April 10, 2014

Enhancements

• Faster AiPerlin4 : The 4-dimensional Perlin noise function AiPerlin4() is now about 1.5x faster. (#3777)
• Faster bump3d : The bump3d shader now makes 25% fewer shader evaluations, which can reduce render times specially when using expensive procedural maps. (#3804)
• Faster lights : Non-motion blurred lights are now a few percent faster to render, specially in scenes with many lights. (#3791, #3792)
• Reduced per-object memory overhead : Ray accel structs now consume a few hundred KBs less memory, which can add up to hundreds of MBs saved in scenes with thousands of objects. We also lowered peak memory used in certain situations. (#3772, #3778, #3783)
• overlay_mode in utility shader : We have added a new overlay_mode parameter to the utility shader which allows you do overlay wireframe on top of the regular color and shading modes. This can be set in the kick command-line with the -om command. (#3800)

Incompatible changes

• Behavior of standard.specular_rotation changed : The specular_rotation parameter in the standard shader will now continuously rotate in the same direction when provided values outside of the [0,1] range instead of switching direction. (#3786)
• objwire utility mode removed : With the new overlay_mode, the objwire color mode in the utility shader is now redundant. The same result can be achieved with -cm obj -om polywire. (#3800)
• Hardcoded name of options node : The name attribute of the options node is now hardcoded to the string "options" and cannot be redefined. Calls toAiNodeSetStr(AiUniverseGetOptions(),"name","foo") will not have any effect. (#3817)
• Removed shader_timing_stats : The global option shader_timing_stats which was used to report fine-grained timings of certain shading operations has been removed. The accompanying diagnostics AOV "texturetime" has also been removed. This both removes a bit of overhead and simplifies the internal logic. (#3818)

Bug fixes