OctaneRender® 1.024 beta 2.47 (lin/mac/win) [OBSOLETE]

[ROUBAL]

Hi Radiance, I know that I have asked for this feature many times and that you have so many things to do, but would it be difficult to add a button allowing to disable shadow casting for a material in a very next release?

As it looks really not like an added feature, but rather as a button to disable an existing feature (shadow), IMHO, it would not take too much time, but as I'm not a coder, I may be totally wrong...

This is really needed, and would allow many things, like non blocking skydomes or background cylinder (allowing the environment light to pass through), faked depth mist by using several semi-transparent planes with a cloud texture...

I am working on a project (old London scene) in which mist would be welcome...

Thank you in advance !

[kubo]

thanks Radiance, the portal news is great, will they be like emmiters? you'll apply a texture that'll "mark" them as portals?
@ roubal you can still do it, I tried for the past competition, and if you add enough "layers" and lower their opacity a lot, plus even if you add a little ligth emission it does look like fog, and light still passes them.
Another test, this time water has dispersion, 0.02, and there is some nices leds in the pool, I'll do more tests and try to have fun with dispersion. PMC hotpixel 1.0 20.000 samples 3hr17min. Also I've saved them at different intervals to see how it "evolved" hope you like it.

[Timmaigh]

Hi,

Thanks for reporting all the issues, we're looking into them (quite a lot of stuff to check)
Please continue testing and report your issues here.
I also think it might be good if some users can do some more tests with disperson+PMC, as not a lot of users have provided test renderings with it yet...

We have also nearly finished adding support for portals, some of you might already know what portals are as they are used in most unbiased engines,
you basically add a plane in an opening (such as a window) to guide the engine in sampling the environment light coming from an area outside of the area the portal is for,
which increases the convergence and efficiency a lot for interiors.

We might do another test build like this to test some fixes and the new portal feature next, it will depend on when the new multi-gpu framework is ready for testing,
which is also nearing completion. I can't make any promises but it won't be long, hopefully less than 2-3 weeks, as we've still some stuff to fix and some optimization work to do.

Regarding the sunlight through glass, I've decided not to fix this in 2.5, I know a lot of users are eager for a fix, but if we provide a fix for it now, with the current kernels,
we will waste quite a bit of development time, and the kernels will become slower as a result, while the addition of bidirectional path tracing will provide a solution to this problem as a welcome and effortless side-effect, amongst others.
Therefore I think it's better to bite the bullet, let users use the transparency workaround a bit longer, and work on bidirectional path tracing instead, which will take a bit longer,
but will be the best solution to the problem, and also will be the best and most adaptive/efficient kernel for most scenes.

Radiance

Awesome news.... just a question about bidir PT, will this be another kernel like DL,PT,PMC, or it will be some combination with PMC, i mean PMC + bidir PT at the same time? I am quite confused regarding this...

[Timmaigh]

One more thing to report regarding the test kernel, had some issue with 32bit version on Vista.... basically replacing meshnode broke the scene, the new imported mesh, which replaced the older one, missed some geometry. The OCS was created with 2.45 version of Octane, so that might be the reason. Loading geometry on a new project worked fine.

[kubo]

I've seen the same thing, when reloading a mesh with some obj replaced or moved it shows a shadow of that mesh, if you choose another node (material node) and then switch back to the mesh node it "fixes" itself and shows correctly the new mesh. But I think this has been reported earlier in this thread.

[tomas_p]

Hi Radiance.

Is posible that such isue is normal, but PMC kernel on my PC have only cca 50 % of path tracing kernel speed.

regards

[DayVids]

Just thought I'd share that the driver for my GTX260 that is Cuda 4 is a hunk of junk causing problems with video playback on my system at this time, so be aware of that if you are trying this out and you start noticing glitching and hanging during video playback.

driver I'm referring to:
275.33-desktop-win7-winvista-64bit-english-whql

I had to install 270.61 to make it go away.

[8Eggar8]

Is it all that necessary to always be updating the graphics driver?
Can one just update on the CUDA part and leave the Gdriver alone?
I have found more times than not that anytime I update on a Gdriver
The result is untennable and since I'm doing this all here on the system
I built here at my job, I really don't have extra time to be trying to always
figure out why the new Graphics Driver isn't working right. The least harm it does is always messing
up my toolbars & menu's in all kind of applications that I run (at the minimum). I'm always hesitant when
it comes to a new GD build because I know it will be much worse than the base driver I got with the card.

Can I just get an update for the CUDA part?


...whoa! didn't know I was posting after that previous reply.
one of my cards is (and being the one that both of my monitors are hooked up to) a gtx260. and have never had a new GD build go right for me.
my other 2 cards are 460's and have noted their recent build versions breaking away of that of the 260's (when before it never had). their version is 270.81.

Do we really have to be dancing this dance all the time?

Damn, Thought I'd just get away only installing the v4 Cuda Toolkit. Even that disabled all functions to even get to the display properties manager for my display card (260). So, Like many times before installing anything other than the root display driver for that card I had to rely on 'system restore' to get me back to a decent profile. For being one of the top providers of graphic cards, NVIDIA sure needs to get it's act together...


k....
After all the bitchin' & whinin' the latest 260 driver (275.33) seems to not be giving me as much difficulty as I had (wrongfully, this time) anticipated - so I'm crossing my fingers...

[matej]

Is posible that such isue is normal, but PMC kernel on my PC have only cca 50 % of path tracing kernel speed.

Yes, PMC is not yet optimized, so it's roughly twice as slower as pathtracing

[Elvissuperstar007]

new engine