept of displaying an empty node pin in the node inspector. This involves a bit more work, which hasn't been done yet.

* 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.

Sorry, no changes in that area.

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.

The testing was more about stability. This release was meant to be a bug-fix release and all additional features were either easy to add or provided some fundamental functionality that gives new possibilities (like alpha shadows and the alpha channel) which were hard to achieve before. Things like cut&paste, undo or a new camera system are a bit more complicated than they might seem at first glance. And you can always work on the workflow - we could spend a year on it and people would still complain about things or think of new improvements

But don't worry, I don't think this will be the last update for many months. Remember there had been a hiatus in development before December due to the move to NZ and other organisational things. But development gained momentum again and at the end of the day, we want to make you guys happy. Believe it or not

Cheers,
Marcus

[ycarry]

What tab are you referring too andrian ?

think its Node Inspector...
It disappear when choose/change mesh preview, materials, etc... clic on icon or image and its back again.
( here with CUDA 3.0 driver 258.96 Vista 32)

[abstrax]

What tab are you referring too andrian ?

think its Node Inspector...
It disappear when choose/change mesh preview, materials, etc... clic on icon or image and its back again.
( here with CUDA 3.0 driver 258.96 Vista 32)

That's weird. Could you post some screenshots of it? I haven't observed that problem yet.

Marcus

[kubo]

I'm currently working on my contest entry with 2.42 win x64 cuda 3.2, and I don't know if is a scene specific issue, (I've test it in 2.4 and it works, where originaly was created btw), but if I delete a node obj (I've got several in the scene so I can work with different parts of it with more ease) then octane crashes, this happend before but it usually worked if I paused the renderer and did the delete. Now no matter what it crashes, which brings me to mind a suggestion, could it be done than when you right-click on a node to pick the save/delete menu the scene doesn't change to that node?
On a side note, we know you want to make us happy, and you always surpass our wildest whishes, so thanks

[Zay]

Thanks!
I can confirm that reloading OSC files that was missing materials are now fixed.
The bug I had where Octane would crash when adding mesh emitters to a saved .OSC file is also fixed.

Great job! I'm very happy about this release

[andrian]

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

What tab are you referring too andrian ?

Radiance

Go to preview kernel, and switch from directlighting to pathtracing and the settings disappear..

[matej]

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

No, this behaviour has not changed, since there is currently no concept of displaying an empty node pin in the node inspector. This involves a bit more work, which hasn't been done yet.

Better than an empty node, would be the fall-back to the previous value. But still, even an default value is better than no parameter (= being forced to plug-in some 'dummy' node).

The place where I miss persistence the most is in the environment tab (and the preview kernel) - It would be nice if the last settings for sunlight & IBL would be remembered when you change between those two types of illumination.

This are of course not a critical things, just something that would make the experience more user-friendly

Anyway, thanks for your answers.

[abstrax]

I'm currently working on my contest entry with 2.42 win x64 cuda 3.2, and I don't know if is a scene specific issue, (I've test it in 2.4 and it works, where originaly was created btw), but if I delete a node obj (I've got several in the scene so I can work with different parts of it with more ease) then octane crashes, this happend before but it usually worked if I paused the renderer and did the delete. Now no matter what it crashes, which brings me to mind a suggestion, could it be done than when you right-click on a node to pick the save/delete menu the scene doesn't change to that node?
On a side note, we know you want to make us happy, and you always surpass our wildest whishes, so thanks

Just to make sure, that I understand it correctly: You delete a mesh node and Octane crashes? Or does that happen with every node?

Thanks for the feedback. By the way: If you find a way to reproduce a crash, please let us always know, even if you know a workaround. If crash bugs are reproducible, three are usually easy to fix.

Cheers,
Marcus