The OctaneRender® Team is pleased to announce the beta 2.56 Test release.
Changes since 2.55b
Support for navigation with a 3Dconnexion 3D mouse
Beta 2.56 introduces 3D mouse support on all platforms.
The movement is camera-centric, so the input you make with the device controls the movement of the camera. We
would like to test how it works with different devices (is the speed reasonable with default settings, are the different
rotations and translations mapped correctly).
If you use your 3D mouse, the camera rotations with the mouse may be off, because the rotations with the 3D mouse
change the up vector in the camera node. Also the turntable navigation rotates around up vector. You can reset the up
vector in the node inspector to the original value (usually [0.0, 1.0, 0.0]) to restore normal behavior.
If the 3D mouse is set too sensitive, it may frequently cause small movements, restarting the render. To avoid restarting,
lock the viewport.
Current issues:
- On Windows, the settings from the 3Dconnexion control panel have no effect. At the moment there
is no way for us to solve this. You can control the speed of the movements in the preferences panel. On
Mac OS X and Linux the settings work as expected. - The speed of translations is tied to the distance between the camera position and target. Zoom in or out with
the mouse to adjust the speed.
Octane normally samples light sources according to area. In some scenes this will lead to a poor
balance between light sources. In a room with a big TV (which emits some light) and a couple of
small bright spotlights, the TV will be sampled most of the time, leading to a lot of noise in the
light from the spotlights.
Emission nodes have a new parameter, sampling_rate, to control how much weight is given to the
emitter when picking an emitter to sample. This allows you to choose which light sources will
receive more samples. In the above example you can increase the rate for the spotlights, so
they get sampled adequately.
Other fixes:
- Allow users to go online if started in offline mode.
- A glossy material with roughness set to 0.0 no longer appears black.
- Connecting a gradient node to another gradient node works.
- Bump mapping with volume textures works correct.
- Fixed shadows on the material ball.
- Fixed wrong sun direction in December, and off-by-one error with months.
- PMC doesn't crash on materials with both SSS and transparency
- Default setting for camera response curve is now correct.
- Corrected wrong gamma for display of gradients in the node inspector.
- Fixed memory leak with textures on creating a new project.
- Display installed CUDA driver version and show error in device manager when the CUDA driver
is too old.
- We have made a few large scale changes in how geometry is stored in the engine, which are a part of our in progress rewrite of OctaneRender's geometry system to allow for instancing and object transform editing, coming in a next release soon.
- A new node medium node type that can be connected to transmitting materials, being the diffuse material (for diffuse transmission) and the specular material. These allow to model absorption, scattering and emission inside a volume. Refer to the forum post Using medium nodes for how to use this feature.
- IOR (Index of reflection) input on the glossy material.
OctaneRender 2.52 and before provided a slider called 'specular' to define the specular reflection amount on a glossy material.
We have now added a new parameter called 'index' which allows you to use an IOR (index of reflection) value instead, to accurately define the glossyness of a material from a reference measured value.
- Corruption of macro input nodes that are linked to the wrong input pin after deleting a macro input node.
- Embedding of HDR images in OCM files.
- Crash with bool inputs for macro nodes.
- Fixed the problem of saving the same frame twice with turntable / daylight animation.
- Fixed rendering errors when an invalid type of node is attached to the normal map input pin.
- Resolved black patches on glossy materials.
- Medium nodes stay attached when swapping between diffuse and specular material
- After swapping a node in the node inspector the component for that node no longer dissapears if it has the same size as the old.
- Crash if a macro input node is connected to the diffuse transmission pin.
Known issues
- On Linux the PMC kernel doesn't work on pre-Fermi GPUs (i.e compute model 1.1 - 1.3) - we couldn't find the problem yet, which seems to be a compiler bug.
Download
Due to this being a Test Release, we are only providing zip/tgz archives, no installers.
Windows: 64-bit — 32-bit
MacOS X: 32-bit (updated—fixed linking problem)
Linux: 64-bit
Driver Requirements: This release was built with CUDA 4.0, which means that you need a recent enough NVidia driver (http://www.nvidia.com/page/drivers.html).
For Linux and Mac OS you also need to install the CUDA Toolkit 4.0 (http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-40).
For Mac OS you also need the latest CUDA 4.0 driver (http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html).
Yours,
The OctaneRender® Team.
