Overview: New OctaneRender for Blender

A quick review of the new features available in OctaneRender for Blender V15.2.3, offering some great workflow improvements.

Lino Grandi 

And here is the full list of changes from OTOY:

• Upgrade to 3.08 stable
• Upgrade to blender 2.79b
• Support “Shift + Left Mouse” to select material directly
  • Firstly, use “Right Mouse” to select target object
  • Then, use “Shift + Left Mouse” to select target material
• Support motion blur for reshapable objects
• Use the same options as Octane Standalone for motion blur setting
• Introduce enum properties to replace raw int sockets for octane enum pins
  • Much more understandable and user-friendly
  • Toon Light
  • BRDF Model
  • Metallic IOR Mode
  • Noise Type
  • Projection Mode
  • Rotation Mode
  • Interpolation Type
• Support external vdb sequence(“Data – Volume properties”)
  • Similar to Lightwave implementation, we leverage special string tag(“$F$”) to identify frame parts in vdb path
  • Use “$F$” to label the frame parts in vdb file path – E.g. “fog_$F$.vdb” => “fog_0.vdb”, “fog_1.vdb” … “fog_10.vdb” … “fog_100.vdb”
  • Use “$[1-9]F”to deal with the leading zeros in file path – E.g. “fog_$4F$.vdb” => “fog_0000.vdb”, “fog_0001.vdb” … “fog_0010.vdb” … “fog_0100.vdb”
• Support new layout in texture node menu
  • In default, the texture nodes are distributed in three categories: proceduals, tools, textures
  • Use new layout in default
  • Able to change new/old layout(“User Preference” – “Add-ons” – “OctaneRender Engine” – “Preferences” – “Texture Node Menu Layout”)
• Support “Octane Layout” for textures as it is in 3.08 StandAlone
• Support compilation optimization for objects/shaders that are invisible in current render layer
• Support external openvdb import(“Data”-“Volume properties”-“Used as Octane VDB”/”OpenVDB File”)
• Support to toggle octane node graph(“Render – Render – Show Octane NodeGraph”)
• Support octane network preference setting(“Render – Octane server – Network preference”)
• Support to choose HDR bit depth type in image texture node
• Added emmision texture menu in texture node graph(for emission pin in volume medium)
• Set OpenVDB as default value in smoke cache format

FIXES SINCE LAST RELEASE

• Fixed linux render hanging
• Fixed crash in scene without cameras
• Fixed render layer mode bug
• Fixed octane camera visibility
• Reverted cycle render layer hiding
• Fix environment texture uplate failure after rename
• Fix missing marker menu
• Fix infinite plane issue
• Fix warnings about write_customdata error

You can learn more here.