Daz Studio Pro 4.15 - NVIDIA Iray

rbtwhizrbtwhiz Posts: 2,171
edited December 2021 in Daz Studio Discussion

When a new build of Daz Studio includes a new version of the NVIDIA Iray renderer, the new build of the renderer comes with its own set of bug fixes, new features, adjustments to existing features, etc. Since the release of Daz Studio that followed the initial introduction of NVIDIA Iray in Daz Studio (4.8 - initial introduction, 4.9 - following release), a list of its changes have typically been made available in the posts that immediately follow the announcement. In many cases, while the information contained within the posts was/is useful to those that want/need it, it seemed to go unread by many. This same information would also then be reposted when a Public Build was eventually promoted to General Release.

To address some of these issues and bring more visibility to the changes for those who want/need it, we now split these posts off into their own thread. A separate discussion thread will remain available (linked below), but the thread itself will be closed for comment so as to avoid the information being buried by the discussion and to provide notification through regular features of the forum software.


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

 

 



Public Build (Beta) Threads:

 

  • 4.15.0.30 (September 2, 2021)
    • 4.15.0.29 (August 31, 2021)
    • 4.15.0.28 (August 27, 2021)
    • 4.15.0.26 (August 19, 2021)
    • 4.15.0.25 (August 17, 2021)
    • 4.15.0.14 (March 18, 2021)
    • 4.15.0.13 (February 24, 2021)
    • 4.15.0.12 (February 19, 2021)
    • 4.15.0.9 (February 11, 2021)
    • 4.15.0.2 (January 7, 2021)
    • 4.14.1.38 (December 23, 2020)
    • 4.14.1.28 (December 15, 2020)
    • 4.14.1.22 (December 4, 2020)
    • 4.14.0.10 (November 24, 2020)
    • 4.14.0.8 (November 10, 2020)

 


General Release Thread:

 

  • 4.16.0.3 (November 22, 2021)
    • 4.15.0.30 (September 2, 2021)
    • 4.15.0.2 (January 7, 2021)

 


Previous Thread:

 

Post edited by rbtwhiz on

Comments

  • rbtwhizrbtwhiz Posts: 2,171

    Iray 2020.1.2, build 334300.5582

    Added and Changed Features

    • General
      • Updated general libraries:
        • OpenEXR 2.5.3
    • Material Definition Language (MDL)
      • A new HLSL backend option use_renderer_adapt_microfacet_roughness has been added, which allows a renderer to adapt the roughness values provided to microfacet BSDFs right before using them. The prototype of the function the renderer has to provide is float2 mdl_adapt_microfacet_roughness(Shading_state_material state, float2 roughness_uv).
      • A new execution context option ignore_noinline has been added, which allows to ignore anno::noinline() annotations, enabling inlining when creating a compiled material. Previously this happened later when generating code for distribution functions. But optimizing at this time could lead to a changed DAG which may not contain the nodes requested by the user anymore.

    Fixed Bugs

    • General
      • Fix crash when editing a fiber attribute vector.
      • Fix websocket bug where a fragmented message sent by a client would always be delivered flagged as a binary message.
      • Fix a post-processing failure when activating/deactivating devices during rendering (bug 3108175).
      • Fix post-processing crashes in a few corner cases (like no pipeline or if the pipeline runs entirely on the CPU).
      • Fix potential memory leak in scheduler.
      • Proper fix for scene update failing with many scene elements (bug 2505588).
      • Improve performance of scene traversal for scenes that feature lots of instances.
    • Iray Photoreal & Iray Interactive
      • Performance optimizations for some material paths.
      • Add device IDs and tags to many more messages.
      • Fix potential energy gain of multiscatter-enabled glossy BSDFs.
      • Add support for tinting the environment light, driven by the scene option environment_function_tint.
      • Fix a crash when converting materials that use colors constructed from state::normal() as input for normal maps (i.e. converted back to float3) (bug 3154445), but please use the new base::blend_normals() instead, as it will be much more efficient!
      • Fix an issue where userdata lookups would fall back to the default color in JIT-compiled materials when the ground plane material changes.
    • Iray Photoreal
      • If shadow_terminator_offset_mode is set, improve energy conservation in some corner cases, e.g. poorly tessellated geometry, notably in (but not limited to) combination with transmitting materials (example: specular BSDF with an IOR of 1.0).
      • Fix an error in fiber curve-weights calculations, leading to incorrect per vertex data interpolation.
      • Fix behavior of auxiliary buffers when scene features volumes, especially if the camera is inside of the media (bug 3043439, 3157501).
      • General improvements to volumes and materials featuring sub-surface-scattering, both in performance/convergence and quality.
      • Fix a minor issue with the light importance sampling when using userdata.
    • Iray Interactive
      • Lower CPU usage when rendering with CUDA on lower end systems.
      • Fix crash if picking is done before rendering (bug 3034133).
      • Fix issue with time-based termination (possible iteration overshootings, bug 3150045).
    • Material Definition Language (MDL)
      • Fix wrong optimization for ternary operators selecting different vector elements in HLSL always returning the true expression.
      • Fix wrong PTX version used for sm_86.
      • In single-init mode, don’t let a requested geometry.normal expression calculate the normal again.
      • Fix analysis of derivative variants of functions not being recognized as depending on state::normal().
      • Reduce number of texture result slots used in generated init functions.
      • Do not generate HLSL code containing min16int to ensure compatibility to Slang.
      • Fixed translation of conversion of an 8-bit to a 32-bit integer for HLSL.
      • Accept MDL projector and decal functions whose return type is explicitly marked as uniform or varying (bug 3148507).
    • MI importer/exporter
      • Fixed missing error message if an MDL projector or decal function has the wrong return type.
  • rbtwhizrbtwhiz Posts: 2,171

    Iray 2020.1.3, build 334300.6349

    Added and Changed Features

    • General
      • Updated general libraries:
        • FreeImage 3.18.0 339654 (massively speeds up handling of progressive JPEGs if only the metadata is needed).
      • Changed timer behavior on Windows: The May 2020 Update (20H1) of Windows 10 (build 19041) introduced a very noteworthy change to how timer resolution/accuracy is handled via the Windows API, especially in the context of many apps/processes running at the same time (for a detailed explanation see for example https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/windows-timerresolution-the-great-rule-change/). Since Iray depends on a high timer resolution/accuracy, it now automatically calls timeBeginPeriod(1) on startup and timeEndPeriod(1) on shutdown.
    • Iray Photoreal
      • ​Extend message tagging functionality by the ability to attach messages to all CUDA devices which adds details to the device handling. In particular, it is now possible to detect CPU fallback, or the inability to fall back to CPU.
    • Material Definition Language (MDL)
      • The performance of the parallel module loading has been improved.

    Fixed Bugs

    • General
      • Fix crash on shutdown after failed authentication.
      • Fix various race conditions potentially leading to crashes.
    • Iray Photoreal & Iray Interactive
      • Add message details to CUDA errors issued from POST.
    • Iray Photoreal
      • Fix memory allocation error messages (Device ID and memory size swapped, Bug 200677658) and details of CUDA error messages.
      • Motion vectors now respect the progressive aux canvas scene option and are correctly averaged when enabled. Please note that it must be used in conjunction with motion vectors instantaneous shutter in order to produce meaningful results (bug 3116613).
      • Fix 3D textures being wrong with motion blur.
      • Fix motion transform computation when instancing is on or auto for motion vectors (bug 3087345).
    • Iray Interactive
      • Rework the fast convergence start mechanism that allows the iteration speed to be reduced in favor of more efficient convergence. A new scene option irt_fast_convergence_ramp_up has been added that allows to specify a number of frames over which the speed/convergence trade-off happens gradually. This new mechanism also fixes some issues (like render time overshooting) that the previous one had (bug 3150045).
    • Material Definition Language (MDL)
      • All error messages of recursively imported modules are now reported in the list of error messages during compilation.
      • The use of an imported user defined structure type with a nested structure type in an exported function signature has been fixed.
      • The check for incorrect varying function call attachments to uniform parameters has been fixed in the MDL SDK API.
      • The function Mdl_compiled_material::depends_on_uniform_scenedata has been fixed.
      • The custom-curve and measured-curve layering has been improved for non-thin-walled transmissive materials to reduce energy loss for some cases of modelling glass with these components.
      • The import of the ::std module in modules of lower MDL version has been fixed.
  • rbtwhizrbtwhiz Posts: 2,171
    edited January 2021

    Daz Studio 4.15.0.2

     

    Note: Minimum driver requirement (to properly support both CUDA 11 and OptiX 7.1) is 451.48 on Windows.

    Post edited by rbtwhiz on
  • rbtwhizrbtwhiz Posts: 2,171

    Iray 2020.1.4, build 334300.6885

    Added and Changed Features

    • Iray Photoreal
      • ​Scheduler ramp-up target is now configurable via the render context option max_progressive_update_interval, which controls the maximum task size that is issued to core workers. Lower values may harm efficiency (so please only tweak this value if really needed!), but increase responsiveness to interaction at later stages in the convergence process. The default remains unchanged and its recommended to leave it like this.
    • Material Definition Language (MDL)
      • Protect custom-curve evaluations against cosines > 1 to avoid numerical corner cases.

    Fixed Bugs

    • Iray Photoreal
      • Fix crash if active mBRDF elements get evicted from cache (bug 3210558)
      • Fix regression/too bright SSS materials/volumes from 2020.1.2 (via the "improvements to volumes and materials featuring sub-surface-scattering") (bug 3209270)
  • rbtwhizrbtwhiz Posts: 2,171

    Daz Studio 4.15.0.9

     

    Note: Minimum driver requirement (to properly support both CUDA 11 and OptiX 7.1) is 451.48 on Windows.

  • rbtwhizrbtwhiz Posts: 2,171

    Iray 2020.1.5, build 334300.8936

    Added and Changed Features

    • General
      • Updated general libraries:
        • OpenSSL 1.1.1i Build 340571
        • SQLite 3.34.1
        • FreeImage-3.19.x-r1859(fixes (at least) CVE-2019-12211 and CVE-2019-12212)
        • FFmpeg 4.3.1 (with patches for CVE-2020-35965)
    • Iray Interactive
      • Added section capping for area lights (nvbugs 3074857).

    Fixed Bugs

    • Iray Photoreal & Iray Interactive
      • Fixed the handling of textured inputs for the roughness of diffuse materials (nvbugs 200692801).
      • Fixed a crash when using a non-trivial input (e.g. function call) for a parameter of a decal projector MDL function (nvbugs 200708284).
    • Iray Photoreal
      • Fixed an illegal memory access when using irradiance probes (nvbugs 200698530).
      • Fixed some wrong error handling for OptiX Prime (i.e. pre-RTX GPUs) if CPU rendering was disabled.
    • Iray Interactive
      • Made Iray Interactive consistent with Iray Photoreal behavior by using the correct background color when being outside a finite environment dome (nvbugs 200699016).
      • Fixed invalid tag access errors for the host caches (nvbugs 200701339).
      • Fixed ray-plane intersections when the ray is parallel to the plane (nvbugs 3042132).
      • Fixed handling of section capping for the UV coordinates auxiliary buffer (nvbugs 200693469).
    • Material Definition Language (MDL)
      • Fixed scope handling for declarations inside then/else and loop bodies.
  • rbtwhizrbtwhiz Posts: 2,171

    Daz Studio 4.15.0.14

     

    Note: Minimum driver requirement (to properly support both CUDA 11 and OptiX 7.1) is 451.48 on Windows.

  • rbtwhizrbtwhiz Posts: 2,171

    Iray 2020.1.6, build 334300.9558

    Added and Changed Features

    • General
      • Updated general libraries:
        • FFmpeg 4.3.2

    Fixed Bugs

    • Iray Photoreal & Iray Interactive
      • Unify behavior of the backplate (between the two render modes) when leaving a finite environment dome with the camera (nvbugs 3268554 and 200713549).
  • rbtwhizrbtwhiz Posts: 2,171

    Daz Studio 4.15.0.25

     

    Note: Minimum driver requirement (to properly support both CUDA 11 and OptiX 7.1) is 451.48 on Windows.

This discussion has been closed.