OctaneRender® 1.024 beta 2.48 TEST (win) [OBSOLETE]

[abstrax]

Hi all,

As promised, here comes the test release with the new render framework. This has been a huge chunk of work and it's a complete re-design of all render-related things except the actual CUDA code itself. This will hopefully lay the foundation of many things to come.

On the other hand, a complete re-design initially introduces new bugs, which is the reason why we release this version as a test version: To stabilize it for the release in the commercial releases forum. This also means that you should not be too disappointed if things don't work. We try to fix them the coming days.

One more thing, before I start with the change list: We planned to release the Windows, Linux and Mac builds together, but unfortunately we found an issue on Linux and several problems on Mac which delays the release for those platforms. We are currently trying to fix those things and will then release for Linux and Mac as soon as possible.

The main difference to beta 2.47 is the new render framework:
- which allows pretty much 100% scaling for many GPUs (we got positive results for up to 8 GPUs, but it should work for more GPUs, too)
- now you can activate and deactivate devices at any time, but keep in mind that if you deactivate a device all calculated samples of that device get lost
- after a change, intermediate render results are only displayed at increasing time intervals (up to 5s) which reduces the time spent on tonemapping and increases the time spent on rendering
- CUDA error handling became more graceful: if a device fails Octane stays alive and other devices (if available) continue running if possible. there will be more work in that area in the future for proper error status display
- each device renders full frames now, which works better with kernels that introduce more low-frequency noise (like PMC)
- the disadvantage of rendering full frames on each device is that you don't gain better intereactivity with more GPUs (it still renders faster though)
- the maximum work load for the path tracing and direct lighting kernels is now limited which should improve interactivity for large images on single-GPU systems
- now you can change maxsamples at any time and either the rendering stops or continues, but doesn't restart
- render target nodes are fully functional now, i.e. you can now easily setup different render scenarios and switch between them
- using a non-NVIDIA card as display should be possible now, as long as the display driver supports OpenGL 2.1 (or higher)

There are many more bug fixes and changes with those being the most important ones:
- we added a material preview to the LiveDB, which fetches pre-rendered images of the material ball scene (not all material have been pre-rendered yet, but we will close the gaps soon)
- the handling of the initial brightness using the PMC kernel got improved for some corner cases
- the PMC kernel handles overbright areas better
- added portal materials for light portals
- added a dithering option to the imager node, which removes banding in very clean images
- added focusDepth to camera node which defines the depth of the plane in focus, if "autofocus" is enabled the focus depth gets overridden by the autofocus

Some things that got broken and will be re-enabled with beta 2.5:
- viewport rulers are not working yet
- sub-sampling doesn't work yet
- turntable animation doesn't work yet
- daylight animation doesn't work yet

We also haven't had time to do much performance work on the PMC kernel.

One thing to keep in mind when you do performance comparisons: For some reason we haven't figured out yet, all previous builds showed a slightly too large number of samples per second. This build displays the correct number of samples per second which is slightly lower than what was displayed before, but rendering should be as fast or faster than beta 2.47. You can verify this using a stop-watch.

This version is a test release and should not be used for production work. Scenes stored in this version may not load in beta 2.46b.

Please do not clutter this thread with wishes, requests and ideas. It's not that we are not interested, but currently we have to focus on the the stuff planned for beta 2.5. Of course, any feedback on the changes of beta 2.47 and beta 2.48 is very welcome and much appreciated.

This release was built with CUDA 4.0, which means that you should install the latest graphics driver (http://www.nvidia.com/page/drivers.html).

Here are the archives (to save time we haven't build installers):

Linux 64bit: will be available soon

MacOS 32bit: will be available soon

Windows 64bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... in_x64.zip
Windows 32bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... _win32.zip

Yours,
The OctaneRender® Team.

[rotorgames]

THANK SD

[pixelrush]

ok cool will give it a quick outing before I go to bed...

material previews are pretty fast - tooltips tend to get in the way of the thumbnail - btw 256x256 is probably big enough
tooltips from icons to left of render window leave shadows- not refreshing for a few seconds

resolution change noticeably faster
ah somethings wrong here with changing down from v large = black window and unresponsive - will check tomorrow. status disconnected hmmm...

some weirdness changing materials brings up the ball rather than changes it in the view.
interesting effect when portal is chosen - car body disappears showing insides - cool for cut aways

[davistalexander]

thanks guys..

[Elvissuperstar007]

very bad release ......................
not stable
material properties do not appear !...... Old glitch
PMС slow

what a portal?

[rotorgames]

[abstrax]

ok cool will give it a quick outing before I go to bed...

material previews are pretty fast - tooltips tend to get in the way of the thumbnail - btw 256x256 is probably big enough
tooltips from icons to left of render window leave shadows- not refreshing for a few seconds

resolution change noticeably faster

The tooltip shadows are a problem in the UI toolkit we use. I hope we will find a solution for it.

Cheers,
Marcus

[mantra]

Can't change subsampling

[abstrax]

very bad release ......................
not stable
material properties do not appear !...... Old glitch
PMС slow

what a portal?

Could you please be a bit more specific? What do you mean with "not stable" and "material properties do not appear"? PMC is not slower than in beta 2.47 and as wrote above, we haven't had time to do much performance work on the PMC kernel.

A portal is geometry that guides sampling of the environment light. You place it usually in windows to help sampling light in closed rooms.

Cheers,
Marcus

[abstrax]

Can't change subsampling

As I have written in the initial post, sub-sampling doesn't work at the moment. The same applies to turntable animation and daylight animation. We will add them with the beta 2.5 release.

Cheers,
Marcus