Roadmap

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[t_3]

one
fine day it will be zero.

some news ahead: completing the rewrite did also allow to add some features more easily; amongst others there will be a "lighting setup" area in the lights tab:

in general this works like the materials tab, but listing octane materials configured as light sources only (such having an emission node). means you will be able to find and edit light sources pretty quick. linking by drag & drop (or context menu) works also of course, allowing to apply existing light sources to other objects fast.

in addition the node widget (aka node inspector) on the right shows a simplified version of the active material node, only presenting "useful" parameters (in general this is diffuse color and opacity of the base material and of course all the parameters of the emission pin).

a new "create as" menu option (shown) allows to quickly set up any scene object as emitter (this one is also available in the materials tab, in addition to the other "create as" options).

"simple" is a pre-set diffuse material with a blackbody emitter, "textured" is about the same, only using a texture emission with a pre-set (empty) image pin, and "for ies" is again a blackbody emitter with a pre-set (empty) floatimage distribution pin for an ies texture. means you can set up anything from here without the need to open the nge.

ps: an option to insert pre-made light objects into the scene will follow a little later, since it needs (of course) some time to prepare all the geometries & settings...

[larsmidnatt]

Sounds nifty.

[jimgale]

Lighting is my biggest issue right now. It is (I believe) the only thing making Reality look better than Octane (for my renders anyway). [needing soft portrait lighting properly]. But Octane is a billion times faster, so I will always choose Octane - just want it to look the same for lighting.
Thanks for working on this.

[jimgale]

1.9?

[t_3]

1.9?

it's more a 0.9... i did hide the "1" already in the 2nd post on this page

a few more numbers:

• the current build is 2558
• in total there were 1460 test builds since the last release (or around one every half wake hour)
• one of the completed optimizations caused a substantial decrease of "managed" nodes (= octane nodes that the plugin must handly directly); for a mid complex scene there were easily over 1000 such nodes (any single rgb color, any single map, any map power, gamma, etc. etc.) - you can imagine how the nodegraph would have looked like in the standalone, where every single node would have been visible - now the same scene needs less than 150 nodes.
• and even if all current released versions were more or less wacky, there were at least 28 000 render passes finished, and over 6000 renderings saved plus an extra ~40 000 animation frames

regarding ongoing work, the last mission accomplished was to get by threading & timing problems, responsible for lots of crashes. having these areas completely redone, i haven't had a single crash, even if pressing hard, like opening a scene while the live db update runs and starting the rendering, while all this (and "double-multi-threaded" mesh building with parallel mat conversion) was still active. currently i'm very happy with the stability - i hope this will still prove for good when the release is out.

i.e. from all the several dozens of test scenes i have (including all i got via pm because of problems they had caused), there was only one from early april still causing a problem, everything else worked.

btw, everyone feel free to send me some stuff via pm, like scenes where you have noticed strange behaviors - can't have too much to test.

last but not least i'm currently building a lower spec pc (dual core i5 with a gt 640), to extend testing, since it was often the case that specific problems did never occur on my high end development machine...

[t_3]

just for the records: catching up with octane 1.20.1 completed...

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[t_3]

I just pressed the "Launch the Fireworks and play the music" - button.
This is incredible great news!

i thought it would be ridiculous to have that much time passing by and release an outdated engine. the update went pretty smooth and even helped to straighten a few areas...

[bluerocket]

Great news Mr. T_3

Regards