What's New in Beast 2013.1.x

Beast

New Features

The following new feature has been added:

Added UV unwrapping. See Creating UVs for Meshes and its subtopics for more information.

Changes

The following changes have been made in Beast 2013.1

Changed material shading to multiply color, texture, and vertex colors instead of being mutually exclusive.
Changed default color on material diffuse component from gray to white.

Improvements

The following improvements have been made in Beast 2013.1

Added support for normal maps to ambient occlusion pass.
Improved error message reporting in eRnsT.
Improved distributed rendering to prevent jobs from failing.
Improved error handling in distributed rendering.
Improved job splitting in distributed rendering.
Improved estimation of remaining time in distributed rendering.
Changed the way tools catch and report license errors if the license key cannot be parsed on the command line because of mistyped/incorrectly entered license keys.
Improved handling of faceting artifacts in the final gather.

Fixes

The following have been fixed in Beast 2013.1:

Scene loading in eRnsT causing an unexpected halt.
Spotlight gobo not gamma corrected.
Constant environment shader incorrectly gamma corrected.
Sky lights incorrectly displayed in the eRnsT editor.
In some cases, the last tile was incorrectly included in the previous tile in texture splitting jobs.
A problem with read back of updates from ambient light sources.
Edge dilation and background color not being set in distributed rendering.
Vertical FOV not initialized properly for live camera renders.
Default material is used if the material used on live-created objects cannot be found.
Resizing the frame viewer in eRnsT causing an unexpected termination.
Job error messages caused a job to be cancelled when the messages were follow-ups to errors that were "accepted" (such as an "Out of Memory" error).

Beast API

New elements

The following are new in the Beast API:

ILBCreateUVJob(): used in creating jobs for UV unwrapping.
ILBCreateUVUnwrapTarget(): used in creating targets for UV unwrapping.
ILBAddMeshToTarget(): used in adding meshes to targets for UV unwrapping.
ILBSetUVUnwrapSegmentationThreshold(): used to set the segmentation threshold for UV unwrapping. See ILBSetUVUnwrapSegmentationThreshold() in Adjusting Mesh Segmentation.
ILBSetUVUnwrapFlatness(): used to set unwrap flatness for UV unwrapping. See ILBSetUVUnwrapFlatness() in Adjusting Mesh Segmentation
ILBSetUVUnwrapStraightness(): used to set unwrap straightness for UV unwrapping. See ILBSetUVUnwrapStraightness() in Adjusting Mesh Segmentation
ILBSetUVUnwrapCompactness(): used to set unwrap compactness for UV unwrapping. See ILBSetUVUnwrapCompactness() in Adjusting Mesh Segmentation
ILBGetUVLayerFromTarget(): used to receive a UV layer from a completed UV unwrap target. See Retrieving UV Layers.
ILBGetUVLayerResolutionFromTarget(): used to receive a UV layer's resolution from a completed UV unwrap target. See Retrieving UV Layers.
ILBUVLayerHandle: used to handle a new UV layer structure.
ILBGetUVLayerSize(): used to retrieve the size of a UV layer. See Reading UV Layer Data.
ILBReadUVLayerValues(): used to read UV values from a UV layer. See Reading UV Layer Data.
ILBGetUVLayerIndexSize(): used to retrieve the index size of a UV layer. See Reading UV Layer Data.
ILBReadUVLayerIndexValues(): used to read UV index values from a UV layer. See Reading UV Layer Data.
ILBDestroyUVLayer(): used to delete a UV layer.

Changed

The following change has been made to the Beast API:

ILBSetInputGamma() can now be used to specify gamma encoding for referenced textures (created using ILBReferenceTexture()).

Beast Maya plug-in

Improvements

The following improvements have been made to the Beast Maya plug-in:

Added support for Beast UV unwrapping to create UVs for Maya meshes.
Added the Edit Target menu option.
Added support for Light Pass.
Normal maps can now be referenced rather than sampled (as with other textures).
Copy/Cut/Paste detects the originating material, avoiding a switch to the default material.
Added bake UV-set to the instance and entity nodes to support override of bake UV-set at a finer level.
Added a texture resolution clamp to ensure light maps use the same resolution for live and offline renders.
Added a message box for the display of errors.

Fixes

The following have been fixed in the Beast Maya plug-in:

A problem with Beast API exceptions passed into Maya.
A problem with deleting instances.
A problem with use of Copy/Cut/Paste while running a live job.
A deadlock problem with asynchronous tasks.

Distribeast 0.3.18.0

Fixes

The following has been fixed in Distribeast:

An issue that could lead to failed resource transfers because of a file rename operation that fails with a sharing violation on some systems.

Known Issues

The following may be an issue:

In rare instances, bake jobs might not terminate because of a missing indication of completion for a resource transfer when multiple simultaneous transfers of the same resource are being made to the same node.