Kerkythea v1.5.1 RC5

[giannis]

hi all,

we've reached RC5 which solves most problems and enhances instancing brush.

Windows

Linux

MacOSX

PluginSDK

Password
ktserc


Changes log

- Added: Clip mapping request - drop clip mapping if image alpha channel is absent. (Tomasz)

- Fixed: Different look of material after applying changes (Fletch)
That was only happening when mat editor was in medium resolution.

- Fixed: Incorrect tone mapping applied in mat editor when using internal scene.

- Fixed: A lot of issues regarding instancing brush/eraser usage and clean up.

- Added: Enhancements for Instancing Brush UI with:
a. Grid
b. Automatic Population
c. Front/Back Face + Mask Texture

- Fixed: Instance List is automatically updated now when clicking on the combo box.

- Partial Fix: Dark edges appearing in Antialiasing of Photon Mapping (Claudio)
Actually there's no fix, but reverted to standard Mitchell-Netravalli for default
AA filter (added also Catmull-Rom) which does not produce so pronounced dark edges.

- Fixed: Popup becoming hidden for MacOSX platform - patched fox.

- Added: Irradiance precomputation automatically set when multithreading is used. (Fletch)
This takes place if not set in the preset (value:-1) and it is then set to value:4.

- Fixed: Gamma correction inconsistency in new scene. (notareal)

- Fixed: Setting Voronoi texture in diffuse light (or material) results in crash. (notareal)

- Fixed: Animation render problem.
It was a side-effect of Load/Save Cache messages of OctreeEnvironment not working properly.

- Fixed: Setting threads in render dialog does not override multi-threaded preset.

- Fixed: View does not match rendering in parallel view. (Fletch/ExtremeFatalist)

- Fixed: FXIcon crash.
All KT versions prior to RC5 have resourse leaks that become evident after
working some hours with KT, usually resulting in "FXIcon: can't create" crashes.

- Fixed: Obj files broken parsing.

- Added: More functions for plugin light.

- Fixed: Weird reflectance in scaled spheres scene. (Avariant)
All KT versions prior to RC5 were giving incorrect shading for scaled objects.

- Fixed: Clip mapping hang for infinite plane. (Avariant)

- Added: Using smaller cache in spatial acceleration module. This can render
up to 20 mil (or more) raw polygons with drop in speed of about 10-15%.
I have removed the switch for this mode in RC5, just to test extendingly
renders using the different intersection module (so, don't mind if you
see a drop in speed of about 10-15%). Normally, the switch will be placed
between 5-7 mil polygons.


Pending issues

- Post-process filtering - still no integration in saving images

- Separation of direct/indirect lighting in MLT - still no extension
to multithreading/networking - it's likely to be dropped.

- Cross-platform networking - is there any experience with networking
of similar machines? i.e. all using Windows or all MacOSX?



We are really close to release now, so you can now show your renders
made with KT2008 to the outside world


best wishes and a happy new year
giannis

nice!

I tried the cross platform networking on the Rc3 already and made atleast 1 bug about that. I'll test it further this week.

[giannis]

lekonna,

many thanks for the networking bug report - i already saw it - it's just
that I didn't try seriously so far to resolve the networking bugs.

It's my next thing to fix asap... there is also another guy that has access
to a university network farm, and it's likely to give him access to the RC
forum.

greetings
giannis

ok,

On the subject of network rendering, so far what has been missing with these release canditates is a proper farm management system. Now i need to go individually to each machine in the farm and load the scene + start the rendering. What would be really cool is that i just subscribe the clients to the server and the server dishes out the scenes to each machine and they start to crunch on those. (maybe optional, either send the full scene or a url to a smb network share where the scene is located).

This would enable much more fluid farm usage, i could have few racks just running the clients in the client mode and the server would then use those as slaves when it needs to render something. (with a big farm would prolly dedicate something like 4-6 slaves for each server).

This is actually a feature that i'll propably try to script in some form if you don't have the time to implement it G. (already did a render queue implementation) just that my scripting has become quick and extremely dirty lately.

I can share the render queue hack script if somebody is intrested.

br, J

[giannis]

lekonna

you are absolutely right on this - Fletch was also insisting on having
some render service/daemon instead of configuring separately the
slaves.

I do understand the need for this, perhaps i'll try to code a couple
of functions missing (like clients waiting till they see a server and
server terminating all clients).

greetings
giannis

[giannis]

Thanks, Giannis!
Great step forward.

[giannis]

[giannis]

Quick update RC5.5 only for windows!


pass: ktserc

The archive contains only the executable that you need to just replace
the previous one of RC5.

Changes
1. Fixed crash when applying a material from disk (tomasz, lee)
2. Material instances can now be edited in mat editor (tomasz)
3. Population now works correctly when canvas is a group of models
4. Population now makes uniform area sampling
5. Editing instancing density texture does not crash anymore (notareal, fletch)
[the bug was happening if you had opened the mat editor prior to editing density tex]
6. Plugin textures/objects correct naming (Avariant)

enjoy!
giannis

animations are working... with PM+FG Med+AA preset with a Xfrog tree ... the grass is made with a synthesis layer using an Avariant procedural over a bitmap... and an avariant procedural bump. I needed some 'fast' grass for animations... cant afford the instanced Frolfer grass that is great for stills... (but for animations I need something quicker )

stats:
prod AA at 1.0
4 threads
240 frames - ~3hr render time for all
~1.5mins per frame
2 bad frames (with strange artifacting glitches) needed deletion (had to copy an adjacent frame and name it the deleted frame number) WISH I could just re-render those 2 frames... maybe in KT 2009?