Daz Studio 4.9.3 Pro, General Release!

Daz Software · January 2017

Daz 3D is pleased to announce Daz Studio 4.9.3 Pro General Release!

Version: 4.9.3.166
Date: January 5, 2017

Highlights
Important Notes
Frequently Asked Questions
Previous Builds/Threads

!! IF YOU HAVE NOT UPGRADED TO THE GENERAL RELEASE OF 4.9, IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED THAT YOU BACKUP YOUR CONTENT DATABASE IN DAZ STUDIO 4.x (E.G., 4.6, 4.7, 4.8) BEFORE LAUNCHING DAZ STUDIO 4.9 !!

How do I backup my User Data in Daz Studio?

!! IF YOU HAVE NOT ALREADY MIGRATED FROM THE OLDER VALENTINA DB BASED CMS TO THE POSTGRESQL BASED CMS, IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED THAT YOU DO SO BEFORE LAUNCHING DAZ STUDIO 4.9!!

Has the Content Management Service (CMS) changed?

Highlights:

Rendering
- NVIDIA Iray
  - Integrated Iray 2016.3
    - Provides support for Pascal generation (10-series) GPUs
    - Requires CUDA 8.0 and recent graphics drivers (see this post for more information)
  - Added "batch" mode (or "queueing") support for network rendering via Iray Server and/or VCA, for still images; animations are not currently supported
  - Exposed lens and aperture settings via a “Lens” property group on cameras
    - Lens Radial Bias
    - Lens Shift X (mm)
    - Lens Shift Y (mm)
    - Lens Stereo Offset (mm)
    - Lens Distortion Type (spherical, cylindrical, stereo, etc)
    - Lens Distortion K1/2/3
    - Lens Distortion Scale
    - Aperture Blades
    - Aperture Blade Rotation
  - Exposed spectral rendering settings via the Render Settings pane
    - Spectral Rendering Enable
    - Spectral Conversion Intent
    - Spectral Observer
  - Added UV clipping to Decal nodes
    - Adds a "Clip Mode" property to the "Decal > General" group
    - Selecting a value dynamically shows/hides additional properties
  - Transmitted color map in the Iray Uber Material is now ignored due to a limitation described in the Iray programmers guide
    - "The material's volume coefficients are varying in MDL, however, Iray Photoreal only supports uniform coefficients"
- Scripted 3Delight
  - The Outline render script respects the colors set by the user again
- OpenGL
  - Renders performed using the OpenGL option(s) now behave similarly to the other renderers in that they include a transparent background
    - Saved scenes that render using one of the OpenGL options and relied on the viewport color as a background color will need to be updated by the user to include a backdrop consisting of the desired color.
Content
- Daz Connect
  - Added support for automatic login
    - Requires valid cached (encrypted) account credentials
    - If account credentials change, automatic login will silently fail and user must explicitly invoke login with updated credentials
    - Added an option to "Automatically Login" to the Account Login dialog and the Smart Content pane Store page
    - Added an "Automatically Login With Remembered Credentials" option to Preferences
    - Automatic Login will fail after 3 attempts @ 20 sec intervals
      - This protects against blocking the application from launching when/if there are issues with web services and automatic login is enabled
  - Fixed an issue with timing out before long running downloads could complete
  - Added a time out for persistently slow download speeds; below 128 bytes per second
  - Fixed an issue with saving (e.g., Scenes, etc.) and assets installed via Daz Connect that could cause too many dependencies to be recorded in the saved file(s)
    - This manifested itself by the loading of saved file(s) indicating that more products are required than are actually necessary; e.g., products that provide morphs and/or UV sets that were installed at the time of save, but are not actively used
  - Selecting the "Browse…" option in Edit > Preferences… > CMS Settings : Cluster Directory will now use the currently selected directory path as the initial folder when browsing for a new Cluster Directory path
- Content Database
  - Fixed an issue that could cause a failure to upgrade the CMS database
  - Properly handle vendor/user categorization when unifying categories
  - Fixed a "Lost and Found" category sync issue
  - The port number defined in the postgresql.conf file, found within the database cluster path, is now read (if any) on launch of the application and validated against the port number read (if any) from the application data cmscfg.json file
    - If the port numbers in these two files do not match, the cmscfg.json file is updated to reflect the port number read from postgresql.conf file.
  - Fixed an issue where the application data cmscfg.json file would not be created if both the cluster directory and the port were changed by a user in the Preferences dialog
    - When a user changes the database cluster path, the port number, or both, the application data cmscfg.json file and the postgresql.conf file are now updated as appropriate
    - When a user changes the port number the application may need to be closed and restarted for a connection using the port number to be established
  - Various usability adjustments have been made to the Categorize dialog
  - "Search Drives(s) for Files" no longer considers content downloaded and installed to the mapped Daz Connect Data directory
- Asset Finding
  - The "Scan Known Directories for Files" dialog has been reworked
- Asset Loading
  - HDRI files are now being found when searching for missing files
- Database Driven Content Views
  - Renamed the "All" filter in database driven asset/product views to "All Files" and "All Products" as appropriate; i.e., the Files and Products pages of the Smart Content pane, the Targets, Add-Ons and Product views of the Smart Content pane, the Presets pages (and their respective embedded Targets and Add-Ons views) on various property based panes
  - Added support for a user persistently hiding vendor-defined categorization of assets; when a user removes an asset from a category that a vendor has assigned the asset to, the vendor-defined categorization is not actually removed, rather the categorization is marked as hidden and thus does not contribute to the category tree in the database driven asset/product views unless the "Show Hidden Vendor Categorizations" preference is enabled or the vendor-defined categorization is changed by an explicit update
    - Note: The state of the new preference has no bearing on the categories or categorizations displayed in the Content Library pane, the Categorize dialog if launched from the context menu of an asset in the Content Library pane, or the Content DB Editor. These particular views are provided for managing content and as such display all categories and categorizations that exist in the database.
  - Migrated assets (i.e., assets installed via Install Manager or assets created in pre-4.9 versions) are now assigned to a "Lost and Found" product sub-category if the asset has no categorization
  - Removing the last user-defined categorization of an asset now causes that asset to either revert to a "Lost and Found" product sub-category (for assets that are not formalized as part of a product with proper metadata) or the vendor-defined categorization (for assets that are formally defined by a product that provides proper metadata)
  - Replaced the "Remove From All Categories" checkbox in the Categorize dialog with a button bearing the same name and modified the behavior accordingly; with the checkbox a user had to check the option, accept the dialog and then relaunch the dialog in order to clear all current categorizations and start from scratch; with the button the user need only click it once to uncheck all current categories and then immediately begin categorizing without being forced to accept and relaunch the dialog
  - Fixed #DS-1286/#CS-221671 : Failure to Upgrade CMS database; this was the root cause of some users suddenly not seeing categories unless the "Show Hidden Vendor Categorizations" preference was enabled
  - Categorizing an asset assigned to a "Lost and Found" product sub-category now automatically causes the "Lost and Found" categorization of that asset to be removed
  - Categorizing the last asset assigned to a "Lost and Found" product sub-category now causes the "Lost and Found" product sub-category to be removed
  - Updating metadata via Daz Connect now removes an asset from a "Lost and Found" product sub-category if that asset has been assigned to a proper category that is outside the “Lost and Found” category; if an asset's categorizations are removed and the asset has not been categorized by the user, the asset is assigned to a "Lost and Found" sub-category named after the product that provides the asset
- Smart Content pane
  - Product views now use their own search thread
- Content Library pane
  - Added the “Create a Product from…” action to the context menu for Search and Category containers
  - Added the “Create a Product from…” action to the context menu for Asset(s)
- Surfaces pane
  - Extended search types to include language specific preset/materials, preset/materials/hierarchical, and preset/shader content types (i.e., MDL, RSL, OSL, LXM, MC6, MT5)
- AutoFit
  - Made general improvements
  - Added support for pose data in clones
  - ERC connections are now temporarily disconnected to avoid issues relating to pose baking
- Duplication
  - Animation data is no longer being lost when an object is duplicated
- Transfer Utility
  - Added an option for UV space projection
  - Added a "Closest Vertex First" option; uses Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) and closest facet first when unchecked, uses Octree and closest vertex first when checked; default is unchecked, previous behavior is checked
  - Worked on projection algorithms to improve results
- ERC Freeze
  - Added an "Object" column to the property view; used in identifying when properties are cross-object
  - The header of the property view columns can now be clicked to change sort order
- Shader Mixer
  - The "Connector Color..." action has been made available from the context menu for connected inputs of a brick; allows the color to be changed from either side of the connection
- Shader Builder
  - The "New Shader..." action in the Catalog is functioning properly again
  - Made UI tweaks toward consistency with Shader Mixer and ultimately toward fixing the minimum size center dock issue of both panes
- Map Transfer
  - Changed to render by material instead of by template
  - Added a "Convert By Matching Properties" option; on by default; causes conversion to occur by property instead of by map
  - Removed a power of 2 requirement from transfered results
- Geometry Based Tools
  - Added actions to context menus that allow a user to select/deselect by geometry islands; context menu > Geometry Selection > (De)Select By > (De)Select Geometry Islands…
Import / Export
- Hexagon Bridge
  - Refactored the options dialogs
- Bryce Bridge
  - Now writes its messages to the log
- OBJ Importer
  - Refactored individual options so that they are more consistent with the OBJ Exporter individual options (in both look and feel)
- FBX Importer
  - Now handles n-gons (polygons with greater than 4 sides)
  - Improved support for pipeline automation via script
- FBX Exporter
  - Fixed FBX export of non-transform property animation curves
  - Added support for distributing auto-follow base figure animation curves to fitted figures (i.e., clothing, hair, etc)
  - Fixed a potential crash in the handling of specialized PBR materials
  - Improved support for pipeline automation via script
- PZ3 Importer
  - The last settings used for the OBJ exporter no longer have an impact on the result of the PZ3 importer
Interface
- Style
  - Made adjustments to the styling of the Darkside style
- Viewport
  - Improved bounding box framing
  - Improved node selectablity in some viewport tools
  - Camera, DrawStyle and Background Color are now being reset correctly when performing a hardware render
- Viewport Tools
  - Added "Secondary Nodes" options to the Universal, Rotate, Translate and Scale view tools; when enabled, these options provide the ability to manipulate multiple selected nodes in the same manner as the primary (most-recent) selected node, using the manipulator displayed in the viewport for the primary selected node
- Preferences
  - Renamed the "Content Library" page to "Content"; the majority of options on the page are not specific to a particular pane
  - Added a "Show Hidden Vendor Categorizations" option to the Content page
    - When checked, vendor categorizations that the user has hidden become visible again in database driven asset/product views
  - Added a Bridges page; extracted bridge preferences from the Interface page
  - Added an option for explicitly setting the Bryce executable location for the Bryce bridge
  - Added an option for explicitly setting the Hexagon executable location for the Hexagon bridge
  - Fixed a crash when launching the Preferences dialog if a bridge plugin that a preference referenced was not installed; e.g., GoZ
  - Addressed crashes caused by security policy differences resulting from changing hosting providers when the Participate in Daz Studio Improvement Program preference is enabled
Scripting
- Many APIs have been added or extended
Fixed bugs and/or made improvements in various areas; see the Change Log for details

*Note: Switching between builds provided via the General Release channel that are older than 4.9.1.30 and builds provided via the Public Build channel (and the Private Build channel for those involved in that endeavor) will cause a "Configuration Changed" message to display.

Important Notes:

The first time you launch Daz Studio 4.9, any data that exists in the content database is migrated so that it can be used in Daz Studio 4.9.
The amount of time the database migration operation takes is proportional to the amount of data to be migrated.
The database migration operation does not delete the data that it migrates from the previous location so that it remains accessible by earlier versions and other applications, such as Carrara.
Daz Studio 4.9 uses the same PostgreSQL database as Daz Studio 4.6 and later, and/or other applications, such as Carrara.
A portion of the data contained within the database is shared amongst versions but not entirely. For example:
- Creating a category in either Daz Studio 4.9 or 4.8 will cause that category to exist in the other version
- Assigning a file to that category in Daz Studio 4.9 will NOT cause that file to be assigned to that category in Daz Studio 4.8
- Assigning a file to that category in Daz Studio 4.8 WILL cause the file to be assigned to the category in Daz Studio 4.9
Reseting the database in any version of Daz Studio that uses PostgreSQL (e.g., 4.6 or later) will purge all of data in the database, including any data that may be used by earlier versions or other applications, such as Carrara.
After the initial migration operation, edited metadata in Daz Studio 4.8 will not be migrated to Daz Studio 4.9.
- A workaround is to export User Data from Daz Studio 4.8 and reimport User Data in Daz Studio 4.9.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Public Beta Threads:

4.9.3.166 (RC5)
4.9.3.153 (RC4)
4.9.3.128 (RC3)
4.9.3.117 (RC2)
4.9.3.71 (RC1)
4.9.3.56
4.9.3.37
4.9.3.25

Previous General Releases:

4.9.2.70 (May 25, 2016)
4.9.1.30 (March 8, 2016)
4.9.0.63 (January 21, 2016)

rbtwhiz · January 2017

Has the NVIDIA Iray renderer been updated?

Yes, it has.

*Note: The entries below come directly from the NVIDIA Iray 2016.3 release notes. Some entries, such as the mention of Iray Realtime, etc, currently have no bearing on Daz Studio itself but are included for completeness.

Iray 2016.3, build 278300.4305

Added and Changed Features

Iray Bridge
- Rendering in batch scheduler mode now supports canvases with more than one layer. This is needed for single pass VR renderings.
- Rendering in batch scheduler mode now heeds the camera sub-window settings. This makes it possible to render an image in multiple passes with different sub-windows..
Iray Photoreal
- Noise levels for most environment lighting setups have been improved.
Iray Interactive
- Support for all compute capabilities on MacOS has been added.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- The behavior of IFunction call::create_variants() has been changed. Defaults not explicitly specified are no longer copied from the prototype and made explicit defaults of the variant, but will implicitly use the defaults of the prototype. If such a default of the prototype is later changed, the change also affects the variant. To maintain the previous behavior, pass explicit defaults when creating the variants, e.g., start with the defaults of the prototype or the arguments of the material instance/function call instead of with an empty expression list, and then change the defaults as desired.
- The loading of pixel data from textures stored in MDL archives is now done lazily as with textures not stored in MDL archives.
- The MDL compiler now properly checks the uniform/varying property of material parameter attachments and warns if an expression computing a varying value is attached to a uniform parameter.
- Note that this is a real error, the rendering will not show what is expected. This warning might turn into an error in future versions of Iray.
- The new methods get_prototype() on IFunction_definition and IMaterial_definition provide the name of the prototype for variants.
- The new method IFunction definition::is_uniform() allows to tell apart uniform and varying functions.

Fixed Bugs

General
- The maximum line length supported for .ies files has been increased to 4096. Proper error handling for lines exceeding this limit has been added.
- A bug has been fixed that occured when the connection to the license server was lost. Iray using FlexNet licensing crashed due to FlexNet’s internal behavior when losing the connection to the license server.
- When rendering over Iray Bridge in batch scheduler mode under some circumstances the scene could stop acting on updates. In IView this could be triggered by rendering a scene in batch mode only until the end criteria for the scene was reached.
- A bug in Iray Bridge has been fixed where cloud render contexts could have returned the wrong error code on video errors. Now -15 is returned.
Iray Photoreal & Iray Interactive
- Wrong intensity scaling of spectral color attachments has been fixed. It could occur in cases were the same expression was used multiple times in a material.
- A potentially incorrect constant folding in cases of multiple color operations {=,-.*,/} with a total of one varying input has been fixed.
Iray Photoreal
- High bit depth texture interpolation has been fixed.
- Materials that feature a perfect specular component and different front/backside materials (if CUDA is used) have been fixed.
- Precision issues for some difficult instancing special cases have been fixed.
- A regression has been fixed that caused Iray Photoreal to stop reporting convergence updates to the progress callback.
- The orientation of the uv layout on classical light sources has been fixed.
- A CPU vs. GPU rendering discrepancy with builtin noise functions in the case of non-finite uv input has been fixed.
- Excessive noise when dynamically increasing light source intensity starting from zero has been fixed.
- Irradiance buffer intensity artifacts when the caustic sampler is enabled have been fixed.
- In contrast to the fake ground plane, matte objects with purely specular materials didn’t receive shadows. This has been fixed.
- Support for SSE2-only capable CPUs has been fixed.
- An occasional GPU failure when rendering with the caustic sampler enabled and emitting geometry has been fixed.
- A crash with directional lights and otherwise empty scenes (if instancing was off) has been fixed.
Iray Interactive
- A bug has been fixed that caused undefined behavior when running out of GPU memory during a scene update.
- Stripe-shaped artifacts when rendering with multiple hosts with irt cloud have been fixed.
- A bug has been fixed that caused only a part of the IES light profile data to be used.
- An incorrect implementation of df::spot edf (which never yielded a spot but only got bright with smaller spread) has been fixed.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- The MDL exporter no longer generates strict-relative file paths for pre-MDL 1.3 modules.
- A serious slowdown when parsing very long annotations has been fixed.
- A rare crash if DB elements of type IFunction_call were overwritten by function calls with a different return type has been fixed.
- A potential crash with many duplicate textures in displacement has been fixed.
- The MDL compiler now checks that the MANIFEST of MDL archives is valid.
- The generation of version numbers in the MANIFEST of MDL archives has been fixed.
- The missing execution of the dependency check for MDL modules loaded from MDL archives has been fixed.
- The retrieval of "export.* keys in the MANIFEST of MDL archives were not reported in all cases.
- The MDL compiler has been fixed to accept dates without a note in MANIFEST values.
- The parsing of comments in the MANIFEST of MDL archives has been fixed.
- The parsing of UTF-8 characters inside the MANIFEST of MDL archives has been fixed.
- The MDL compiler now checks the rules for character positions inside the MANIFEST of MDL archives.
- The parsing of module exports inside the MANIFEST of MDL archives that was failing if the module name was shorter than 3 characters has been fixed.
- A crash in Iray has been fixed that occurred if a MDL function containing a partial write to a struct or vector value like v.x = expr; was inlined into a compiled material.
- An error is now also issued on Windows when an MDL archive should be created from a non-existing directory.
- The file name reported by IModule::get_filename() has been fixed for MDL archives.
- The error check on Windows when an MDL archive was to be created from a non-existing directory has been fixed.

Iray 2016.3, build 278300.573

This is a beta release of Iray 2016.3. This is meant for early evaluation and integration prototypes. Do not use this for production code. Please see the list of known bugs and restrictions below.

Please always read the release notes with each release carefully because they will describe interface changes when appropriate.

Added and Changed Features

General
- The defaults for the upper right corner of the camera window have been changed from (999999, 999999) to (2^32 - 1, 2^32 - 1). This should not change the effective camera window since the values are clipped against the camera resolution. However, arithmetic with the camera window coordinates needs to use the correct types, e.g., mi::Uint32. Using incorrect types, e.g., signed integer types like mi::Sint32, might cause problems.
Iray Bridge
- Available bandwidth is now fairly distributed between multiple Bridge video streams when rendering using more than one bridge render context at the same time. Currently requires that all video streams use h264 video format.
- The deprecated legacy Iray Bridge API has been removed.
- Bridge data compression on very fast connections has been disabled since the compression becomes a bottleneck rather than the network speed in this case.
- The Iray Bridge Render Context option "video_mode" has been deprecated and tied to the "scheduler_mode" option instead. A new scheduler_mode value "synchronous" has also been added to the cloud render contexts. The scheduler mode now dictates the video mode like this
  (scheduler_mode -> video mode):
  "interactive" -> "streaming",
  "synchronous" -> "synchronous" and "batch" -> "batch".
  The other combinations that were possible before don’t make much sense and are no longer supported.
Iray Photoreal
- In addition to the existing "user" mode for "iray_instancing", there is now also support for "auto" mode, which automatically breaks the flattened scene graph geometry up into smaller subsets if an instance in the scene graph changes. Based on recent edits and the memory available, it will also regroup subsets again over time, if necessary. Detailed documentation is not available yet, but will be added with the final release of 2016.3.
- To guide the new "auto" mode for "iray instancing", Iray Photoreal will now also respect the already available "movable" flag on instances. If this flag is set, the automatic instancing mode will assume that this part of the scene graph will be animated or edited at some point, thus avoiding the initial delay when changing an instance in the scene graph.
- The ray tracing core on Maxwell and Pascal architectures has been optimized.
- Classical area light source geometry (rectangle, disc, sphere, and cylinder) now features UV coordinates.
- Builtin support for simple MDL math expressions like a*b, a\b, a+b, a-b has been added where a and b are floats, avoiding JIT compilation (for color and mixed color/float this was already supported).
- The amount of MDL JIT compilation has been reduced: if small sub-expressions require JIT compilation this no longer necessarily requires compilation of the full expression.
- Setting "progressive_rendering_max_samples" to -1 now disables that termination criterion.
Iray Interactive
- For compatibility reasons, the added "auto" mode for "iray_instancing" is now also recognized by Iray Interactive, but will so far behave the same as setting it to "off", which already automatically adapts to scene changes by breaking the flattened scene graph geometry up into smaller subsets.
- Rendering with multiple render contexts uses now less memory if data can be shared.
- Builtin support for simple MDL math expressions like a*b, a\b, a+b, a-b has been added where a and b are floats, avoiding JIT compilation (for color and mixed color/float this was already supported).
- The amount of MDL JIT compilation has been reduced: if small sub-expressions require JIT compilation this no longer necessarily requires compilation of the full expression.
- Setting "progressive_rendering_max_samples" to -1 now disables that termination criterion.
- Support for render context option "scheduler_mode = batch" has been added. It adapts the number of iterations rendered before returning an image, thus making best use of the GPU resources. The limitation to 64 iterations in one go has been removed for this mode.
- Support of camera offset for panoramic cameras has been added.
- Improved sampling of global illumination for distorted and panoramic cameras has been added.
Iray Realtime
- Support for RGB canvases has been added to the labels output.
- Support for matte_visible_in_aux_canvas has been added to the ground.
- Support for the "Sint32" canvas type for object_id output has been added.
- Iray Realtime is now using static runtime libraries with RiX DLLs.
- The new option "glsl_place_uniforms_into_ssbo" has been added to the GLSL backend of the MDL compiler and MDL SDK. With this option set, large constant MDL data can be copied into one SSBO object instead of using uniforms, which size might be very limited.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- MDL archives as specified in Appendix C of the MDL 1.3 specification are now supported. Using MDLmodules is transparent, i.e., it does not matter whether MDL modules (or referenced resources) are located in MDL archives or plain files. The new API component IMdl_archive_api allows to create and to extract MDL archives, as well as to inspect their manifest. The new API example example_archives.cpp demonstrates these possibilities.
- The method IMdl_factory::create_variants() has been extended such that it now allows the creation of annotations with multiple arguments of type bool, int, float, double, and string..

Fixed Bugs

Iray Photoreal
- In case a base.mdl procedural's texture_return.mono was used as weight input for df::*layer/df::*mix, the result incorrectly could feature a color tint. This has been fixed. Note that this was a general bug in the mono-mode implementation of builtin procedurals and that there might be small differences for saturated colors now compared to before.
- If a material's backside uses JIT-compilation and the next material's frontside also uses JITcompilation, this could lead to a wrong function being executed at runtime causing wrong results.
Iray Interactive
- In case a base.mdl procedural's texture_return.mono was used as weight input for df::*layer/df::*mix, the result incorrectly could feature a color tint. This has been fixed. Note that this was a general bug in the mono-mode implementation of builtin procedurals and that there might be small differences for saturated colors now compared to before.
- If a material's backside uses JIT-compilation and the next material's frontside also uses JITcompilation, this could lead to a wrong function being executed at runtime causing wrong results.
- In case backplate lens effects were used in conjunction with a finite-size dome, the depth of field calculation was still considering an infinite dome.
- In rare cases Iray Interactive could crash when running out of GPU memory instead of falling back to CPU rendering.
- When using a "sphere_with_ground" dome projection in a scene without matte ground plane and containing section planes beneath the ground plane, the ground projection would disappear and be replaced by an infinite projection.
Iray Realtime
- Infinite lights did not cast shadows on the ground plane unless they were explicitly marked as matte. Now matte is forced on infinite lights.
- A bug has been fixed that could lead to a corrupted uvw transform of material textures in the fast cutout opacity evaluation.
- Shadow maps were not properly updated when the light sources changed their type. This has been fixed.
- Wrong values were output for the ground to the "distance" canvas. This has been fixed.
- Ground shadows were corrupted in the first frame when re-enabling the ground after some navigation.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- Fixed rare indeterministic crashes in the renderer when a “tag not found” error was reported during JIT compilation.

rbtwhiz · January 2017

Iray 2016.2, build 272800.6312

Added and Changed Features

General
- Iray now ships with and is using CUDA 8.0 final. Please note that this requires at least NVIDIA driver 367. It is recommended to use NVIDIA driver 372.XX.
- The node manager client has been made more robust in situations where a worker stalls or crashes in the middle of a network request which would have led to a freeze on the client.
- The quality of H.264 encoded images has been improved.
- The bridge upload of changes to small objects has been improved further.
Iray Photoreal & Iray Interactive
- The iray_camera_near_plane scene option has been removed and the mip_use_camera_near_plane boolean attribute on the camera has been added instead. When switched on, Iray Photoreal and Iray Realtime use the existing min clip distance from the ICamera for new plane clipping. The default is off.
Iray Interactive
- The maximum working memory occupancy has been reduced by capping it to 3GB.
- The scene option Sint32 irt fast convergence start has been added to allow faster convergence at a lower frame rate after the given iteration number.

Fixed Bugs

General
- Updates to memory-based resources were not always correctly reflected in the rendered image and in compiled materials.
- The expression duplicate detection has been fixed, reducing the number of texture slots used for some MDL materials.
- Massive slowdowns due to JIT-compiled base::perlin noise texture have been fixed.
- An Iray Bridge server side shutdown problem has been fixed that could cause the server to crash if shutting it down while rendering using Iray Interactive with "batch" video mode.
Iray Photoreal & Iray Interactive
- Issues with missing geometry in case the displacement shaders return NaN has been fixed.
- A crash if base::gradient3_texture().mono is used has been fixed.
Iray Photoreal
- Matte objects have been disabled when rendering irradiance probes/buffer.
- Memory usage of OptiX Prime after hierarchy construction has been decreased.
- Possible GPU driver timeouts when cancelling and resuming a rendering have been fixed.
- Striping after scene changes when rendering with Iray Server in a cluster of multiple slaves has been fixed.
- A crash when switching from interactive mode to batch mode has been fixed.
- Hangs and crashes when the scene is referencing invalid ies files have been fixed.
- Rendering is now restarted when switching on/off single pass stereo rendering.
- Fix wrong lighting for Sun&Sky sun disc parameter being larger than 33.
- Fix more precision issues when instancing of geometry is enabled (iray_instancing on).
Iray Interactive
- Light profile parameters remained even after resetting the light profile data. This has been fixed.
- Unnecessary memory occupancy, potentially leading toCPUfallback on large models has been fixed.
- A bug causing illegal memory errors when using translucent materials on Maxwell and Pascal GPUs has been fixed.
- Erroneous blurring when using Path-Space Filtering with irt_render_mode==0 has been fixed.
- A crash when using a negative camera window size has been fixed.
- A bug causing decals to disappear after creating additional instances of an object with decals has been fixed.
- Broken decal projections after repeatedly adding more geometry and decals to a scene have been fixed.
- Line artifacts at horizon when rendering a ground plane with the scene option "progressive_rendering_samples" set bigger than one have been fixed.
- Fixed a bug preventing the working memory of Iray Interactive to be increased when increasing the irt_working_memory parameter.
- Fixed a bug causing the virtual ground to appear matte when seen from below, regardless of its glossiness.
- Fixed a bug causing the cutouts of objects to be ignored when rendering the shadows on the virtual ground plane.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- The export of MDL files for compound literals containing enum values has been fixed. In rare cases, the necessary scope for the enum values was not printed before, exporting wrong MDL code.

Iray 2016.2 beta, build 272800.3649

This is a beta release of Iray 2016.2. This is meant for early evaluation and integration prototypes. Do not use this for production code. Please see the list of known bugs and restrictions below.

Please always read the release notes with each release carefully because they will describe interface changes when appropriate.

Added and Changed Features

General
- The FreeImage image plugin has been renamed from freeimage.so/dll to nv_freeimage.so/dll to avoid collisions with the DLL name of FreeImage itself.
- Iray is now using CUDA 8.0.
- New camera attributes to tweak depth of field/aperture have been added: mip lens radial bias, mip aperture num blades and mip aperture blade rotation angle
- The internal precision for some texture formats (like 16 bit per channel textures) has been increased.
- Bridge render modes now log a "video bitrate" progress message when the bitrate changes for rendered frames. Though only when h264 video format is used.
- The gamma value is now by all render mode objects correctly written to a canvas after rendering. Bridge render modes also propagate gamma for rendered canvases from the server.
Iray Bridge
- Support for the iray cloud option "stereo eye" has been added which works in the same way as the iray option with the same name.
- The Iray Bridge pages available through the admin pages have been improved.
- Support for Bridge connection timeouts has been added. If nothing is heard from the peer in 10 seconds, Bridge will consider the connection dead and disconnect it. The timeout can be set by setting the debug option "bridge_network_timeout" to the desired value. Useful to set to a high value when debugging to avoid the connection to time out.
- Support for the "IQ Interactive" Bridge (iq_irt_cloud) render mode has been added.
Iray Photoreal
- Cancel reactivity has been improved when passing the mi::neuraylib::IRender_context::CANCEL_AND_RESTART cancel mode to IRender_context::cancel_render.
- Single pass stereo rendering has been added. When rendering to a canvas with at least two layers, Iray renders both the left and right eye in one single pass and stores the images in the first two layers.
- Support for arbitrary numbers of section planes has been added.
- The performance of texture pre-processing has been improved.
- The convergence if directional lights are used in combination with "environment_function_intensity" has been improved.
- Rendering is now restarted, if the backplate constant color is changed.
- The iray_camera_near_plane option for camera near plane clipping has been added.
Iray Interactive
- Support for Pascal GPUs (Compute Capability 6.0 and 6.1) has been added.
- Support for cancel render has been added to improve responsivity.
- Support for deprecated MetaSL has been removed.
- Single pass stereo rendering has been added. When rendering to a canvas with at least two layers, Iray renders both the left and right eye in one single pass and stores the images in the first two layers.
- Support for arbitrary numbers of section planes has been added.
- The iray_camera_near_plane option for camera near plane clipping has been added.
Iray Realtime
- The limitations and the renderer options documentation has been updated.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- The signature of IMaterial_instance::create_compiled_material() has been changed to allow to specify the minimal and maximal wavelength. Previous default arguments have been removed.
- The MDL exporter has been improved in various ways. It now supports memory based resources, attempts to use the original filename of resources to maintain the meaning, and uses strict-relative file paths to avoid ambiguities.
- The MDL factories have been extended to dump annotations, annotation blocks, and type/value/expression/annotation lists. IFactory::dump() has been extended to support an optional transaction parameter.
- Error messages in the MDL core compiler about failing module imports are now suppressed if the module name contains a syntax error.
- The create_material() API now supports "nameless" resources, i.e. resources that are created in memory without a file on disk.
- Uniform parameter analysis has been implemented for parameters in the create_material() API.
  
  This analysis automatically sets the uniform flag for parameters created by create_materials() if this is required by the signature of the prototype instance.
  
  There should be no need to manually restrict the uniform property. Note that a new error code -15 might be returned.
- The compatibility of mono mode of base::checker texture has been increased.

Fixed Bugs

General
- A potential crash and memory leaks have been fixed for Web socket clients when dealing with too long or ill-formed responses.
- A crash has been fixed for Web socket clients when handling a timeout while connecting to a HTTP proxy.
- Gamma has been corrected for render canvases.
- Geometry with displacement was not re-tessellated when the mdl meters per scene unit option changed. This has been fixed.
- Geometry was not re-tessellated on certain kinds of geometry changes. This has been fixed.
- A problem in the .miimporter occurring with deferred-sized array arguments of MDL function calls or material instances has been fixed.
- A bug in Iray Bridge has been fixed that caused an error about failing to flush the encoder when closing an nvenc (NVIDIA hardware h264) encoder.
Iray Photoreal
- Rare issues of ray tracing artifacts (dark spots) when tracing through refractive objects has been fixed.
- Issues with ray tracing stepping over geometry when using instancing (like thin glass or lamp shades) has been fixed. Self intersection/shadow acne when using instancing has also been fixed.
- Sometimes occurring wrong values in the alpha buffer and depth buffer have been fixed.
- Matte objects with transparent materials no longer cast fully opaque shadows if no backplate is used or matte reflections and refractions are configured to go into the environment.
- A convergence problem of slowly or even never fully vanishing noise when rendering large resolutions on very fast GPUs like a M6000 or GTX Titan X has been fixed.
- Lens distortion on orthographic cameras has been disabled.
- Panoramic stereo rendering has been fixed. Left and right eye were not aligned correctly.
- Clip planes with caustic sampler have been fixed. The light clipping option was inverted for the caustic sampler, leading to wrong shadows.
Iray Interactive
- A bug has been fixed that caused the suppression of light materials to be ignored.
- An unwanted depth of field effect on the backplate when environment dome ground connect to environment was enabled has been fixed.
- A crash when a custom tone mapper was applied without its RGB curve data has been fixed.
- Path Space Filtering was using undefined default parameter values when not explicitly specified in the scene options. This has been fixed.
- A potential crash when setting a camera exactly located at its point of interest has been fixed.
- Erroneous picking results when setting a camera exactly located at its point of interest has been fixed.
- Rendering was not reset when the firefly filter parameters were modified. This has been fixed.
- A bug causing erroneous firefly filter parameters when not set explicitly in the scene options has been fixed.
- A potential crash when modifying the firefly filter parameters on multi-GPU configurations has been fixed.
- A bug causing canvas gamma to be ignored when no tonemapper was present has been fixed.
- Lens distortion on orthographic cameras has been disabled.
Iray Realtime
- A bug has been fixed that was affecting cascaded shadow maps when lights were added or removed.
- A bug with cascaded shadow maps that happened when the number of cascades was changed has been fixed.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- A crash in the MDL core compiler has been fixed that happened if a function or material variant used non-existing parameter names to specify a new default value.
- MDL code generated by the create material() API if a material was created from the material constructor has been fixed.
- Two bugs in the MDL core compiler regarding uniform and non-uniform values have been fixed. The compiler did not correctly check the parameter types of varying functions.
  
  Hence, errors like this:
  T f(uniform T x) varying;
  varying T g();
  f(g())
  were not detected. This has been fixed.
  
  Additionally, functions using varying calls only inside the default parameters are not erroneously marked as varying anymore.
  
  Calls inside the default parameter are outside the function body, hence they do not influence the varying property. This is now handled correctly.
  
  Note: Previously the MDL core compiler did not always detect wrong code due to this. Hence, old materials might now be (correctly) marked as erroneous. Typically it is easy to fix them. In most cases this happens because a material or function parameter is not marked as uniform but used to compute an argument value of a function inside the body that must be uniform.

rbtwhiz · January 2017

Iray 2016.1.4, build 261500.12792

Added and Changed Features

Iray Photoreal
- The convergence performance when using both directional lights and environment function intensity has been improved.
Iray Realtime
- The documentation on renderer options has been updated.
- The documentation on renderer limitations has been updated.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- IMdl_factory::create_materials() has been extended such that is also supports the function definition for the material constructor as root node of the provided material graph.

Fixed Bugs

Material Definition Language (MDL)
- IMdl_factory::create_materials() now automatically detects if a newly created parameter must be uniform because of the used template material instance. A new error code -15 is returned if the passed argument is not uniform in that case.

Known Issues and Restrictions

Iray Realtime
- Shadow softness has been clamped to 0.3 to avoid artifacts produced by higher values.

Iray 2016.1.3, build 261500.12088

Added and Changed Features

General
- The AxF importer has been updated to AxF 1.3. This adds support for clear coat on SVBRDF representations and support for carpaint (version 2) representations - both only if the clearcoat is non-refracting.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- The method IFactory::dump() supports now MDL annotations, annotation blocks, and type/value/expression/annotation lists when they occur in untyped arrays or structures. Useful for debugging arguments passed to IMdl_factory::create_variants() or IMdl_factory::create_materials().

Fixed Bugs

General
- A race condition in a closing TCP socket that could lead to a crash on Windows has been fixed.
- The .mib importer was storing all data in global scope, regardless of the calling transaction (and its scope). The implementation has been changed to obey the scope’s privacy level.
Iray Photoreal
- Rendering is now restarted on tonemapping changes if a backplate background color is used and tonemapping is disabled for the backplate.
- In case of JIT-compilation, the mono output of base::checker texture was inverted. This has been fixed.
- An issue with instanced geometry featuring transmissive materials (no more shadow artifacts) has been fixed.
Iray Interactive
- In case of JIT-compilation, the mono output of base::checker_texture was inverted. This has been fixed.
- irt_first_frame_antialiasing is now disabled by default, in accordance with the documentation.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- Ignoring the gamma value of memory-based textures in IMdl_factory::create_variants() has been fixed.
- A crash that occured with zero-length immediate-sized arrays in annotations has been fixed.
- A crash if a material or function variant was declared with wrong parameter names has been fixed. Now an error is reported.
- Support for memory-based resources in IMdl_factory::create_materials() has been added.
- The MDL compiler now generates useful error messages if module names in import statements contain syntax errors.

Iray 2016.1.2, build 261500.10935

Added and Changed Features

Iray Realtime
- The per_component tone mapper parameter is now set to default when "mip_burn_highlights_per_component" is not present.
- Support for the tone mapper parameter "mip_burn_highlights_max_component" has been added.
- On the ground plane, only shadows from matte lights and the sun are now rendered.

Fixed Bugs

Iray Photoreal
- A bug in 16 bit color texture handling that typically resulted in an incorrect blue channel for non-normal map color textures has been fixed.
- Incorrect color shifts in spectral rendering with "iray_spectral_conversion_intent" "natural" at the border of the visible gamut have been fixed.
- Precision issues with instancing and shadow rays have been addressed.
- Procedural object space texture coordinates were broken when moving around instances in Iray Photoreal. Texture coordinates didn’t move with the instance as expected. This has been fixed.
- A multi device or multi host deadlock when rendering with Iray Photoreal in interactive mode has been fixed. This was more likely to happen when rendering a simple scene with many hosts.
Iray Interactive
- A bug in 16 bit color texture handling that typically resulted in an incorrect blue channel for non-normal map color textures has been fixed.
Iray Realtime
- The selection of the cascade in cascaded shadow maps has been fixed.
- Artifacts at frustum splits for cascaded shadows maps have been fixed.
- A bug where the ground plane was cut by the camera’s near clipping plane has been fixed.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- Cases where the import of tex::gamma mode was missing when the create_material() API was used has been fixed.
- Wrong resource names that were generated when resources were used through the create_material() API have been fixed.
- Cases where the create_material() API generates extra copy constructors around resource values that led to an error due to a bug in the core MDL compiler have been fixed.
- Wrong error indications generated by the MDL core compiler when copy constructors of resource types were used (which is legal in MDL) have been fixed.
- Result type calculation of the ternary operator inside the MDL core compiler that could lead to extra copy constructors has been fixed.
- The check if at least one entity of an overloaded set can be imported for a given function has been fixed. This fixes the problem that state::rounded corners() could not be imported into MDLmodules for MDL < 1.3.

Iray 2016.1.1, build 261500.9492

Added and Changed Features

General
- OptiX Prime ray tracing has been switched to version 3.9.1 fixing several issues with very large geometry and improving stability of the hierarchy construction in Iray Photoreal and Iray Interactive.
Iray Interactive
- Texture conversion log output has been added.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- Support for state::texture_tangent_(u|v)() in the GLSL backend has been added.
- Support for state::geometry_tangent_(u|v)() in the GLSL backend has been added.
- state::texture_coordinate() is now handled like state_texture_tangent_*() in the GLSL backend, allowing different behavior depending on backend options.

Fixed Bugs

General
- Importing light profiles with default resolution used a lower resolution than necessary for sub types with symmetries. This has been fixed. The previous behavior can be restored by explicitly requesting the lower resolution.
- Importing of light profiles of type B without symmetry has been fixed. The order of values in θ direction was reversed.
- Importing of light profiles of type B with 0/90 degree symmetry has been fixed. The values for ϕ = 0 were wrong.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- Generated GLSL code in Iray Realtime has been fixed. Support for more than one jitted material was broken.
- Rare crashes occurring when an MDL user defined function containing uninitialized arrays was inlined into MDL materials have been fixed.
- A crash in the JIT backend if a great amount of constant data was used inside an MDL material has been fixed.
- A crash in create materials() that could occur if a member was selected from a struct typed entity has been fixed.
- Some wrong MDL code generated by create_materials() in several conditions has been fixed. Some missing imports have been fixed. The generated resource type of parameters of a new material has been fixed.
- Generated names for enum values inside create_materials() have been fixed. Now the enum value is generated instead of the enum type name (with extra prefixes).
- When a material instance is compiled, the signature of calls inside the arguments is now replaced by their original signature if these are calls to aliases. This fixes render problems if re-exported entities from the std module are attached.
Iray Photoreal
- The incorrect handling of color IOR data if "iray_spectral_conversion_intent" was set to "natural" has been fixed.
- Cutout geometry is no longer incorrectly visible in matte object reflections.

rbtwhiz · January 2017

Iray 2016.1, build 261500.8353

Added and Changed Features

General
- OptiX Prime has been updated to 3.9.1. This fixes issues with invalid geometry and with very large scenes.
- The handling of interactive changes to displacement settings has been improved.
- When changing displacement settings of shared materials, Iray now attempts to share the underlying tessellation when possible.
Iray Photoreal
- Documentation for spectral rendering has been added.
- The mip_lens_stereo_separation camera attribute has been renamed to mip_lens_stereo_offset and the direction has been flipped (positive is to the right).
- The firefly filter initialization now behaves the same for the cases where gamma is done using Iray Photoreal’s tonemapper or when it is done externally by the integration application.
Iray Interactive
- The mip_lens_stereo_separation camera attribute has been renamed to mip_lens_stereo_offset and the direction has been flipped (positive is to the right).
Iray Realtime
- The behavior in case an excessive shadow map resolution is requested has been improved.
- Version information has been added to RiX DLLs.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- A draft version of the MDL 1.3 Specification document has been added. The new annotations on packages as specified in Section 15.7 and the new MDL archives as specified in Appendix C of this document are not supported with Iray 2016.1.
- The prelease parameter of anno::version() now has a default value.
- Initial support for MDL 1.3 math::emission color(color) has been added.
- The signature of anno::dependency() has been changed to match those of anno::version().
- anno::version() and anno::dependency() annotations on modules are now visible through the API.
- It’s now guaranteed that the *_isvalid() functions are evaluated in the case the given resource is actually valid. This can reduce the need for JIT compilation.
- The spectral helper functions base::color_constructor() and base::emission_color_constructor() have been removed. Their functionality is now provided by the standard library.
- The uniform MDL 1.3 state function wavelength_[min|max]() have been added.
- The limits::WAVELENGTH_[MIN|MAX] have been removed in MDL 1.3.
- Support for MDL 1.3 math::emission_color(color) has been added.
- Support for MDL 1.3 functions state::wavelength_[min|max]() has been added and has been removed for limits::WAVELENGTH_[MIN|MAX] in MDL 1.3.
- The MDL compiler option to change the values of limits::WAVELENGTH_[MIN|MAX] has been removed for MDL < 1.3. These are now always fixed to 380, 780.
- ::df::simple_glossy_bsdf_legacy() has been moved to ::nvidia::df.

Fixed Bugs

General
- A crash in the HTTP server on Windows when start ssl() failed has been fixed.
- A bug in Iray Bridge has been fixed that caused needless replication of synchronized data in the server side database when creating Bridge snapshots instead of just uploading the data.
Iray Photoreal
- A facetting issue with the shadow terminator offset enabled has been fixed.
- Shading on transformed instanced objects has been fixed.
- Backplate lens effects have been fixed. When backplate lens effects were disabled, the effects were still applied to matte objects and reflections on the backplate.
- Faceting artifacts for shadow terminator offsetting, most prominent for diffuse material in low frequency environments, have been fixed.
- Reflections into the environment in presence of a backplate have been fixed.
- Rendering if irradiance probes were attached to the camera, but no irradiance probe canvas was requested has been fixed.
- Lens distortion precision issues, causing black circles in the image for some boundary distortion parameters, have been fixed.
- The focal plane for both eyes on the panoramic stereo camera has been aligned. The focal planes for the left and right eye had unequal phase.
- An issue with irradiance probes on Windows that’s been introduced in 2016.1 beta has been fixed.
Iray Interactive
- A bug seen with certain interactive scene changes has been fixed. When all materials of an object were removed and some of those had displacement settings, then the displacement was still visible. This is now fixed.
- Lens distortion precision issues, causing black circles in the image for some boundary distortion parameters, have been fixed.
- Artifacts of backplate projection on the fake ground plane have been fixed.
- Unnecessary scene rebuilds after camera changes have been fixed.
- Undefined behavior when sharing the same environment between two render contexts has been fixed.
- The focal plane for both eyes on the panoramic stereo camera has been aligned. The focal planes for the left and right eye had unequal phase.
Iray Realtime
- On some Linux systems the main material shader used to fail the compilation.
- A bug seen with certain interactive scene changes has been fixed. See Iray Interactive.
- The object_id output for the "Float32<4>" canvas type has been fixed.
- The ground in the depth and distance output buffers is no longer rendered when there is no matte ground. Currently, matte ground is also not rendered; this will be fixed later.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- The compilation of texture functions using texture_3d type in the JIT backend has been fixed.
- The export of MDL variants has been fixed. It is now ensured that features from MDL 1.x are not used if a MDL 1.y is created WITH x > y. The exporter always creates a MDL version that is taken from the original material. Be sure not to use higher language version features.
- When creating a variant through the API, it is now guaranteed that used entities from default arguments are imported.
- When creating variants, Iray no longer imports predefined types and enums.
- A crash in the MDL compiler that could occur if an imported function was inlined into a material body has been fixed.
- Imports of generated materials when created from instances has been fixed. Wrong imports of built-in types and enum types has been fixed.
- The results of the "thin-walled material transmission check" analysis has been improved, eliminating some wrong "different transmission on both sides of a material" errors when new MDL 1.3 bsdfs are used.
- The MDL core compiler handling of positional arguments when a variant is declared which is legal MDL has been fixed.
- The MDL compiler inlining of function variants that could lead to a crash have been fixed.
- A crash in Iray Interactive when a resource was created inside a user defined function has been fixed.

Iray 2016.1 beta, build 261500.5273

This is a beta release of Iray 2016.1. This is meant for early evaluation and integration prototypes. Do not use this for production code. Please see the list of known bugs and restrictions below.

Please always read the release notes with each release carefully because they will describe interface changes when appropriate.

Added and Changed Features

General
- Internal memory cleanup has been improved. Some live leaks of internal geometry handling data have been fixed. The corresponding data will be released as early as possible.
- CUDA error messages output has been improved.
- The texture compression encoder has been improved to produce less artifacts in compressed textures.
Iray Photoreal
- 3d texture support for MDL environment functions has been added.
- Precision for 16 bit normal maps has been improved.
- Stereoscopic spherical camera support has been added.
- Ray tracing precision (watertight intersection) has been improved.
- A new scene option, "progressive_aux_canvas" has been added which allows for progressive rendering of the auxiliary render target canvases (depth, normals, object_id, etc.). The default is false, which mostly retains previous behavior. This enables antialiased "clown mask" buffer support.
  Object_id, material_id, and generated_material_id canvases are now of color type.
Iray Interactive
- 3d texture support for MDL environment functions has been added.
- Precision for 16 bit normal maps has been improved.
- Support for glossy transmission with irt_indirect_light_mode=2 has been added.
- A sanity check on the OptiX Prime library to prevent from combining Iray Interactive with an outdated OptiX Prime version has been added.
Iray Realtime
- Transparency sorting has been modified.
- Anisotropic filtering for material textures has been added. This is controlled by the "ogl_tex_max_anisotropy" renderer option. The default value is 1.0, which corresponds to no anisotropy. Any value above 1.0 corresponds to the max number of samples the hardware is allowed to take to do the anisotropic filtering.
- Support for fog, as defined by the scene options "matte_fog_absorption" and "matte_fog_color" has been added.
- The old shadow map algorithm has been replaced with variance shadow maps. These provide:
  - Better shadow quality compared to the standard shadow maps at effectively the same speed.
  - Support for shadow LODs (Level of Detail), providing soft edges.
  - They remove most problems/artifacts of the standard shadow maps.
  - They have their own artifacts (e.g. light bleeding) that are mostly mild and are expected to be removed or reduced with further improvements/enhancements.
- Support for sun shadow has been added:
  - For sun & sky, the sun direction parameter is now used.
  - For IBL (Image-based lighting), the sun direction from the environment texture is now extracted.
- New renderer options have been added:
  - "ogl_env_shadow_intensity" - controls the environment (currently only sun) shadow, 0 - env shadow is off.
  - "ogl_shadow_softness" - range [0, 1], controls shadow softness by selecting the normalized LOD, 0 - finest resolution, i.e. sharpest shadow.
- Omnidirectional light shadow maps now use the full resolution for each face which defaults to 2048x2048.
- Support for the depth and distance output canvases has been added.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- In addition to material variants it is now also possible to create function variants.
- Annotations on MDL modules are now supported.
- The resolution of modules and resources mentioned in .mdl files has been changed to match section 2.2 of the MDL specification version 1.3.
- Using the resource search path to find resources mentioned in .mdl files has been deprecated. The resource search path is intended for reset_file() calls in the API; the MDL search path is for resources mentioned in .mdl files. Resources in .mdl files that can only be found via the resource search path will trigger a warning.
- Allow compilation of constants into functions in the MDL SDK. Prior to this change, this was rejected because of performance reasons. Now it is possible.
- MDL 1.3 feature function variants are now fully supported.
- The "glsl_max_const_data" option has been added to the GLSL backend in the MDL SDK.
- Generated GLSL code in the MDL SDK has been slightly improved. Constants are no longer put into temporaries.
- More options for the MDL SDK backends have been implemented.
  - "enable_ro_segment" for LLVM and PTX.
  - Fully implemented "glsl_max_const_data" for GLSL.
- The option to let the JIT backend in the MDL SDK generate LLVM bitcode instead of LLVM IR has been implemented.
- It is now ensured that the GLSL backend of the MDL SDK generates every prototype only once.
- vec3 return in the MDL SDK GLSL backend is no longer enforced. Any return type is now supported.
- The unused "proj" parameter in MDL SDK GLSL compilation of paths has been removed.
- The MDL SDK LLVM backend now uses the external text handler by default.
- Support for native functions in the MDL core compiler has been implemented. Native functions can be used inside a special "native" module that can be supplied by a renderer.
- Options for steering the MDL state access in the GLSL backend of the MDL SDK have been implemented.
- User function remapping for the GLSL backend of the MDL SDK has been implemented.
- The name of df::ward_geisler_moroder_glossy_bsdf has been changed to df::ward_geisler_moroder_bsdf as stated by the MDL specification.
- Support for strict relative imports in the MDL core compiler has been implemented. This allows . and .. to be used at the beginning of an import name for entities and resources in MDL 1.3+.
- MDL 1.3 state::rounded_corner_normal() with 3 parameters has been implemented.
- More support for MDL 1.3 math::emission_color() has been added.
- Support for spectral rendering in Iray Photoreal has been improved.
- math::emission_color() has been added.
- MDL 1.3 anno::version and anno::dependency have been implemented in the MDL core compiler. anno::version number has been removed.
- The option "internal_space" has been added to MDL SDK backends.
- Support for SM 6[012] has been added to the PTX backend (no specific code is generated so far).

Fixed Bugs

General
- Both base and standard MDL modules are now correctly handled during export to the .mi format.
Iray Photoreal
- Rendering of the "distance" render target canvas in network mode has been fixed.
- Thin-wall glass paths (that are defined to go to the backplate) getting changed to environment for the fake ground plane has been fixed.
- Gamma handling of cubemap textures used in MDL environment functions has been fixed.
- "Shadow acne" artifacts if instancing was enabled has been fixed.
- A regression has been fixed: invalid geometry is now detected again if "iray_optix_prime" is disabled.
- Light source brightness issues on progressive scene updates have been fixed.
Iray Interactive
- Gamma handling of cubemap textures used in MDL environment functions has been fixed.
- Unnecessary rebuilds of geometry data on remote hosts after camera changes have been fixed.
- Ambient occlusion and shadow buffer have been fixed.
- Backplate projection with lens distortions has been fixed.
- A crash when progressively modifying BRDFs has been fixed.
- Depth buffer rendering with spherical and cylindrical camera has been fixed.
- Glossy ground reflection when rendering with a camera window has been fixed.
- A bug causing wrong sampling of point lights with non-omnidirectional EDFs has been fixed.
- A driver timeout when setting the camera focus distance to very low values (e.g. 1e-5) has been fixed.
- A bug causing material containing one diffuse layer with 0 weight to render black has been fixed.
- A bug causing light sources located behind the camera to show up in the rendered image has been fixed.
Iray Realtime
- A potential crash on materials with untextured cutout opacity different from 1 has been fixed.
- A crash on materials with procedurally textured cutout opacity has been fixed.
- A bug in which the texture coordinate transformation of a cutout opacity texture was not applied has been fixed.
- A crash on objects whose material indices did not correspond exactly to the number of materials defined by the attached instance has been fixed. In accordance with the specification, the excessive material indices are treated as pointing to the first material of the instance.
- A crash in case of a failed shader recompilation after a change in user-defined MDL expressions has been fixed.
- An issue which was causing invisible objects to become visible when changing the "movable" flag has been fixed.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- Operators were not supported as defaults of variants. This has been fixed.
- The MDL SDK now correctly detects unsupported compilation paths of *df types, which are not supported.
- Handling of the GLSL version option in the MDL SDK GLSL backend has been fixed.
- Rare cases where exporting material variants had missing imports has been fixed.
- A memory leak in the GLSL backend of the MDL SDK when handling uniform initializers has been fixed.
- The "entity is read" analysis for operators that read and write an lvalue in the MDL core compiler has been fixed.
  Prior to this fix, functions like
```
int func(int n) { return ++n; } int func(int n) { int n; return n += 1; }
```
  issued the warning "’n’ is written but not read" which is wrong of course.
- The creation of GLSL code generated by the MDL SDK has been fixed.
- The handling of nvidia::df::legacy_mcp_glossy_bsdf() inside Iray has been fixed.
- Handling of dead code in the MDL JIT compiler has been fixed.
- Code generation for ternary operators in the MDL JIT compiler has been fixed.

Iray 2016.1 alpha, build 261500.922

This is a preliminary release of Iray 2016.1. This is meant for early evaluation and integration prototypes. Do not use this for production code. There are no release notes for this release.

rbtwhiz · January 2017

Iray 2016, build 250909.11169

Added and Changed Features

General
- Another photometric tonemapper option "mip_burn_highlights_max_component" to use the maximum component instead of the luminance has been added.
- Certain database elements of type function call and material instance are generated automatically, e.g., for call expressions in defaults, or when a deep copy of such expressions is needed for arguments. The names of these database elements contain random parts which requires some extra efforts to manually remove these database elements in case they are no longer needed. Now such database elements are marked for removal by default, i.e., they are removed from the database as soon as the owning database element is removed.
- The AxF libraries have been updated to version 1.1.2. This adds support for Linux and Mac. It adds full support for color space conversion to the user-defined target color space. This means that previously incorrectly imported colors should be correct now.
Iray Bridge
- It is now possible to call cancel_render() on a cloud render context to cancel the upload of the scene.
- The cloud render context now supports a new context option "video_tag". This can be set before calling render in "streaming" video mode to tag the render request so that it is possible to know when a frame arrives that contains the changes of that specific request. Subsequent calls to render will fire the progress message "video tag" with the tag of the current frame just before the render() call returns (unless the video tag is empty).
Iray Photoreal
- The performance when interactively using Iray Photoreal on Windows in combination with recent NVIDIA drivers has been improved.
- Support for full 4x3 matrices for uvw transformations has been added.
- Classic area light sources now support varying MDL functions and no longer drop them from the emitter material.
- Alpha now accounts for absorption in Iray Photoreal. Previously a material with high absorption and transmission but no reflection would render as fully transparent. Now the absorption is taken into account and recorded as opaque.
Iray Interactive
- Support for the environment_dome_ground_connect_to_environment_scene option has been added.
Iray Realtime
- The deprecated mi light types spot and planar are now ignored. All spot lights are now point lights with an appropriate EDF. This matches better Iray Photoreal. However, point lights have a lower effective shadow map resolution for the same setting than the old spot lights. Better shadow maps are coming in the following releases.
- Missing support for the tonemapper option to burn highlights per component has been added. This is the default.
- Glossy reflections of the environment have been improved.
- The opaque regions of objects with cutout opacity now contribute to ambient occlusion and shadows.

Fixed Bugs

General
- Interactive changes to the scene unit attribute (meters_per_scene_unit) were not reported to the Iray Interactive and Iray Realtime renderers. This has been fixed.
Iray Bridge
- A bug has been fixed that capped the bitrate to 100Mbps for x264 streaming with cloud renderers even if the bitrate was set to a higher value.
- A potential hang bug when canceling the creation of a bridge snapshot has been fixed.
- A bug has been fixed where the creation of Bridge snapshots might have failed when multiple clients created bridge snapshots at the same time.
- A problem when database elements larger than 953 MB were transmitted over Iray Bridge has been fixed.
Iray Photoreal
- A narrow window for a race condition that allowed the log and progress callbacks not to be invoked for the last update has been closed. Note that the resulting image was not affected by this.
- It is now ensured that Iray Photoreal’s light path expression parser and the LPE syntax check in the API allow for the same set of LPE grammar features.
- An issue with extremely large scenes when using the internal ray tracing core of Iray Photoreal ("iray_optix_prime" off) has been fixed.
- Missing cutouts in user programmed MDL functions have been fixed.
- The camera when focal distance and lens radius were both zero has been fixed.
- Occasional excessive noise after moving light sources in a scene with few lights has been fixed.
- A brightness issue on groundplane has been fixed. It appeared when using the caustic sampler with hemisphere environment projection and disabled groundplane.
- Broken lens distortion when distortion parameters approached linear distortion has been fixed.
- The differences between CPU and GPU when rendering with caustic sampler has been fixed.
- Crashes when removing finite light sources have been fixed.
- A rare hang in the caustic sampler has been fixed.
- The rendering of distance render target canvas in network mode has been fixed.
Iray Interactive
- The orientation of IES light profiles when not enabling the global distribution flag was erroneous and has been fixed.
- Faceting artifacts when rendering measured materials have been fixed.
- Values on object edges in the normal buffer were erroneous. This has been fixed.
- Artifacts on the ground shadows when the camera viewing direction was parallel to the ground have been fixed.
- Wrong reflections of ground shadows when using camera shift or lens distortion have been fixed.
- The backplate was offset when using camera shift. This has been fixed.
- The lens shift was ignored on the backplate even when backplate lens effect was on. This has been fixed.
- Light source transformations were wrong when the last row of the light transformation matrix was not (0,0,0,1). This has been fixed.
- The color offset in the backplate when using vignetting has been fixed.
- The alpha buffer contained the maximum of (R,G,B) opacities instead of the average. This has been fixed.
- A bug has been fixed causing insufficient sampling of light sources with IES light profiles having low power along the surface normal.
- Excessive noise in areas of the ground distant from the scene objects has been fixed.
- A bug caused collisions between objects IDs and light sources IDs in the material ID buffer. This has been fixed.
- Light sources with visible=false remained invisible to secondary rays. This has been addressed.
- Specular transmission of specular decals was ignored by LPEs. This has been fixed.
- Several problems with lens shift in Iray Interactive have been fixed.
- Backplate depth of field in Iray Interactive has been fixed.
Iray Realtime
- A bug in the light source transformation has been fixed.
- A GLSL link failure in the ground plane effect has been fixed, which was first observed under the 361.75 driver.
- An appearance issue for objects that use transparent materials for some faces and opaque for the others has been fixed.
- A bug in materials that use simple color operations (+,-,*,/) has been fixed.
Material Definition Language (MDL)
- The handling of some math operators with at least one of the color operands supported natively by Iray Photoreal (i.e no JIT compilation) has been fixed.
- Alignment issues when big constant data of float4/double4 was used in the JIT compiled code has been fixed.
- Wrong error messages / missed error messages caused by the auto type analysis of array types having the uniform modifier has been fixed.
- Wrong error messages / missed error messages caused by the auto type analysis calculating wrong dependencies for multiple assignments has been fixed.
- The MDL core compiler’s implicit type conversion rules for enum types has been fixed.
- The inlining of presets into materials if used in MDL source code has been fixed.
- Changes to displacement parameters were not always correctly updated. When changing displacement parameters from the original value, the update worked, but when resetting it back to the original value the update was ignored. This has been fixed.

Iray 2016 beta, build 250909.5884

Added and Changed Features

General
.mi File Format Importer
Iray Bridge
Iray Photoreal
Iray Interactive
Iray Realtime
Material Definition Language (MDL)

Fixed Bugs

General
.mi File Format Exporter and Importer
Iray Bridge
Iray Photoreal
Iray Interactive
Iray Realtime
Material Definition Language (MDL)

joseft · January 2017

FBX Exporter

Added support for distributing auto-follow base figure animation curves to fitted figures (i.e., clothing, hair, etc)

Does this mean exporting characters with geo-grafts and hair to C4D via FBX will work properly/better?

spearcarrier · January 2017

Well here's hoping it's a better version. Iray is nice and all but I use DAZ for Optitex and pwtoon renders. :-)

jdfox · January 2017

I have just downloaded 4.9.3.166 Win64 and all the necessary new plugins. For some reason none of them will install (won't even run). Have checked the old ones, they still work. Have I missed something? Am I doing something wrong? Is anyone else having the same problem?

Have just downloaded the 32-Bit version - that doesn't work either.

Malaeus · January 2017

A nice surprise, and for me at least it's working and working well - just updated the program (never installed the test beta, I'd guessed that may cause issues so probably best to uninstall before updating to the release version). I'm happy to have a 4K image file done in less than 10 minutes (9m22s to be exact). System is an i7 6700 with MSI 1070GTX.

DoctorJellybean · January 2017

jdfox said:

I have just downloaded 4.9.3.166 Win64 and all the necessary new plugins. For some reason none of them will install (won't even run). Have checked the old ones, they still work. Have I missed something? Am I doing something wrong? Is anyone else having the same problem?

Have just downloaded the 32-Bit version - that doesn't work either.

Are you installing it through DIM?

CMKook-24601 · January 2017

forgve my ignorance... but what is spectral rendering exactly? like it's function?

Petra · January 2017

Well I installed via DIM and now the Infinite Cove that comes with Renderstudio looks awful. I attached an image for you to see, maybe someone can help me.

Is there a way to install the previouse DS version again, I use that cove for most of my renders and need it working.

Petra

jdfox · January 2017

DoctorJellybean said:

jdfox said:

I have just downloaded 4.9.3.166 Win64 and all the necessary new plugins. For some reason none of them will install (won't even run). Have checked the old ones, they still work. Have I missed something? Am I doing something wrong? Is anyone else having the same problem?

Have just downloaded the 32-Bit version - that doesn't work either.

Are you installing it through DIM?

No. Manual install. DIM downloads 4.2!!

Just discovered the problem. Microsoft blocked the installation - unblocked it in file properties.

Katmeow2015 · January 2017

I have a stupid question, how do I update? do I need to download daz from the main page and install again? or is it an authomatic update?

Oso3D · January 2017

Any changes noticeable with 3DL?

DoctorJellybean · January 2017

Katmeow2015 said:

I have a stupid question, how do I update? do I need to download daz from the main page and install again? or is it an authomatic update?

It should show as an update in DIM. You can also download the standalone installers from the Product Library in you web store account.

IceDragonArt · January 2017

This won't affect my custom categories will it? I know its an update to the Iray render engine, but I've had my categories go missing before with an update that had nothing to do with categories.

DoctorJellybean · January 2017

It shouldn't.

Imago · January 2017

I created a new camera, but Blades and Lens proprieties are empty in my DAZ... I'm doing something wrong?

IceDragonArt · January 2017

DoctorJellybean said:

It shouldn't.

Okay thanks.

loveit · January 2017

i dont see any update in dim or in my product library

RAMWolff · January 2017

So Dr. Did you look into the issue I mentioned in the Beta thread about conformed items not staying put when moving the figure it's conformed too or restyling of the conformer (such as hair) jumping to it's default position as I'm fiddling with the look of the hair and then back again to the figure when the dial is released?

wiz · January 2017

CMKook-24601 said:

forgve my ignorance... but what is spectral rendering exactly? like it's function?

It makes all the colors go in "the proper directions" when passing through any "interface" between air and a transparent liquid or solid. This way, "caustics", the light pattern projections behind a glass of water, a vase, cut crystal, a marble, etc. have realistic looking colored fringes. It also should get things that have "irridescence", or color dependent scattering of light to look correct, whether it's makeup, paint, or a beetle's shell.

You know how "white" light splits into a continuous "rainbow" of colors when it goes throuh a prism, a cut gem, basically anything transparent? That's caused by all the different "wavelengths" of light getting "bent" in slightly different amounts due to something called "dispersion".

A renderer that uses RGB colors or some concept of light having a separate "brightness" and "color" component can't do that. In order to get every wavelength moving in a differnet direction, you need to render rays of light where each ray (like individual "photohs" of real, physical light) has a different wavelength. This takes more time, obviously, than just doing the "each ray has 'all the color' built in" thing. It also makes setting up the render a royal pain, because you need the complete spectrum (a curve of emitted light at every different wavelength) for each light source, the reflective of each object in the scene, and the spectral characteristics of each "observer" (human eye, camera, vampire, etc) receiving that light. All this data doesn't exist for most rendered "stuff", so the spectral renderer needs to do a good job of "faking it" for the objects that don't have it.

tl;dr every last thing you've ever been taught concerning "primary colors" on screen, in paint, in print, etc. is oversimplified garbage intended to make color make sense to kindergarteners. Spectral color is the way things actually work in the real world, and what a renderer has to do if you want light to go where it does in the real world and have the right colors when it arrives there.

DoctorJellybean · January 2017

RAMWolff said:

So Dr. Did you look into the issue I mentioned in the Beta thread about conformed items not staying put when moving the figure it's conformed too or restyling of the conformer (such as hair) jumping to it's default position as I'm fiddling with the look of the hair and then back again to the figure when the dial is released?

I don't have the items you mentioned in your original response, so I'm trying others. Is there perhaps anything in the DAZ store which behaves in the same way?

wiz · January 2017

timmins.william said:

Any changes noticeable with 3DL?

I've heard that the word "DEPRICATED" appears as a diagonal watermark across all renders.

RAMWolff · January 2017

DoctorJellybean said:

RAMWolff said:

So Dr. Did you look into the issue I mentioned in the Beta thread about conformed items not staying put when moving the figure it's conformed too or restyling of the conformer (such as hair) jumping to it's default position as I'm fiddling with the look of the hair and then back again to the figure when the dial is released?

I don't have the items you mentioned in your original response, so I'm trying others. Is there perhaps anything in the DAZ store which behaves in the same way?

I don't really use Genesis these days too much so I have no idea sir.

ItsTraveler · January 2017

Anyone with a 980Ti able to render GPU only?

Mine is throwing an error "No Device Found" and 3 second empty renders. I mean that is a speed up in render times, but the results are lacking a little in the artistic department, LOL

DoctorJellybean · January 2017

ItsTraveler said:

Anyone with a 980Ti able to render GPU only?

Mine is throwing an error "No Device Found" and 3 second empty renders. I mean that is a speed up in render times, but the results are lacking a little in the artistic department, LOL

What is your NVIDIA driver version?

ItsTraveler · January 2017

LOL Horribly outdated 364.72 and the newest is 376.33

Updating now! TY DrJellybean!

Ivy · January 2017

wiz said:

timmins.william said:

Any changes noticeable with 3DL?

I've heard that the word "DEPRICATED" appears as a diagonal watermark across all renders.

Is that really True? . Because if so I won't update daz if it has a water mark in 3DL. I got like 20 plus scenes left to render for a animtion I'been working on for months, last thing i need is a watermark to show up .. Grief

Notifications

Daz Studio 4.9.3 Pro, General Release!

Daz 3D is pleased to announce Daz Studio 4.9.3 Pro General Release!

!! IF YOU HAVE NOT UPGRADED TO THE GENERAL RELEASE OF 4.9, IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED THAT YOU BACKUP YOUR CONTENT DATABASE IN DAZ STUDIO 4.x (E.G., 4.6, 4.7, 4.8) BEFORE LAUNCHING DAZ STUDIO 4.9 !!

!! IF YOU HAVE NOT ALREADY MIGRATED FROM THE OLDER VALENTINA DB BASED CMS TO THE POSTGRESQL BASED CMS, IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED THAT YOU DO SO BEFORE LAUNCHING DAZ STUDIO 4.9!!

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