OctaneRender® 1.0 beta2.46 [OBSOLETE]

[abstrax]

Hi everyone,

Refractive Software® is proud to announce the availability of the beta 2.46 release candidate.

This version needs OctaneLive. You will find your OctaneLive account information in the customer area. You will find an FAQ here:
http://refractivesoftware.com/forum/vie ... =24&t=4069


IMPORTANT NOTE: Regarding CUDA toolkit use and multi-GPU support

During our migration to CUDA 3.2 we have noticed that due to changes to the CUDA toolkit by NVIDIA, our approach to multi-GPU rendering on Geforce products has been handicapped. As a result using more than one GPU for rendering does not offer a speed increase with the CUDA 3.2 releases.

We are rewriting the multi-GPU feature to resolve this issue, also adding some new features, so as an intermediate solution we will be supplying both CUDA 3.2 and CUDA 3.0 solutions.

• CUDA 3.2: Recommended version with better support for modern GPUs (like GeForce GTX 4xx/5xx), which should be used if you are not rendering on more than one GPU.

• CUDA 3.0: Legacy version for correctly functioning multi-GPU support.

Provided below are the CUDA 3.0 and CUDA 3.2 builds for Linux, Mac OS and Windows.


Please note this version requires you to enter your OctaneLive® license information. These can be found as explained here:
http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... =24&t=3095


New features and fixes since beta 2.45

Code: Select all

- new updated manual
- when material picker is used only the pin of the actual selected material is highlighted
- fixed missing tool tips
- fixed incorrect Unicode handling for image files on Linux and Mac OS
- increased maximum emission power to 100,000
- fixed black text in edit fields
- slider bars are darker now, to enhance visibility of slider triangle
- better display of OctaneLive status on Linux
- improved UV mapping and vertex normals of material ball

New features and fixes since beta 2.44

Code: Select all

RENDERER

- added light distribution input for emitters, incl. rotation
- light power is now specified as total power
- added support for IES files to be used as light distribution
- generated textures can now be used as environment texture
- new improved material ball scene
- improved shading behind the light terminator
- emitting materials now also work in the material preview, when the directlighting kernel is used
- shifted render camera output by 1/2 pixel
- fixed incorrect north offset calculation of daylight sun

USER INTERFACE

- added new note node
- added new listint node
- added button "Update" to commit manually entered resolutions, which should solve missed resolution changes
- new tab design with close buttons
- toolbars are now customizable and can be placed an the four sides of a pane
- the pane selection is now an icon 
- a default scene can now be saved, which will be used as template for all new projects
- improved display of nodes in the node inspector
- fixed crash when the node inspector is resized with the daylight node being displayed there
- fixed incorrect node placement of materials dragged from the LiveDB to the node graph editor

IO / CONTROL

- macros in the OctaneLive material database are now sorted by name
- texture paths and material names can contain now spaces and non-ASCII characters as long as they are encoded in UTF-8
- less strict handling of relative path names that are specified like "/daz_textures/texture.png" (this should make the import of DAZ exports work again)
- added new option to store file paths as relative paths in OCS files (which ON by default)
- proper error handling for too large macros that will be uploaded to OctaneLive (the maximum is now 15MB)
- more robust time-out handling with OctaneLive
- fixed incorrect error messages in authenticatin dialog
- fixed crash when an input node of a loaded macro gets deleted

How to connect to OctaneLive® through a firewall/router

If you have a firewall/router, and you cannot log into the octanelive® service (e.g. the server cannot be contacted), configure your firewall or router to allow outbound connections to the URL named 'live1.refractivesoftware.com'.


CUDA drivers/toolkit requirements for Windows

To use this release you should install the latest Nvidia drivers for your GPU. It was built and tested with driver versions 260.99 (GeForce), 266.45 (Quadro) and 266.58 (GeForce).


CUDA driver requirements for Macintosh

The CUDA 3.2 release was built and tested with CUDA Toolkit 3.2.17. To use it you should install the latest NVIDIA drivers for your GPU, plus (in that order)

• the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 3.2.17, http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolki ... oads#MacOS
• the NVIDIA CUDA Driver 3.2.17, http://www.nvidia.com/object/macosx-cud ... river.html

CUDA driver requirements for Linux

The CUDA 3.2 release was built and tested with CUDA Toolkit 3.2.16. To use it, you should install the graphics driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-260.19.44 or later, plus the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 3.2.16 which you can download from: http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolki ... oads#Linux

The CUDA 3.0 release was built and tested with CUDA Toolkit 3.0. To use it, you should install the graphics driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-260.19.44 or later, plus the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit 3.0 which you can download from: http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolki ... oads#Linux

OctaneRender for Linux was built and tested on CentOS 5.5 using GCC 4.1.2. Due to that libstdc++ must be of version 4.1.2 or higher.


Download


MS Windows

Self installing executables (including the TdrLevel registry patch recommended for new users):
CUDA 3.2 32bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda32.exe
CUDA 3.2 64bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda32.exe
CUDA 3.0 32bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda30.exe
CUDA 3.0 64bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda30.exe
or as ZIP archives:
CUDA 3.2 64bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda32.zip
CUDA 3.0 64bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda30.zip

GNU/Linux

Gzipped/tar archives:
CUDA 3.2 64bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda32.tgz
CUDA 3.0 64bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda30.tgz


Apple Mac OS X (10.5/6)

Installer package:
CUDA 3.2 32bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda32.pkg
CUDA 3.0 32bit: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/rcdow ... cuda30.pkg

Please post your experiences and issues with this release in this thread. Your help is much appreciated.

Yours,
The OctaneRender® Team.

[matej]

Niiice...

I was thinking; It's not worth building a personal material 'local DB' right now, because old materials will not be compatible with the node system rewrite, right? Can you guys comment on how is this feature proceeding?

[Jaberwocky]

Thanks for the prompt update abstrax.

[grimm]

Excellent! And Linux is not the last this time. The new power range is working perfectly, thanks.

[radiance]

Niiice...

I was thinking; It's not worth building a personal material 'local DB' right now, because old materials will not be compatible with the node system rewrite, right? Can you guys comment on how is this feature proceeding?

Hey,

Your materials should be forward compatible with later releases like 2.5+, so i don't see an issue with it.
We have a decent number of materials in the LiveDB now, so we are not going to break backwards compatibility in the near future (before v1.0 final), so we can keep all the liveDB materials,
and as both local OCS mats and liveDB mats all use the same OCS like XML storage, it will be identical for both.

On a side note, this is our final 2.4 release, with a few bugfixes for the new stuff in 2.45
it will be moved into Customer news forum tomorrow and the 2.46 based demo version will be made available in 1-2 days too.

This will be the last release for a while, at least 3 weeks, and then it's the big 2.5 release with the rewritten multi-gpu framework, the new render kernel, and some other stuff we're still deciding on, aswell as the new website to accompany it

Radiance

[matej]

Thanks, Radiance, for input.
2.5 update sounds awesome

About materials; the last obstacle for building yourself a "local DB" of personal materials is the fact that texture images are embedded in .ocm files. This brings along redundant image duplication, less flexibility and slow .ocs saving when you have a lot of imported .ocm's in your scene. I really hope that in 2.5 we will be also able to just link texture images in .ocm files - that would speedup workflow & reuse.

[abstrax]

Thanks, Radiance, for input.
2.5 update sounds awesome

About materials; the last obstacle for building yourself a "local DB" of personal materials is the fact that texture images are embedded in .ocm files. This brings along redundant image duplication, less flexibility and slow .ocs saving when you have a lot of imported .ocm's in your scene. I really hope that in 2.5 we will be also able to just link texture images in .ocm files - that would speedup workflow & reuse.

We will very likely squeeze that one into of one the next releases, since it shouldn't be a lot of work. It's just that you somewhere have to draw a line or you will neve release anything.

Cheers,
Marcus

[GeoPappas]

Greetings.

Is there any way that you can provide the Windows releases in ZIP format (like you have been doing with the past few releases)? IMO, they are so much easier to install (you just copy and paste) and uninstall (you just delete).

I understand that you are probably trying to help out new users that need the registry hack, but many of us already have that fix and would prefer a ZIP install.

Thanks for all of the hard work.

[abstrax]

Greetings.

Is there any way that you can provide the Windows releases in ZIP format (like you have been doing with the past few releases)? IMO, they are so much easier to install (you just copy and paste) and uninstall (you just delete).

I understand that you are probably trying to help out new users that need the registry hack, but many of us already have that fix and would prefer a ZIP install.

Thanks for all of the hard work.

Please read the red line (I will put one up tomorrow, i.e. in ~10 hours)

Cheers,
Marcus

[GeoPappas]

Greetings.

Is there any way that you can provide the Windows releases in ZIP format (like you have been doing with the past few releases)? IMO, they are so much easier to install (you just copy and paste) and uninstall (you just delete).

I understand that you are probably trying to help out new users that need the registry hack, but many of us already have that fix and would prefer a ZIP install.

Thanks for all of the hard work.

Please read the red line (I will put one up tomorrow, i.e. in ~10 hours)

Cheers,
Marcus

Sorry. I somehow missed that. That is great news. Thanks for all of the hard work. Looking forward to checking out all of the new features.

One thing that I didn't see in the list of changes is if the memory leak (when using alpha) has been fixed.