The OctaneRender® Team is pleased to announce the beta 2.58c test release, which corrects some bugs introduced in the previous releases, and has some performance tweaks.
Changes introduced in test release 2.58c
- Fixed crash when trying to stop a heavy render.
- Make sure the middle mouse button starts panning in the node graph editor on any place.
- Fixed pasting/importing of nodepin connections.
- Fixed daylight and gradient component mouse interaction.
- Implemented opening OCS files with drag-and-drop.
- Added more checks in OCS file loader to avoid crashes if some information is missing.
- Added separate input on infochannelkernelnode for UV scaling.
- Improved performance of material preview with scenes containing a lot of textures.
- Update material preview of a macro node when the connection to its terminator is changed.
- Fixed default preview resolution setting.
- Fixed range of Z-depth slider on InfoChannelKernelNode.
- Added command line option (-t) to specify a rendertarget to be used for rendering.
- Added offset to pasted node when pasted with keyboard ctrl+V.
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 and node inspector.
- 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.
- Imlemented panning the node graph editor with the mouse.
- Display empty node pins in the node inspector, and allow filling them in.
- Implemented cut and delete in the node inspector.
- Fixed crash when trying to stop a heavy render.
- Connecting a node to the output node inside a macro node properly updates the rendering.
- Implemented copying the rendered image to the clipboard.
- Added scrollbars to the render view component when the image doesn't fit the display area.
- Added context menu in render viewport.
- 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.
- Added context menu for Camera zoom picker: allow picking Z-depth as well.
- 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.
- Implemented opening OCS files with drag-and-drop.
- 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.
- 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.
- The new Kepler architecture (GTX680, GTX690 and others) is not supported yet. We have not been able yet to get satisfactory performance with
the new CUDA version required for these cards. - 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.
