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KtoA 4.1.4.0 - Arnold for Katana

17 Nov 2022

KtoA 4.1.4.0 includes Arnold core 7.1.4.0

Installation

  • Download the Arnold for Katana plugin
  • Follow these installation instructions

Katana 4.5 and 5.0 compatibility

Katana 4.5v3 and 5.0v3 introduced a change where the Arnold USD plugins support in Katana. This release of KtoA supports those versions or newer within their release series. Katana 4.5v1, 4.5v2, 5.0v1 and 5.0v2 are not supported with this release.

Enhancements

New viewer light manipulators: New manipulators for various aspects of Arnold lights have been added to the Hydra-based viewer. Activate the new manipulators by pressing Shift+A in the viewer, and compatible lights will have a ring of manipulator icons displayed with can be clicked+dragged to modify those aspects of the light(s) selected. We anticipate adding more manipulators for other aspects of lights and Arnold-specific locations in the future. For this release, available manipulators are as follows. (KTOA-324)

  • Cone angle (left-right) and penumbra angle (up-down) for spot lights
  • Radius for spot, disk, photometric and point lights
  • Spread for disk and quad lights
  • Aspect ratio for spot lights
  • Roundness for quad and spot lights

Auto-TX: In ArnoldGlobalSettings two new options have been added to activate and control auto-creation of tx textures from source textures. By default texture_auto_generate_tx is off as many users have manual TX texture creation pipelines (running maketx manually), but can be activated when you are ready. This generates .tx textures next to your source textures, or using texture_auto_tx_path to specify a local directory to deposit textures for your machine. It is important to keep the auto-generated textures local so that multiple render nodes or workstations do not stomp on each other when generating textures automatically. (KTOA-827)

Autodesk Analytics: The controls for data collection and analytics have changed, and simplified, and the information about what data we collect, and how to opt in or out have been unified with how the kick and the other Arnold plugins such as MtoA, etc do it. There are benefits to allowing analytics for users, so please review our documentation on anaylytics to see how this may benefit or otherwise affect you and your studio. (KTOA-829)

Finalization of geolib3: Katana geolib3 resources are now freed once the scene is translated and Arnold begins rendering. For preview and disk renders this should result in less memory used, but it is scene-dependent how much benefit is achieved. (KTOA-780)

Updated USD version: The version of USD and Arnold-USD used has been updated to match the latest in Arnold core. (KTOA-812)

Hair melanin and redness: The standard_hair shader's melanin and melanin_redness parameters as well as the AidEonBSDF() function's absorption parameter are now being referenced in a linear sRGB color space so that the direct lighting results match when switching to other rendering color spaces such as ACEScg. The melanin_redness parameter will also now produce a more correct-looking red tint in ACEScg. (ARNOLD-7585).

Arnold 7.1.3.2 Arnold 7.1.4.0
  • Sharp textures through reflections and refractions: Textures seen through specular reflections and refractions, particularly when there is low roughness, such as with clear windows and mirrors should now look correctly sharper. This can result in higher resolution texture mipmap levels being loaded in memory, so scenes that were affected by this can see an increase in texture cache usage. (ARNOLD-5632)

    Arnold 7.1.3.2 Arnold 7.1.4.0

Crash reporting: When Arnold detects a crash on Windows or macOS, it opens a dialog box asking if you want to report the crash to Autodesk. Submitting this will help us determine which crashes to prioritize fixing as well as aid us in deciphering why a crash occurred. If you provide your email address, when we determine that we have a fix for your crash, we will be able to notify you that a new version of Arnold is available with the fix. This is disabled in plugins in batch rendering and when kick -dw is used so that the dialog box doesn't hang a remote job on a render farm. Silent reporting can also be set, which causes Arnold to automatically report crashes to Autodesk without opening a crash window; this is done in kick by passing it the following argument: -er your_email@address.com. The environment variables ARNOLD_CER_ENABLED and ARNOLD_CER_AUTOSEND_EMAIL can also be used to control the error reporting. See the full documentation. (ARNOLD-10070)

MaterialX 1.38.5: Arnold now ships with an updated MaterialX version, see the full release notes.(ARNOLD-12448)

USD Enhancements

  • USD 22.08 The arnold USD procedural now use USD 22.08.

  • MaterialX support: MaterialX shaders are now supported, both in Hydra and in the usd procedural. usd#1181

  • Alembic support: Alembic references and payloads are now supported by the usd procedural. ARNOLD-12593

  • Imager support Imagers can now be rendered in Hydra and the procedural through an imager node graph connected to the RenderSettings "imager" attribute. usd#1305

  • Skinning improvements UsdSkel Skinning can now support instances and was made more efficient. Motion blur is now correct in both hydra and the procedural. usd#1291 usd#1078

  • Support shader connections to mesh lights It is now possible to connect shading graphs to a mesh light color. This can be done by connecting an ArnoldNodeGraph primitive to the mesh attribute primvars:arnold:light:shaders. usd#1294

  • Skinning improvements UsdSkel Skinning can now support instances and was made more efficient. Motion blur is now correct in both Hydra and the procedural. usd#1291 usd#1078

  • Camera improvements: dataWindowNDC support has been improved for batch rendering. It now adds more pixels to the output image instead of simply adjusting the frustum, when using husk or kick usd#1271 The horizontal and vertical aperture offset attributes in the cameras are now supported, both in Hydra and in the procedural. This enables features like render region. usd#1225

  • Cylinder lights: Cylinder lights are now supported in the usd procedural. usd#1231

  • Render settings improvements: We can now set in the usd file which RenderSetting primitive will control the render by pointing the layer metadata attribute renderSettingsPrimPath to the RenderSetting primitive. usd#1235 The aov_shader attribute of a RenderSettings primitive can now point to multiple ArnoldNodeGraph. They have to be separated by a space. usd#1321 "Abort on error" is now declared as a Hydra render setting, and can be controlled in usd_view or mayaUSD. usd#1259

  • RenderVar improvements The attribute "arnold:filter" of the RenderVar primitive now defaults to box instead of closest_filter. usd#1313 RenderVar aov name can be called "color" for the beauty, it was supported in the render delegate and is now supported in the procedural. usd#1311

  • Improved default sampling values in Hydra: The default sample values were inconsistent between interactive Hydra versus batch rendering (e.g. with husk). This was improved, and now matches the other Arnold plugins. This is an incompatible change for scenes where sampling values were left to default usd#1006

  • Shader outputs registered in Sdr: The output attributes for Arnold shaders are now registered, along with their type, in the Sdr registry. This allows for applications / plugins to expose shading trees with Arnold shaders with the correct types usd#1211

  • Environment variable to debug Hydra: In order to help debugging Hydra renders, an environment variable HDARNOLD_DEBUG_SCENE can now be set to a .ass scene filename, allowing the Arnold scene data to be saved out as the render starts usd#1266

Incompatible Changes

  • Desktop analytics status: you may be prompted to set your opt-in or opt-out status again when you run Katana UI mode with KtoA. Your previous status may be ignored, unless you had run an Autodesk product with more updated analytics such as a recent release of Maya. (KTOA-829)
  • GafferThree initial state for light linking: the initialState setting for light and shadow linking was being wrongly ignored by Arnold light packages, and now is honored. This may result in different light linking for your scene, so please check if the improved behavior causes unexpected lighting changes. (KTOA-801)
  • Dropped support for Katana 3.6 release series: Katana 3.6 is no longer supported, please upgrade to Katana 4.0, 4.5, or 5.0 to use this version of KtoA.
  • Hair melanin and redness in ACEScg: The changes to standard_hair shader's melanin and melanin_redness in ACEScg are potentially look-breaking. The absorption parameter for the AidEonBSDF() is now expected to be in a linear sRGB color space. Those changes can be reverted through the enable_deprecated_hair_absorption render option (ARNOLD-7585).
  • Autodesk network licensing: Autodesk Network License Manager (NLM) servers have to be updated to version 11.18, otherwise checking out a network license throws a Generic license checkout error (22).

Bug Fixes

  • KTOA-801 - GafferThree initialState not working for light linking
  • KTOA-539 - Initial state on GafferThree's Linking page has no effect
  • ARNOLD-12660 - Volume rendering performance regression in Arnold 7.1.3
  • ARNOLD-11448 - Crash stacktrace is not always printed
  • ARNOLD-12590 - [GPU] Single channel 8-bit textures are too bright
  • ARNOLD-12675 - [Maketx] maketx tool doesn't recognize the --ignore-unassoc parameter
  • ARNOLD-12619 - [MaterialX] Channel connections not exported when exporting MaterialX shading networks
  • ARNOLD-12667 - [OCIO] Slow call to the OCIO color manager when reading raw textures in OSL
  • usd#1278 Support visibility overrides on instances in the render delegate
  • usd#1336 Fix empty ProductName rendering as .exr
  • usd#1331 Fix motion blur sampling on skinned instances
  • usd#1329 Fix inverted motion blur in the render delegate when using velocities
  • usd#1315 Fix interpretation of primvars arrays with constant interpolation
  • usd#1309 Fix RenderVar's filter width not translated properly in the procedural
  • usd#1306 Allow to render deepexr RenderProduct with kick
  • usd#1282 Don't set UsdUvTexture uvset when st coordinates are used
  • usd#1281 Fix crash when a volume prim density field is invalid
  • usd#1232 Set output to half precision for RenderVars with half types
  • usd#1214 Make Sdr node discovery results consistent across renderers

System Requirements

  • Windows 10 or later.

  • Linux with at least glibc 2.17 and libstdc++ 4.8.5 (gcc 4.8.5). This is equivalent to RHEL/CentOS 7.

  • CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set.

  • GPU rendering works on Windows and Linux only and requires an NVIDIA GPU of the Ampere, Turing, Volta, Pascal, or Maxwell architecture. We recommend using the 495.46 or higher drivers on Linux and 511.09 (Quadro), 511.09 (GeForce), or higher on Windows. See Arnold GPU for more information.

  • Optix™ denoiser requires an NVidia GPU with CUDA™ Compute Capability 5.0 and above.

    The driver type must be set to DCH. In the driver page, select "Windows Driver Type:" DCH

    The cache will also need to be re-populated after installing a new Arnold version, updating to a new NVIDIA driver , or changing the hardware configuration of GPUs on the system. More information can be found here .

  • Katana Katana 4.0v1 or newer, Katana 4.5v3 or newer, or Katana 5.0v3 or newer.

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