OctaneRender® 1.025 beta2.58b test release [Obsolete]

[roeland]

Hello,

The OctaneRender® Team is pleased to announce the beta 2.58b test release. This fixes some small issues in our 2.58 test release, and adds some tweaks to the node inspector (full support for copy-paste, and resetting empty node pins).

Changes introduced in test release 2.58b

• Improved performance when enabling a material preview.
• Fixed freezing of render engine when deleting the currently rendering mesh node or selecting a render target node without a mesh attached.
• Display empty node pins in the node inspector, and allow filling them in.
• Implemented cut and delete in the node inspector.
• Imlemented panning the node graph editor with the mouse.
• Connecting a node to the output node inside a macro node properly updates the rendering.
• Fixed hang in an application dragging an OBJ file to Octane.
• Fixed rendering restart with resolution lock enabled when scrollbars become visible.
• Added context menu in render viewport.
• Cancelling the pick menu works.
• Limit the nodes types connected to the resolution input of a renderTarget to int2 and int2resolution.
• Fixed rendering more than 6400 samples via command line.

Changes introduced in beta 2.58

Quick material previews.

It is possible to enable quick previews of materials and textures inside the node
inspector. These will be rendered without interrupting the main render, and will
update automatically when the material or texture is changed. The scale of the
material can be updated as well.

There is a choice of a preview on a sphere and a flat 2D preview. The scale of
the object shown is customizable, and users can choose default settings in the
settings dialog.

New light source sampling.

In the new release light sources are sampled by power instead of by area.
This should work well in a wider range of scenes than our old area based sampling,
reducing the need to manually tweak the sample_rate parameter of the emitter. If
you have a scene where you have tweaked the sample_rates, you will have to do this
tweaking again for the new system.

Further tweaks to the node graph editor.

• The node graph editor supports copy/paste.
• Add application-wide shortcuts for cut, copy, paste and delete, and put these in the application menu.
• Add dropping of macro and mesh files on the nodegraph editor.
• Node pin connections are saved when saving multiple nodes.

Other features and bug fixes.

• Implemented copying the rendered image to the clipboard.
• Added scrollbars to the render view component when the image doesn't fit the display area.
• Maximum Z-depth is a separate slider on the deep_image_channel kernel node.
• Added viewing of the UV mapping to the deep_image_channel kernel node.
• Zooming in and out the rendered image is usable with smooth scrolling devices like trackpads.
• Menu structure on Mac OS more in line with conventions, multi-material pick uses
  the standard context menu bindings.
• Right mouse button works inside the render viewport on Mac OS.
• Color picker preference is properly saved, and is selected with a combo box.
• Remove the Update button in the resolution settings component, changes to the input fields are applied immediately.
• Added aspect ratio lock to the resolution settings component.
• Linear/logarithmic keeps working after changing float node value.
• Fixed broken loading of RGBA images into a float node.
• Fixed possible stability issue when the connection to OctaneLive drops out.

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 here:

Due to this being a Test Release, we are only providing zip/tgz archives, no installers.

Windows:
ZIP archives:
- 64-bit — 32-bit

MacOS X:
- 32-bit

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.

[PeterCGS]

Great to see new releases coming! It was awfully quiet for a while. Good to see your back on track!

[Jaberwocky]

Thanks for the update.

I'm going to have a play with it.

Cheers

Jaba

[pixelrush]

Thanks for the colour/material cut and paste Roeland
It may be small but this type of thing makes all the difference to the user.
Much appreciated that this was done finally.


Ok reporting time -
Edit1:
Deep channel Z depth input not fixed yet but thats a small item. Related to this though I wonder if 10 should be the default z depth value rather than 1 seeing as how the camera is usually about 10m away by default. For new people the resultant white out might be confusing? dunno...maybe a more ballpark number can be pulled from the camera to mesh distance.
Switching to Texture coords(5) from that 10 I notice that to get a similar 'focus' (else it tends to be blacked out) requires the coords slider needs to be reset to 1, should they be linked? or should tex coords depth have its own named slider? Not sure...

Edit2:
Daylight seems to have lost drag of geographic position on the map. copy/paste not needed here

Edit3:
Gradient control points cant be dragged either it appears.... on second thoughts maybe they dont work like that anyway since they have a pos slider

Edit4:
Drag and drop .obj loads/voxelises but doesnt render after clicking on node. no start/stop/focus etc icons active, nothing evident in vram until some deliberate node inspector activity refreshes/updates it then its away.

Edit5:
seems like a nice update in general s-m-o-o-t-h even

[Jaberwocky]

So far, for us with single cards in our system, it runs really well.I left octane rendering in the background and went on to other things and never noticed any slowdown at all , except a slight pause when using context menu's in draftsight.Very nice.

[matej]

Nice to see small periodical updates!

btw, the GE panning control should not have any other functionality than panning. Currently the middle mouse pans, but also moves nodes & connections, so you can accidentally trigger render re-start instead. Left mouse brings up the context menu, so it's also not appropriate for panning. For consistency, the GE panning control should be the same as the one for the image - Ctrl+Right mouse with the default control scheme. This combination should not do anything else in GE.

[Elvissuperstar007]

movement is not working

[matej]

Two things:

1.) One annoying aspect of rendering with Octane is the focus stealing pop-ups 'loading image', 'voxelizing', etc... which effectively make you computer difficult to use when rendering animations, ie. you can't work on anything else on the comp because the pop-ups are constantly thrown in your face.

Couldn't these information be sent to the STDOUT instead? Or not shown at all, since its almost irrelevant ('loading image' pop-up for every image??). Only show graphical pop-ups when critical errors happen or user input is needed (like not finding texture files). So that the --quiet option would really be quiet, without interruptions for the user.

2.) I was doing two rendering jobs with a python batch script, of which one failed (CUDA device 0: KERNEL FAILED) halfway through. I noticed that in both cases (ie. the one that successfully finished and saved the render, and the one that crashed) the Octane process returns the same value: 0.

It wold be possible that a failed rendering would return a different value, so it could be identified and started again? This would make automation of rendering jobs a bit more effective.

[jamnique]

Two things:

1.) One annoying aspect of rendering with Octane is the focus stealing pop-ups 'loading image', 'voxelizing', etc... which effectively make you computer difficult to use when rendering animations, ie. you can't work on anything else on the comp because the pop-ups are constantly thrown in your face.

Couldn't these information be sent to the STDOUT instead? Or not shown at all, since its almost irrelevant ('loading image' pop-up for every image??). Only show graphical pop-ups when critical errors happen or user input is needed (like not finding texture files). So that the --quiet option would really be quiet, without interruptions for the user.

God yes please

[ycarry]

thanks