What's New in Beast 2013.0.x
Beast 2013
Live scene authoring
Beast's new complete live workflow supports adding, removing, and modifying both instances and geometry. This supports simultaneous changes to layout and lighting without the need to restart rendering.
Maya plug-in
Beast 2013 includes a custom Maya integration. This includes the plug-in's full source code that serves as both an extensive Beast API example, and the foundation for building the plug-in for production use. The Maya plug-in is also ready for use to help your game artists be up-and-running without first having to integrate Beast into your proprietary game engine.
Live Camera frame buffer rendering
Live mode now outputs camera frame buffers, simplifying Beast integrations by displaying a streaming sequence of images rather than applying live lightmaps. This camera mode supports the display of both baked lightmaps and final frame rendering; it can be used with geometry that has not yet been set up to use lightmap UVs.
Lightmap atlas optimization
Beast can automatically adapt the UV-layout of a lightmap atlas to the baked content. This optimization reduces memory use by scaling-down shapes with low frequency lighting.
LOD support in Live mode
Beast previews correctly bake LOD hierarchies of objects to support the streaming of lightmaps into your game engine for all resolutions of your objects.
Additional new features
- A new LUA function for a perturbed normal (for bump/normal mapping)
- The Ambient Light light source.
Improvements
Final bake distribution performance
- Improved calculation of the size of the job queue for distributed rendering
- Optimized performance of distributed file I/O
- Increased efficiency in the handling of shared global illumination caches.
Live rendering
- Optimized live mode processing of shapes and lightmaps for large scenes
- Support for normal mapping in eRnsT
Final bake rendering
- Gamma correction is enabled by default
- Added LARGEADDRESSAWARE to WIN32 builds
- Modified the contrast measure in FG/RC to use a relative measure for sample values larger than 1.0. This improves Beast performance with very bright scenes.
- Added front-back culling of FG samples when check sample visibility is disabled
Distribeast 0.3.17.0
- Improved logging
- Internal performance improvements
- Job handling has been added to manage child and grandchild processes in the event of an unexpected termination
- Distribeast can be remotely started, stopped, and restarted using dconfig
- Distribeast automatically stops receiving jobs from other nodes if the node is determined to be busy (determined by metrics based on CPU and memory use on the host system). The node automatically starts accepting jobs 30 seconds after it is no longer busy. Jobs from the local machine are accepted at all times.
- When a node is started, it does not accept jobs until a certain time has elapsed; the default waiting period is 60 seconds
- Logs can be gathered from remote machines using dconfig; log gathering can be limited to recently updated log files
- Distribeast settings and cache clearing can be remotely managed using dconfig
- The clearing of temporary files has been improved to prevent problems with Windows Search that can cause the host computer to become too busy
API
New
- Added support for creating a new instance by calling ILBCreateInstance() in live mode
- ILBDeleteInstance() added for deleting an instance in live mode
- ILBSetInstanceTransform() added for setting a transform for an instance in live mode
- ILBSetInstanceMesh() added for changing the shape of an instance
- ILBEnableAtlasRescale() added for automatic rescaling of instance lightmaps in an atlas
- ILBSetAtlasRescaleFrequencyThreshold() added to control the rescale frequency threshold of an atlas
- ILBCameraTargetSetRenderMode() added to control a camera's frame buffer render mode. This is used to change between lightmap or pure camera rendering
- ILBSetResolutionScale() added to scale the texture bake output resolution per pass
- LIBSetErnstRunningState() added for pausing/resuming in live mode
Changed
- Changed API render stats enums for consistency; old render stats still exist for backwards compatibility
- Added new Gameware license system, which affects changes to ILBCreateManager()
- Replaced ILBSetErnstGamma() with ILBSetErnstDisplayGamma() to ensure the gamma is correct between the Beast API and rendering binaries
- Added ILBStatus to report license errors
- Removed ILBEraseCachedMesh() and ILBEraceCachedTexture() because they were limited to local data
Fixes in Beast 2013
Beast
The following have been fixed in Beast 2013:
- Local Beast bake caused unexpected halt when using multiple-depth FG
- Sampling sky lights when using the MonteCarlo integrator
- eRnsT was not respecting all render stats
- Irradience cache files were always empty when distributed
- Incorrect point distributions in FG when multiple surfaces were baked together (FG filtering was "stealing" FG points from other surfaces)
- eRnsT lightmap rendering occasionally displaying black squares in the lightmaps
- Rendertool job management was only spawning one job at a time when it might be possible to run multiple jobs
- API error message concerning "target mapping not found"
- Incorrect error message when a file copy failed and the node connection was lost
- Culling specular reflections from light that is not facing intersection normal
- Unexpected halts of eRnsT on exit
- ILBGetTargetEntityInstance caused unexpected halts, and it caused incorrect return of the internal (hashed) name rather than the specified name
- UV-antialiasing negative region size triggered unexpected halt with shapes that were out of UV range
- Problems in combining transparency and diffuse shading in eRnsT
- ILBClearCache did not apply correctly in a global scale when using a local cache scope
- Shadow pass was returning the last pass rather than the maximum transmission of all added light sources
- An instances display name was not correctly applied in the property panel of the live mode editor
Distribeast 0.3.17.0
The following have been fixed in Distribeast:
- Distribeast was prevented from monitoring tool processes
- Jobs started on the same machine as the controller could overuse node resources
- A race condition when sending cancelled tools notifications could cause bakes to fail
- A race condition that could leave some transfer files in the resource cache if the job ended at the same time
- Double replies were sent for resource transfers that failed when the source node could not be contacted
- Incorrectly "Working for" displayed on tooltip for the Distribeast monitor when a tool was closed early
- "Files in Use" dialog appeared during upgrade.
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