OTOY Forums

Hi,

This is the latest production release of the OctaneRender™ 4.01 for Houdini™ plugin compiled with the Octane 4.01.1 core. This 4.01.1.1 release is available for the Houdini 16.0/16.5/17.0 latest production builds on Windows x64, Linux gcc6.3.1 and OSX 10.12. This plugin is also compatible with Houdini Indie (While working inside the Indie version, the plugin will have a 4k limited resolution while rendering sequences and the scene export and cloud rendering features disabled)


License upgrade
Unless you have a subscription license, you will have to upgrade your version 3 licenses to version 4. This upgrade is free and can be done via these 4 steps:

• Go to https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/purchase/
• Select "Upgrade" in the top menu.
• Click on "UPGRADE NOW" next to "Upgrade existing licenses to OctaneRender 4".
• Select the licenses you want to upgrade and confirm.

To use this version, you need a GPU of compute model 3.0 or higher. Support for Fermi GPUs (like GTX 4xx and 5xx) has been dropped. Also make sure you use a driver of version 387 or higher and if you are working on Mac OS that have a CUDA driver installed that supports at least CUDA 9.1.


New features
To learn more about the new features and improvements of OctaneRender 4, please check out our blog post, but this a quick list of the main new features that have been added:

• Overhauled geometry engine that dramatically reduces compilation times.
• Support for out-of-core geometry.
• AI Light: Improved sampling of emitters, which is a lot more effective than the old method if you have many small emitters that have only a fairly local effect.
• AI Denoiser: Cleans up your render, which can dramatically cut render times.
• Global light inclusion/exclusion.
• Light linking: Allows the inclusion/exclusion of light IDs in the object layer nodes, which can be used to control the direct influence of emitters on objects.
• Universal material: Merges the properties of the diffuse, glossy, specular and metal materials into one material.
• Dirt support in the info channel passes / kernel.
• Overall performance improvements in the render engine and in loading HDR and OBJ files.
• Support to capture direct and indirect light separately in the light render passes.
• Support for emission on sphere primitives.
• Planetary environment based on the Nishita sky model, simulating the scattering of sun light in the atmosphere to render the sky.
• UDIM support via the new image tile texture node.
• Image texture compression.
• Layer selection in the OpenEXR image export.

Release 4.01.1.1 regular license
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _Win64.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _Linux.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... ni_OSX.zip

Release 4.01.1.1 subscription license
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... n64_vr.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... nux_vr.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... OSX_vr.zip

Release 4.01.1.1 demo builds
https://render.otoy.com/plugindownloads ... 4_demo.zip
https://render.otoy.com/plugindownloads ... x_demo.zip
https://render.otoy.com/plugindownloads ... X_demo.zip


Standalone 4.01.1 version for the network rendering nodes
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _1_win.exe
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _linux.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _macos.dmg


Release Notes:
=============================================
RELEASE 4.01.1.1
=============================================

* PLUGIN FEATURES AND FIXES:
- Fixed a critical issue in the IPR OBJ node and instancers transformations update code.


=============================================
RELEASE 4.01.1.0
=============================================

* PLUGIN FEATURES AND FIXES:
- New Octane "ShaderMerge" VOP node, designed to reference and share any Octane shader VOP node or node tree from multiple materials.
- Improved scene extraction time while working with complex mesh, hair or particle objects.
- The scene multi-thread extraction option is now enabled by default.
- Fixed a critical performance issue in the IPR scene update.
- Fixed a crash while trying to render empty OBJ nodes.
- The Octane spare parameters tab on newly created OBJ nodes is now added automatically, but the environment variable OCTANE_AUTOSPAREPARAMS can be set to 0 to disable this feature.
- Fixed the IPR updating of the material builder node promoted parameters.

* OCTANE FEATURES AND BUGS FIXED:
- Improved the planetary environment by replacing the planetary axis and angle input pins with latitude and longitude pins, to allow you defining the correct orientation of the planet underneath your location that can be matched against the coordinates in the sun direction node.
- Improved memory management during progressive scene data updates, when out-of-core is used to fix a performance regression observed with various scenes.
- Removed the fast GPU upload which caused issues on systems that connected via PCIe risers/expanders (see viewtopic.php?p=351110#p351110). It didn't make much of a difference in most cases.
- Fixed CUDA failure in the baking camera when rendering a scene with animated meshes.
- Fixed hot pixels and incorrect light distributions in scenes with portals that have AI light enabled.
- Fixed global light exclusion of the environment if the scene contains portals (see viewtopic.php?p=351802#p351802).
- Fixed clamping of post-effects in the denoised main pass.
- Fixed artifacts in scenes of scaled meshes that use displacement, which became most visible in the AO info channel kernel.
- Fixed wireframe rendering when using the baking camera.
- Fixed incorrect attribute access when a scene with volumes is rendered using the baking camera.
- Fixed bug that caused the denoiser to not start on the very first frame / render (see viewtopic.php?p=352129#p352129)
- Fixed incorrect rendering of shadow catcher materials in the denoiser main pass (see viewtopic.php?p=352596#p352596).
- Fixed filtering out of daemons that run on the same machine as the net render master.
- OSL: Fixed crash when using getattribute("camera:fov", fov) in an OSL shader


Happy rendering,
Your OTOY Team

Seems like IPR does not update obj level transform

coresign wrote:Seems like IPR does not update obj level transform

Hmm, Ok. This can be a side effect of some of the performance issues fixed in this build. I'll fix it for the next build that we'll try to release as soon as possible.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

That's probably stupid question, but do we have 'thin glass' option for materials in Houdini?

Joss wrote:That's probably stupid question, but do we have 'thin glass' option for materials in Houdini?

Hi,

The Octane Specular and Universal materials have a "Fake Shadows" option to simulate the architectural glass colored shadows effects. I'm not sure if this is what are you looking for ...

Thanks,
-Juanjo

Trick to avoid full refraction calculations on store glasses, windows or car windshield, for example.
Behaves like a glass, just without refraction.
I believe I've seen that somewhere, but can't find any traces in docs now.

Hi, I don't see the "bin" folder inside the plugin folder. I'm not sure what value to pass to PATH in houdini.env in order to install? Thanks

Never mind, I figured out that on MacOS setting HOUDINI_PATH to the plugin root folder is enough. Everything works as expected. Thank you

mzo wrote:Never mind, I figured out that on MacOS setting HOUDINI_PATH to the plugin root folder is enough. Everything works as expected. Thank you

Yes, in the MacOS version (and usually in Linux) defining the HOUDINI_PATH is enough.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

coresign wrote:Seems like IPR does not update obj level transform

Hi,

I've updated this topic including just a quick-fix for the original 4.01.1.0 build, that fixes the IPR OBJ transformations updating issue due to a last-minute change and which we only noticed after the release.

Thanks for reporting this issue!
-Juanjo