This is the first public test build of version 3.08 which introduces these main features:
- Programmable OSL texture
- Programmable OSL-based projection
- Programmable OSL-based camera
- New specular reflection and refraction models: Beckman, GGX, Ward
- Anisotroptic reflections
- Metal material
- Toon shading
Although on the surface, Octane still looks the same as 3.07 a pretty big chunk of the render code has been replaced by a completely new system. -> Please consider this build still as experimental. We expect that a good number of issues will be uncovered in the coming weeks.
There is also a slight performance hit for Maxwell and Pascal GPUs. We are talking here of a 0% - 10% speed drop compared to 3.07. We will try to improve things over the coming weeks, but consider performance to be work in progress right now. Kepler (at least compute model 3.5) seems to be faster than 3.07 for some reason.
Background
We started working on an implementation of OSL materials last year, but the preparation for OSL goes back even further since the kernel restructuring of version 3 was done with an eye on the planned implementation of OSL materials.
Now, anything programmable requires you to be able to compile some code into machine code during runtime. Turns out that this is a fairly tricky problem to solve for GPUs and although we got it working for complete OSL materials we couldn't get the compile times short enough, which broke the interactivity of Octane. We also had to restructure more stuff in the render kernels which had a negative effect on the render performance, too.
Running out of ideas how to improve the situation substantially, we tried to reduce the scope to OSL textures only and tried a couple fairly different approaches and one of them worked pretty well, eventually resulting in this release. With the new system, re-compilation of the texture code usually takes <500ms, but in more complex scenes can take 1-2s. We are trying to minimize the amount of recompilation as much as possible, but you will probably notice a small delay before rendering of a new scene starts and we don't think there is not much more we can do about it.
So yes, this has been a fairly long journey but we hope the wait has been worth it. We are aware that most users won't write OSL shaders, but plugin developers will be able to better emulate textures of the host application and we and other advanced users can share new interesting textures in the coming days and weeks. It will definitely allow a whole suite of new things, which will become clearer soon.
Near term outlook
We are planning to add 1 or 2 more features to 3.08 but the focus will be on stabilizing this version, in adding more useful OSL textures and examples and in improving the performance on Maxwell/Pascal GPUs.
So when will full OSL material support arrive? We honestly don't know yet. Before we will give OSL materials a second try, we will probably look into MDL support first since it seems to be more suitable for a path tracer like Octane and its support in the industry has grown a lot in the last couple of years. After MDL we will look into OSL material support again and hope to make it work, but we can't make any guarantees here.
Other changes since version 3.07:
- Overhauled the skinning system to allow an arbitrary number of joint weights per vertex (for now only relevant for plugin devs).
- Refactored the authentication / OctaneLive code. Please let us know if you experience any problems authenticating or using the LiveDB etc..
- Fixed several bugs in the authentication system prohibiting successful authentication in some corner cases.
- Fixed loading of normals from FBX files under certain circumstances.
- Fixed picking of materials (see viewtopic.php?p=325089#p325089).
- Lua:
octane.render.start()has now an additional input parameterdoUpdate. If set totrue(default),octane.changemanager.update()is run before the actual rendering starts.
Downloads for users with a regular license
regular version for Windows (installer)
regular version for Windows (ZIP archive)
regular version for Mac OS X (DMG image)
regular version for Linux (ZIP archive)
Downloads for users with a subscription license
subscription version for Windows (installer)
subscription version for Windows (ZIP archive)
subscription version for Mac OS X (DMG image)
subscription version for Linux (ZIP archive)
Photoshop workflow plugin download
You can download and install the current Photoshop workflow plugin (1.0.5) either via the Adobe Exchange platform or you can download it from the link below and manually install it.
Windows and Mac OS X
Photoshop extension (v1.0.5) (ZXP archive)
Happy rendering,
Your OTOY NZ Team
