The OctaneRender® Team is pleased to announce the beta 2.57 release.
Changes introduced in 2.57
Deep channel rendering.
Octane has a new kernel which renders false-color images of the scene, containing various types of
information about the scene. The following settings are available:
- Geometric normals
- Shading normals
- Position
- Z-depth
- Material ID
settings except for gamma and min_display_samples are ignored. For the Z-depth setting the exposure
setting controls which value is mapped to white. To save these channels you should use untonemapped
EXR. And in scenes where the environment is visible you should enable the alpha channel.
Bug fixes & Minor new features
- Improvements to the node graph editor:
- Allow selecting nodes with a lasso box
- Allow dragging, saving and deleting multiple nodes at once
→ The connections between those nodes are lost if you load them back into Octane. We are working on that. - Add context menu item to render a node
- Add context menu item to import a macro node at mouse position
- Added importance sampling for diffuse transmission and reflection.
- Fixed rendering of emitting materials inside macro nodes.
- The value of a macro input nodepin, if internal, is no longer reset every time the input node inside is reconnected.
- Added option to use sRGB color space for color picker.
- Enable smoothing for materials when the OBJ file contains vertex normals.
- When saving a macro file, and clicking the save button before selecting a file, a file chooser is shown.
- Embedding resources in OCM files is optional.
- Octane remembers the path used for saving images.
- Fixed loading of OBJ files with non-ASCII characters in the path name.
Volumetric effects
Octane allows rendering volumetric effects within volumes: scattering, absorption and
emission of light. This allows rendering effects like subsurface scattering and fog.
This is done with a new node type, a volume node, which is connected to either a
specular node or a diffuse node that has transmission enabled.
This functionality supersedes the support for absorption on specular materials in
beta 2.52, scenes using this system can be updated to use the new absorption medium
node.
IOR (Index of reflection) on the glossy materials
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.
Improved light source sampling
By default the light sources are sampled by area, which can cause small light sources
in the scene to be sampled poorly. If the balance between the light sources in the scene
is poor, it can be corrected with the new sample_rate parameter.
Support for 3Dconnexion 3D mouses on all platforms
The movement is camera-centric, so the input you make with the device controls the
movement of the camera.
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.
Improvements to the node graph editor
You can select multiple nodes with a classic lasso selection box and move, delete
and save them at once.
Other fixes:
- Octane can load OBJ files with non-ASCII characters in the path name.
- Allow users to go online if started in offline mode.
- Fixed the problem of saving the same frame twice with turntable / daylight animation.
- Fixed rendering of emitting materials inside macro nodes.
- Embedding resources in OCM files is optional.
engine. The performance of the renderer is a bit better with this new system, but
the precision of representing geometry far from the origin has decreased slightly.
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:
Windows:
Self installing executables (including the TdrLevel registry patch recommended for new users)
- 64-bit — 32-bit
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.
... hahaha just messing around, great update, now please an Octane for max DEMO... please.........
