OctaneRender 2022.1 for Houdini beta build 2022.1.0.1 XB2

[juanjgon]

Hi,

This is a beta release of the OctaneRender™ 2022.1 for Houdini™ plugin compiled with the Octane 2022.1 XB2 core. This 2022.1.0.1 release is available for the latest Houdini production builds on Windows x64 and Linux gcc6.3.1.

Houdini production builds supported by this release: 18.0.597, 18.5.759, 19.0.589, 19.0.622 and 19.0.657
Additional build available for Houdini 19.5.303

As with all experimental builds, we advise to not use this release for production purposes. We are trying to, but we can't guarantee that scenes saved with this version will be compatible in future releases.

New features
To learn more about the new features and improvements of OctaneRender 2022.1, please check out the 2022.1 release post


Release 2022.1.0.1Enterprise subscription license
Windows builds
Linux builds
H19.5.303 builds
MacOS version: WIP

Release 2022.1.0.1 Studio subscription license
Windows builds
Linux builds
H19.5.303 builds
MacOS version: WIP

Standalone 2022.1 XB2 version for the network rendering nodes
Standalone


Release Notes
=============================================
RELEASE 2022.1.0.1 XB2
=============================================
* PLUGIN FEATURES AND FIXES:
- Added H19.0.657 plugin build.
- Fixed a crash while rendering volumes in scenes created with previous Octane versions.

* OCTANE 2022.1 XB2 NEW FEATURES:
- Various improvements to nested dielectrics.
- Improve the handling of surfaces with multiple materials and nested dielectrics enabled.
- Improved user experience when there are OCIO errors.
- Fix hang when photon tracing is used in scenes without mesh geometry.
- Fixed blending/compositing happening for output AOVs that were not composite layers.
- Update the Blend color space tooltip to clarify that it affects both blending and compositing.
- Fixed hair primitives on macOS.
- Prevent incorrect value of free device memory being shown in the UI sometimes when enabling/disabling denoiser.
- Fixed hang when photon tracing is used in scenes without mesh geometry.
- Disabled environment sampling if we are recording a shadow AOV and have portals and no importance sampled environment.
- Make blending composite output AOV layers in perceptual space match Photoshop when the layers aren't fully opaque.
- Make the color burn and color dodge compositor blend modes match Photoshop in the last remaining special case.
- Use slightly overlapping tiles for photon tracing, with soft edges.
- Fix artefacts in the color dodge and color burn composite output AOV blend modes.
- Added blend color space to composite AOV layer node.
- Fixed issue causing wrong results when using the baking camera with geometry with texture displacement.
- Implement OSL transformu() function for units of length.
- Fixed baking camera on macOS.
- Fixed issue causing artefacts showing outside the UV geometry boundary when using the baking camera in info passes.
- Fixed material maps when using multiple instances of one SDF node with different materials.
- Fixed noise and incorrect background of positional AOVs if RTX is disabled and the scene bounding box has size 0 along one of its axes.
- Fixed GPU failure when switching from photon tracing to PMC.
- Fixed SDF displacement using the wrong transform.
- Fixed minor sampling error.
- Integrate the 'Image adjustment' node
- Integrate the 'Color key' node
- Fixed AI Light on macOS.
- Fixed medium emission using uninitialized values.
- Fixed possible hand when using RTX.
- Bounds input of the Vectron node no longer allows negative values.
- Fixed issue on Windows causing ORBX file corruption when updating files on remote drives that have been temporarily disconnected.
- Switch to use soft borders for Standard volume mediums.
- Fixed a crash when deleting an output AOV group node sometimes.
- Fixed curvature node not outputting the right values on macOS.
- Fixed MacOS "legacy volume" render regression.
- Fixed texture projections on SDF objects (volume + osl sdf).
- World space coordinates work more consistently on texture inputs on SDF shaders.
- Added option to the volume Z depth AOVs that allows you define which depth is considered white/1.
- Fixed render error when using the baking camera with a baking group ID with empty UV data.
- Fixed a crash which happens when triggering geometry export with invalid path(like a ORBX package) or relative paths. Relative paths are now anchored from project directory if a project exist or from current working directory.
- Fixed the 'Volume cloud' texture on macOS.
- Added 'Fractal 2' to the 'Procedural effects' texture.
- Added 'Noise smoke flow' to the 'Procedural effects' texture.
- Added volumetric effects to the 'Procedural effects' texture node.
- Integrated more textures from LiveDB.
- Fixed random net render hang when no local GPUs are used for rendering.
- Added a new output AOV type: cryptomatte mask.
- Fixed Linux render node distributable which was missing the daemon executable.
- Fixed object layer masks of volumes which were messing up custom AOVs.
- Fixes invalid materials in non-RTX CUDA when moving the camera in scenes with nested dielectrics enabled.
- Fixed issue causing to re-login when switching versions of Octane on some Linux distros.
- Fixed a bug where auto bump map doesn't work as expected when box projection is used.
- Fixed a bug in vertex displacement. By mistake y and z axes were swapped for object space vector maps. Also autobumpmap was not working as expected on object space vertex displacement.
- Update FreeImage to 3.18.0.
- Add BRDF sampling slices for diffuse BRDFs, remove invalid Specular/Ward combination.


Happy rendering,
Your OTOY Team

[vurt]

Hey, how do we use the new feature Mesh to Fog Volume?
Does it need to be in shader or OBJ params, and what inputs?

Thanks

[juanjgon]

Hey, how do we use the new feature Mesh to Fog Volume?
Does it need to be in shader or OBJ params, and what inputs?

Sorry, this feature is not available in the Houdini plugin yet, but anyway, in Houdini this function is redundant ... you only need to use the Cloud SOP to build a volume from any mesh

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[vurt]

Sorry, this feature is not available in the Houdini plugin yet, but anyway, in Houdini this function is redundant ... you only need to use the Cloud SOP to build a volume from any mesh

Thanks,
-Juanjo

Thanks. yeah, there are a bunch of ways of doing it in Houdini. Just from the experience with some mid-high voxel counts, it takes a long time to load, so was thinking about a direct volume conversion during rendering can help

[juanjgon]

Sorry, this feature is not available in the Houdini plugin yet, but anyway, in Houdini this function is redundant ... you only need to use the Cloud SOP to build a volume from any mesh

Thanks,
-Juanjo

Thanks. yeah, there are a bunch of ways of doing it in Houdini. Just from the experience with some mid-high voxel counts, it takes a long time to load, so was thinking about a direct volume conversion during rendering can help

Yep, from this point of view this Octane feature can be useful. Also be aware that the "volume" primitives are extracted faster than the "vdb" primitives, and the OpenVDB files are even faster because they are loaded by Octane at the render time.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[galleon27]

How do we get the color data onto volumes? Cd is 3 scalar values when using volume primitives. It has to be a VDB if we want to use it and as you stated, extracting VDB primitives is slower than volume.
The only usable way now is to write the volume to disk and load it as OpenVDB.

[juanjgon]

How do we get the color data onto volumes? Cd is 3 scalar values when using volume primitives. It has to be a VDB if we want to use it and as you stated, extracting VDB primitives is slower than volume.
The only usable way now is to write the volume to disk and load it as OpenVDB.

Yes, to work with color grids you need to use Houdini "vdb" primitives or OpenVDB files. I always recommend working with cache OpenVDB files because Octane can load them at the render time, so the scene extraction time is almost 0.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[Andreu]

Hi, I was wondering if this build includes the Solaris plugin as well or is still a separate build?

[juanjgon]

Hi, I was wondering if this build includes the Solaris plugin as well or is still a separate build?

It is still a separate build. Everything related to the Hydra plugin is here:
viewforum.php?f=140

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[ThomasHelzle]

Hey Juanjo,

in this and the previous build, I get the following error on each render I start in the IPR:

Code: Select all

Texture_Image_Greyscale1 void __cdecl OP_Parameters::evalStringT(class UT_String &,const class UT_StringRef &,int,double,int) const: Invalid parameter name A_IMAGE_CHOSEN_LAYER_NAME
Texture_Image_Greyscale1 __int64 __cdecl OP_Parameters::evalIntT(const class UT_StringRef &,int,double,int) const: Invalid parameter name A_IES_PHOTOMETRY_MODE
EnviroTexture void __cdecl OP_Parameters::evalStringT(class UT_String &,const class UT_StringRef &,int,double,int) const: Invalid parameter name A_IMAGE_CHOSEN_LAYER_NAME
EnviroTexture __int64 __cdecl OP_Parameters::evalIntT(const class UT_StringRef &,int,double,int) const: Invalid parameter name A_IES_PHOTOMETRY_MODE
CamEnviroTexture void __cdecl OP_Parameters::evalStringT(class UT_String &,const class UT_StringRef &,int,double,int) const: Invalid parameter name A_IMAGE_CHOSEN_LAYER_NAME
CamEnviroTexture __int64 __cdecl OP_Parameters::evalIntT(const class UT_StringRef &,int,double,int) const: Invalid parameter name A_IES_PHOTOMETRY_MODE

Am I doing something wrong or is this some kind of bug? The error message doesn't tell me anything.
I select my textures with the file picker dialog like always, a mixture of .tif and .png, three in total.
The scene is freshly built in Houdini 19.622 yesterday, today I installed 657 and this build of Octane (had 2022.1.0.0 before) but the error stayed the same.
I'm using Windows 10.

Thanks and cheers,

Tom