OTOY Forums

Hi,

This is the latest production release of the OctaneRender™ 4.05 for Houdini™ plugin compiled with the Octane 4.05 core. This 4.05.0.0 release is available for the Houdini 16.0/16.5/17.0/17.5 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 419 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 4.05.0.0 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 4.05.0.0 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 4.05.0.0 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 4.05 version for the network rendering nodes
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... 05_win.exe
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _linux.zip
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... _macos.dmg


Release Notes:
=============================================
RELEASE 4.05.0.0
=============================================

* PLUGIN FEATURES AND FIXES:
- Fixed a bug in the camera FOV animation that was breaking some of the animated .orbx exported files.
- Fixed a rendering bug in objects with one or two vertex polygons.

* OCTANE FEATURES AND BUGS FIXED:
- Fixed emission if "keep instance power" is enabled and sampling rate is 0.0.


=============================================
RELEASE 4.04.0.2
=============================================

* PLUGIN FEATURES AND FIXES:
- Addressed the support of the network rendering in the vr subscription builds.
- New code to try to fix the rare problems related to the scene corruptions reported by some users.


=============================================
RELEASE 4.04.0.0
=============================================

* OCTANE FEATURES AND BUGS FIXED:
- Fixed a dongle activation issue.
- Fixed exporting scenes from plugins that contain animated transforms with zero matrices.
- Fixed a crash when stopping render, and then previewing a material in the node stack. This also caused crashes in plugins that use the same mechanism to render thumbnails and material preview tiles.
- Fixed a crash during activation on some machines with RAID setups.
- Fixed denoiser black pixels.


=============================================
RELEASE 4.03.0.0
=============================================

* PLUGIN FEATURES AND FIXES:
- Fixed the problems related to the wrong ordering or missing UDIM textures.
- Added some additional code to avoid a rare case of scene corruption related to the OBJ spare parameters.
- Fixed a problem with the LiveDB materials including blank space characters in the material name.

* OCTANE FEATURES AND BUGS FIXED:
- Fixed black pixels from denoiser.
- Added sheen and coating normal and bump maps.
- Fixed volume step length being locked to 4 when using absorption or scattering medium with alpha shadows disabled.
- Fixed caustic blur for clear coat layer of universal material.
- Fixed "visible on specular" emitter option when used with universal material.
- Fixed black material render on Octane BRDF when using 0 roughness.
- Allow greyscale images as opacity maps, as it was in V3.
- Fixed "affects alpha" option of specular materials when "keep environment" is enabled. (fixed the refraction pass erroneously including the environment in that case)
- Fixed universal material (transmission only) with roughness 0 rendering incorrectly.
- Fixed excessive noise in universal material when used with a medium node.
- Increased max number of alpha intersections, which fixes some scenes that have a lot of alpha maps.




Happy rendering,
Your OTOY Team

Thank you.

Quick question. I was trying to import and obj from Blender and could not apply a material to it. It just displayed pink.

The obj appears correctly in houdini (wireframe) but in the IPR, it looks a bit different. Do you know why that would be?

VISUAL360 wrote:Thank you.

Quick question. I was trying to import and obj from Blender and could not apply a material to it. It just displayed pink.

The obj appears correctly in houdini (wireframe) but in the IPR, it looks a bit different. Do you know why that would be?

Probably it has a shop_materialpath primitive attribute that is overriding any other material settings. You need to delete this attribute because it takes precedence over the OBJ level material.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

Thanks!

That's exactly what it was. How would anyone know that? Is that a result of all objs from another program?

VISUAL360 wrote:That's exactly what it was. How would anyone know that? Is that a result of all objs from another program?

The Houdini OBJ file format importer adds this attribute itself, to be honest not sure why, but in any case, if you remove it or change it to point to a valid Octane material, all should work fine.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

VISUAL360 wrote:That's exactly what it was. How would anyone know that? Is that a result of all objs from another program?

You have to disable write material option when exporting obj from blender.

Thanks very much! Appreciate the responses.

Hi Juanjo,

this version is not working here. When starting Houdini I get the error:
"The Octane.dll file is not valid for this plugin version. Plugin version: 4040000 - Octane.dll version: 4050000.
And after that:
"The Octane API can't be starterd: Tried to start DLL more than once."

I'm on Houdini 17.5.327 and Windows 10.


Cheers,
Lukas

Got it working, when deleting the whole preferences folder, starting Houdini so it creates a new clean one and then using the same houdini env-file, I had before.