What's New in Beast 2014
This page lists the new features and bug fixes introduced in the 2014 release.
Beast
- Sky lights now support changing textures live.
- Physical scenes now support additional rendering passes: the Lua pass, Ambient Occlusion pass, and Light pass.
- Added trimming to the texel packer. This allows for more efficient packing of atlases, but no longer makes power-of-two-textures.
- Support for referencing .tx texture files. Using tiled .tx files created by the maketx utility provided with the OpenImageIO toolkit can significantly improve shading performance when rendering.
- Introduced new ILBSetCausticsMode() function to control caustic effects in physical rendering.
- Added new eventLogPrint option for the <frameSettings><outputVerbosity> setting in the job XML.
- Optimized distributed rendering by significantly cutting down startup time and resource transfer time.
- Multithreaded loading of scene resources.
- Optimized scene loading when many shapes are present.
- Optimized resource transfer time by writing zipped mesh resources by default.
- Optimized ramp light sources. If possible, a max range is calculated from the ramp in order to cull these lights early in the rendering.
- Optimized boundary merge for point clouds.
- Distributed non-physical camera renders.
- Raised maximum cache size for texture data.
- Massive performance improvements to UV unwrapping, including multi-threading.
- Improved progress reporting from UV unwrapping.
- Added support for solving overlapping UVs during unwrapping.
- Fixed broken log message when failing to load an OSL shader.
- Tangents were not generated for objects with no UV sets, even if shaders accessed them.
- Live materials could lose flags, such as "need tangent", "need normal", etc.
- The OSL compiler was only provided in 64-bit version. The Beast distribution now includes both oslc-32.exe and oslc-64.exe.
- Bug fix for incorrect shadow map fov on spot lights in the eRnsT editor.
- The texel packer could not pack one instance that was used in more than one TextureTargetEntity in the same atlas (possibly multiple atlases).
- Fixed a yield issue in live frame rendering.
- Fixed a problem with failing transfers in distributed rendering.
- Fixed a bug where UV unwrap compactness was not set to the default 0.0 but rather to 0.7 if no value was specified.
- Fixed a problem with blending multiple OSL closures.
- Vertex normals and face normals are now flipped consistently. Fixed a problem where vertex normal and face normal could be pointing in different directions from a triangle, causing bias offsets in the wrong direction.
- Added an error code when setting bake UV set live on eRnsT instance, which is not currently supported.
- Fixed quoting of paths with spaces in the Beast API.
- Fixed occasional hangs in live render.
- Fixed potential crashes in the UV unwrapper.
- Fixed a bug where ILB_LS_VISIBLE_FOR_EYE was turning off direct lighting contribution.
- Fixed a bug that could cause a thin halo at gracing angle of objects.
- Changed emissive component response in OSL shaders to match the "classic" material model.
- Fixed white spots in physical direct lighting from skylights.
- Fixed black spots in physical rendering.
Maya plug-in
- Support for new render passes: the Lua pass, Ambient Occlusion pass, Radiosity Normal Map pass, and Light pass.
- Added bake noise reduction setting for live baking.
- Added caustics control in the Beast settings.
- Support for running multiple Maya instances with Beast.
- Support for relative paths in OSL shader nodes.
- Support for live changes to volume light textures.
- Optimized live viewport frame gamma correction.
- Moved the UV Unwrap menu item to the Beast menu. Also added a progress bar and improved error handling.
- Removed dependency on the BEAST_ROOT environment variable in the Maya plugin.
- Fixed the sampling of Maya shader nodes. The plug-in now samples at the proper pixel center, and initializes filter sizes correctly.
- Fixed UV unwrapping for meshes with more than one material.
- Fixed a bug in reading back texture results from a job with multiple passes.
- Fixed a problem running out of file handles when importing texture bake results.
- Fixed a bug in setting light stats in export.
Distribeast 0.3.35.0
- Improved logging and logging performance for certain scenarios, including for non-English versions of Windows.
- Small performance improvements for handling incoming messages.
- Nodes are now better at limiting the amount of memory used for incoming resource transfers, to avoid being flooded with data.
- Performance improvements for handling file operations related to incoming resource transfers.
- Fixed handling of a network error that could cause bakes to fail because a resource could not be transferred.
- Fixed a race condition that could occur when multiple nodes were running on the same machine, causing nodes to be assigned to jobs before they would accept connections. This could lead to difficulties getting the nodes to participate in bakes.
- Fixed a crash when the memory usage limits for the node were reached while writing a resource to disk, when that same resource was simultaneously being created locally and transferred somewhere else.
- Fixed an issue in keepalive handling that could cause a connection to be closed instead of being kept alive. This was typically only an issue for long running connections on the local machine with little or no activity.
- Fixed an issue that caused nodes to stop accepting further connections if an error occurred while accepting incoming connections.
- Fixed an issue that could cause nodes to intermittently stop delivering messages due to being blocked by disk I/O.
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