Highlights
Subsurface scattering improved
SSS now clears much faster in difficult indirect lit areas. You will see the most dramatic improvements when the SSS object is lit only by indirect lighting.
Added camera multi step motionblur
Unlimited motion blur steps are now taken into account also for camera movements, which previously was limited to 2 substeps.
Speed optimization in some render channels
Alpha, Z-buffer, Material Id and Object Id now render clean much faster.
Maxwell
Other new features
Now it is possible to type simple arithmetic operations in numeric fields, (i.e 200/2 ; 30*4). It also works in conjuntion with the Shift+Enter shortcut that sets the same value in all the numeric fields that share the same parent group, i.e scale in X, Y, Z.
When alpha channel is embedded and Multilight is enabled with "separate lights" option turned on, the alpha channel is also embedded in all the light images.
Improvements
Speed optimization rendering particles with motion blur
Stability of extensions improved
When resuming a render Maxwell now checks the MXI vs. the target SL before preprocessing to save time in case resuming is not needed
SDK improved
Speed optimizations in MXI read/write/merge routines
Improvements/Bugfixes (Maxwell FIRE)
Added some speed improvements
Overall stability improved - Now it is possible to change RealFlow toolkit parameters interactively
Voxelization was triggered in some cases when it was not necessary
Issues of pretessellated displacement in interactive mode
Override and default material were not properly refreshed when they were changed while Fire was running
Hierarchies were not properly refreshed if parents were hidden
Potential crash when changing the diaphragm parameter while interactive mode was running
Bugfixes
Embedded alpha is always set to have the same bit depth as the render channel
Some camera parameters were not changing when changing the active camera
Multilight shutter slider range
Problem with greyscale TGA files
Resuming MXI from the menu option was failing in some cases
Reading of EXR displacement maps with negative values was clipping them to zero
Alpha channel could fail pure black textures
Problem with reverse colors in hair tips
Alpha channel could be wrong in areas with pure black reflectance textures
Hidden to camera failed when IBL + ML + Shadow channel
Old MXI files could look too bright when opened in the viewer
Hang when rendering with "-node" flag
Problems searching dependencies in paths with dots
Bug when instances had an emitter material applied while their referenced mesh had a non emitter material
Bug in subsurface scattering in draft mode
Memory leak in pretessellated displacement
Network
New features
"Progressive refinement". By default jobs are rendered until the target SL is reached but when the new "progressive refinement " option is enabled, the user can specify the amount of SL passes. For example setting it to 3,7,10, means that the job will be rendered up to SL 3, then automatically resumed to SL 7 and then will finish at SL 10. This is extremely useful for compositing purposes, since compositors can start working in the whole sequence at low SL while the sequence is being automatically refined. Note: the more refining steps, the more file transfers are needed. The syntax is identical to the one used in animation strings, you can type for example: 3,12-14,17.
Port:X command line argument allows you to set the port range. It is very useful to run different networks in the same local domain. A set of the nNodes, Monitors and Manager launched with a certain port will be invisible to other Managers launched with a different one. mxnetwork needs 14 ports so if i.e X = 25000, ports used will be in the 25000-25014 range.
Nodes in the node list can now be sorted by each column
Now a list with all the dependencies of a job is displayed in the last page of the job wizard
Added mechanisms to detect if the manager is running out of space on disk to avoid crashes
Improvements
Performance merging MXI files vastly improved
Jobs with both "Save MXI" and "Save Image" parameters unchecked are not accepted
Improved routines to search for missing textures and dependencies to avoid unnecessary Pack n' Go when launching network jobs
Improved performance of routines for checking dependencies
Error handling improved
Nodes in the node list can now be sorted by each column
Improved threads stability sending/receiving data
Now the preview images do not show premultiplied alpha
Bugfixes
Batch render was not working properly in 2.6.0
Dependencies of some extensions were not properly sent
Original MXS file was sometimes deleted when "send dependencies" was unchecked
Problem resuming MXI sequence if some of the frames already had a sampling level higher than the target sampling level
Problem with paths in Linux
Warning message when monitor was closed without sending all its dependencies was not shown in some cases
Problem in cooperative renders when the "Save MXI" parameter was unchecked in the scene
Changing the camera in the job wizard was not updating iso/shutter parameters
Problems rendering at very high resolutions
Issues when a render node failed in a cooperative job and was restarted again
Paths with macros were not working. Now macros are replaced by regular paths when the job is submitted
Use scene settings didn't obey all settings in Batch mode
Format of channels was ignored (they were saved using the render output format and depth instead)
Problems with paths when "separate lights in files" was enabled
Reset entire network routines fixed
GUI issues resizing panels and other minor gui issues
Studio/MXED
New features
Added a checkbox to enable/disable auto GMT in the sky parameters
Now it is possible to drop textures directly from the Explorer/Finder to the texture slots of the material editor
Improvements
Now it is possible to make simple arithmetic operations in numeric fields, (i.e 200/2 ; 30*4)
It is possible to enter negative values in the displacement 3D scale parameters
Bugfixes
"Reset" with hierarchies
FIRE was voxelizing sometimes when it was not necessary
Objects with a reference material applied sometimes were not displayed properly in the openGL viewport
Pack n' Go with references
Downloaded MXM Gallery materials gets added twice to the material list
Potential problem when switching between material preview scenes
When a material was renamed inside the material editor, Studio was not checking if the name was already in use
HDR Light Studio: sometimes data stored in the MXS file was not read properly
HDR Light Studio: Fixed some refresh issue
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