What's New in Beast 2013.2.x

Physical scenes

To accommodate all the new functionality offered by the physical renderer while preserving the old functionality, this release introduces a new type of scene called a physical scene. This is done to ensure that you do not use the old fixed-function materials and certain old render passes with the new physical renderer.

Rendering jobs that run on physical scenes currently support the following render passes:

• Full-shading
• Illumination
• IlluminationSH
• RNM

If your project requires the physical rendering system to support for any other passes, please contact Autodesk Support. See Support.

Physical materials and OSL

This release completely changes the way you set up materials in your scenes. Instead of calling API functions to set up a fixed-function shader built in to Beast, you now provide an OSL shader for each material. The shader is invoked by Beast when necessary to determine the effect of light on the surface. You can use the functions provided by the Beast API to set up input parameters for the shaders for each different material you create. For details, see Creating Physical Materials.

Live materials and material parameters

The new physical shading system allows you to change your materials and set new parameter values for your shaders during the course of a live session. This is a major improvement over the old materials system.

eRsnT and final render convergence

When using the physically based rendering system, the same renderer is used for both eRnsT and final render. Therefore, there should be no visible artifacts introduced in the final bake step that are not visible in the preview. (This excludes artifacts that are a part of a specific pass. For example, the RNM pass might introduce anomalies that come from applying the light information onto the final format of the pass).

In addition, there are no extra settings to tweak for the final render, which used to be done in the XML file you set for the job. For example, the primary cache, secondary cache, light sample settings, etc. The properties used to configure eRnsT and final baking are the same, except for quality settings.

Note, however, that due to the use of OSL shaders, this release only supports the “illumination only” mode when running eRnsT in live bake mode.

Post-filtering

One of the major changes in this release is the removal of all cache-based GI calculations when rendering physical scenes. This makes renders much easier to set up, without the need to spend time tweaking the behavior of the different render caches through the XML configuration.

Removing the caches also allows Beast to scale better in large render farms, since most of the sync points during a render job have been eliminated.

However, since we apply a path tracer approach, the raw result will likely contain more noise than in previous versions. To counter this noise, this release also introduces a new filter that can be applied for a physical job. This filter uses more data than a regular image filter, which means that you can get fairly good results even from quite noisy input data. The filter also filters between different shapes and bake types, which means that it can smooth out both UV-seams and seams between objects.

See Creating Render Targets.

Maya plug-in

The Maya plug-in has been re-engineered to always produce a physical scene. As a convenience, the plug-in transparently converts Maya materials to an OSL representation. However, for best results, and the ability to tweak materials and material settings live, you are encouraged to set up your scene with custom shaders using the new BeastOSL node. The Beast Settings node has also been updated to reflect the simplified workflow. See the Maya plug-in section for details.

Improved frame rendering

This release introduces new functions for camera rendering:

• ILBSetCameraDoF(), which allows you to set up the depth of field for a camera target.
• ILBSetCameraMotionTransforms(), which allows you to set up motion blurs for a camera target.

These new functions, combined with OSL support, allow you to output high quality camera renders from Beast.

Backward-compatibility

Note that this release is fully backward-compatible with previous releases. While you are encouraged to switch your project to the new physical scene, physical materials and physically based rendering system, you do not have to. You can continue to use your existing scenes and materials as-is.

New features

• Switched to the new physical rendering system, which allows support for live materials.
• Added render view integration for final camera render jobs.
• Added support for image-based lighting.
• Added support for setting the max ray depth for eRnsT.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a bug in ILBGetCameraFOV().
• Fixed an issue with failed Beast exports leaving Maya stuck in busy mode.
• Fixed the default value for UV unwrapping compactness.

New features

• It is now possible to change which node acts as the controller in the network without restarting the node. See Monitoring Distribeast.
• It is now possible to override the node instance ip and id for private cloud environments.
• Distribeast now supports assigning only the local node to certain consumers (used by Beast to run certain tasks on the local machine only).

Improvements

• Running dconfig -status to monitor the farm now lists all nodes, including those with an incorrect version. If a node is not accepting jobs, the listing also indicates the reason, if possible.
• Tools are monitored more closely when starting and stopping to make sure that they start and stop in a timely manner.

Bug fixes

• Fixed a crash in the self-upgrade system when attempting to download a non-existent new version.
• Fixed a race condition that could cause a failed handshake between entities in the system, particularly likely on slow single-core machines.
• Fixed theoretical race conditions when connecting to a controller.
• Fixed a crash when a node was unable to monitor the local machine performance.
• Fixed resource transfers that never completed if a resource transfer had previously been cancelled and restarted while still partially residing in memory.
• Fixed an issue that could lead to bake jobs never terminating under some circumstances because no indication of completion was sent when two or more simultaneous transfers of the same resource were in progress.
• Fixed an issue that could leave behind some temporary files after canceling a resource transfer.
• Fixed a problem that could cause resources to be left in the node cache even after the cache was cleared.
• Fixed a potential crash when stopping a node while worker tools were connected.