Arion changelog

From RandomControl Wiki

This version changelog keeps track of the features added to each new version of the product.

Please refer to the Technology announcements page for the latest news.

Contents 1 Arion v1.6.1 2 Arion v1.6.0 3 Arion v1.5.1 - Release Candidate 4 Arion v1.5.02 - Beta 5 Arion v1.5.01 - Beta 6 Arion v1.5.00 - Beta 7 Arion v1.0.01 8 Arion v1.0.00

Arion v1.6.1

 Not released yet

Fixed

• CORE: Problem with hashed ObjID and MtlID.

Arion v1.6.0

 2011.12.23

Added

• CORE: Adoption of CUDA 4.1 RC2.
• CORE: Support for an UNLIMITED number of texture maps.
• CORE: Support for an UNLIMITED number of scene materials.
• CORE: Support for an UNLIMITED number of scene objects.
• CORE: Faster memory manager in general (faster updates).
• CORE: Black dots fixed in open-environment scenes with fog enabled.
• CORE: Native support for OpenEXR I/O (both for texture maps and framebuffer output).
• CORE: Support for 16-bpp maps.
• CORE: Support for 16-bpp (half) floating-point HDR maps.
• CORE: Safe-frame viewer.
• CORE: Camera roll.
• APP: DEMO version.
• APP: The WatchDog Timer registry patch has been added to the setup.
• UI: File explorers now recall the most recent file open, per file type.
• UI: A QTVR panoramic .mov file exporter has been added as a 'save as' button for the framebuffer.
• UI: Hide selection button.
• UI: Isolate selection button.
• UI: Unhide all button.
• UI: Clicking on the framebuffer clicks through hidden objects now. This is vital when working with vessels and liquids, for example.

Fixed

• CORE: Roughness issue in mirror-like surfaces.
• APP: .obj exporter brought back as an alternative 'save as' option.
• UI: The layout uses a versioning system now, so the standalone will reset its status if an obsolete layout.cfg file is found.
• UI: Dragging undocked panels works fine now (mouse offset fixed).
• UI: Undocked panels are restored property when the application is closed and re-open.
• UI: Menu popups close when they lose focus now.

Improved

• CORE: 25% smaller (minimum) memory footprint for color textures.
• CORE: 75% smaller (minimum) memory footprint for grayscale textures.
• CORE: Up to 50% smaller memory footprint for non-power-of-2 textures.
• UI: Much smaller memory footprint for the Scene Explorer.
• UI: Faster UI population.

Arion v1.5.1 - Release Candidate

 2011.12.06

Added

• CORE: Entirely new proprietary BRDF/BSDF technology.
• CORE: 0 energy loss at all roughness values.
• CORE: Immensely faster rough glass.
• CORE: No-energy-loss rough glass.
• CORE: Seamless transition between roughness 99 and full lambertian.
• CORE: Ability to render pool caustics.
• CORE: Physically-based Sub-Surface Scattering.
• CORE: Physically-based Participating Media (fog).
• CORE: Multi-level Media Traversal Stack (dielectric interfacing).
• CORE: New hyper-fast (yet high quality) Draft Mode.
• CORE: Support for Lua scripting in RenderWarrior.
• CORE: Much higher quality noise due to strong multi-dimensional stratification.
• CORE: Slightly faster rendering speed (more efficiency).
• CORE: Support for CUDA 4.
• CORE: Custom falloff.
• CORE: Explicit (RGB mask) ObjID.
• CORE: Explicit (RGB mask) MtlID.
• CORE: Kelvin emitters.
• CORE: Physical emitter units (candela, lumen, ...).
• CORE: Texture-mapped emitters.
• CORE: Different types of anaglyph-based stereoscopy.
• CORE: True stereoscopy (L-R frames) through RenderWarrior.
• CORE: Many diagnostics flags (caustics flag, bump flag, ...).
• CORE: S5 and glossy S5.
• CORE: New compositing channels (Fresnel, roughness and Matte/Shadow).
• CORE: Wireframe shader.
• CORE: Lambertians can refract now.
• CORE: Sun caustics through rough dielectrics.
• CORE: Combined nd at the interface between two different dielectrics.
• CORE: Object (memory) limit lifted to 8192 objects.
• CORE: Smooth AA in the supersampled navigation buffer.

Fixed

• CORE: Some AA problems in Multi-GPU environments.
• CORE: Emitters and Sun can work together now.
• CORE: Some old problems with opacity mapping in Pre-Fermi cards are gone now.
• CORE: Crash on mouse-wheel on some systems.
• CORE: Fixed some bugs in the memory usage bars.
• CORE: Fireflies in normal-smoothened emitters.
• CORE: Correct rendering of dielectrics regardless of their normal flipping.
• APP: The plugins now auto-create the output folder for the .rcs if it does not exist prior to exporting.
• UI: File associations (.rcs and .rcm).
• UI: Redraw problems in roll-outs.

Improved

• CORE: Bigger resolutions are possible now, in the same amount of GPU memory.
• CORE: Editable emitters.
• CORE: Negligible hit in performance when opacity is on.
• APP: New configuration-less camera tracker speed.
• APP: New setup-less (in-memory) Material Editor preview testroom.
• UI: The standalone keeps the aspect ratio of the render resolution on start.
• UI: Faster UI (the app starts faster also).
• UI: New UI philosophy (Scene Tree-centric).
• UI: Legacy .fry importer included as a simple Load .fry button (not as an importer anymore).
• UI: Ability to rename materials, cameras and objects from the standalone.

Warnings

• APP: .obj I/O have been disabled temporarily.
• APP: .rla and .exr exporters have been disabled temporarily.
• APP: The QTVR exporter has been disabled temporarily.
• UI: You may need to delete the arion.cfg and layout.cfg files from previous installations from the Roaming folder in C:\ for the UI to display correctly.

User experience

• New Scenes Repository.
• New (much more standard) product setup.
• New corporative Rendering Technology Blog.

Arion v1.5.02 - Beta

 2011.08.20

Added

• CORE: Warning on warm up about 'too many objects / too many materials' to identify common crash situations.
• APP: Arion Bike + Architectural environment (sample scenes) included in the setup.
• APP: New .RCM materials library included in the setup.
• APP: Ability to re-render material thumbnails in RCConv.
• APP: DEMO build of Arion (no save/export + watermark + no network + no commandline tool + resolution lock).
• UI: Ability to Drag & Drop materials directly from the materials library.
• UI: Ability to password-protect .rcs files against export.

Fixed

• APP: Fixed the standalone material editor mtled.exe.
• APP: Problems with relative paths when importing/converting .fry and .frm files.
• APP: Problems with relative paths in .rcs and .rcm (after an Archive operation).
• UI: Proper notifications on Drag & Drop of maps.
• UI: Problems with Drag & Drop (mouse release events were getting stuck).
• UI: CPU/GPU memory bars and resource counters are displayed again.
• UI: Fixed keyboard input in textboxes.
• UI: Removed useless restart of the render when a material is selected.

Improved

• UI: Faster UI updates when the active material changes.
• UI: Faster UI startup when a scene is loaded/warmed up.

Arion v1.5.01 - Beta

 2011.06.27

Added

• APP: RenderWarrior has been included in the setup.
• APP: RCConv has been included in the setup.

Improved

• APP: The config file hardware.cfg now saves Arion's configuration in a more friendly manner which can be edited manually if necessary.

Fixed

• APP: Old .fry scenes load properly now. (This affects RCConv also).
• APP: Old .frm materials load properly now. (This affects RCConv also).
• UI: Fixed camera Hold.
• UI: Toon Core properties are back to the REN dialog in the plugins.
• UI: BGR/RGB problems in the Materials Library.
• UI: .rcm extension is now kept when materials are saved.
• UI: Load button fixed for .frm materials.
• DLRC: Fixed OBJ importer (it was crashing with some .obj files exported from 3dsMax).
• DLRC: Proper camera positioning when importing OBJ files.

Warnings

• Materials saved with v1.5.00 Beta are displayed in BGR colors in the material library. Just resave materials with v1.5.01 to fix the issue.

Arion v1.5.00 - Beta

 2011.06.22

Added

• APP: Unified commandline powertool (RenderWarrior).
• UI: Compositing and kernel properties are saved in the .rcs file.
• UI: Fully customizable UI theme (some presets included).
• UI: Fully re-dockable User Interface (some presets included).
• UI: Orbiting/walkthrough (dual-mode) camera tracker.
• UI: Pass counter next to the FPS counter (calibrated to match fryrender's pass counter).
• UI: OBJ tab to select objects by name.
• UI: Ability to define a color for each object/material for the ObjID/MtlID compositing channels.
• UI: Film width/height + camera presets.
• UI: New interactive GPS picker for the geolocation.
• UI: Ability to take snapshots in 32-bpp floating-point HDR (.hdr and .tif).
• CORE: Explicit angle override for the sun position.
• CORE: Kelvin override for the sun color.
• CORE: Importance-Sampling based dielectric dispersion.
• CORE: Colored dielectric absorption.
• CORE: New ObjID/MtlID compositing channel modes.
• CORE: Lens distortion.
• CORE: Panoramic cameras.
• CORE: Orthogonal cameras.
• CORE: Straight QTVR output for panoramic cameras.
• CORE: HDR and multi-channel output in .rpf and OpenEXR.

Improved

• UI: Mousewheel works on most controls now (comboboxes, spinners, ...).
• UI: Zoomable thumblists (Materials Library).
• UI: No wait after the save dialog finishes.
• UI: Camera tracker speed is proportional to the distance to the selected object.
• UI: Dispersive materials are listed in the scene counters panel.
• CORE: Much smaller .rcs files (50% smaller or even better if animations are involved).
• CORE: Strengthened numerical precision for very-large/very-thin triangles.
• CORE: Support for .obj files exported from Rhino.
• CORE: Support for .obj files exported from Modo.

Fixed

• UI: Bug in the listbox in the Hardware Config dialog.
• CORE: Bad sun angles are not rendering in funky colors anymore.
• CORE: Slits in single-sheet thin/large geometry.
• CORE: Bug in the detection of the number of cores in Fermi cards.
• CORE: Bug in the CUDA compiler for Fermi cards affecting the physical Sun.
• CORE: Bug when using bump mapping in imported .obj scenes.
• CORE: Frosted glass.

Warnings

• The new .rcs files are no longer compatible with fryrender v1.5.00.
• Arion can open old .rcs files + Both apps can read and write .fry files for back and inter-compatibility.

Arion v1.0.01

 2010.04.06

Added

• Full command-line support through arncmd.exe.
• NetWarrior supports arncmd.exe now (animations / batched remote rendering).
• Descriptive readme.txt about the Watchdog Timer in the /registry folder.

Improved

• Near 2x faster CUDA rendering core, depending on the scene.
• Framebuffer RAM usage decreased by a factor of 7x.
• Now it is possible to pick which CUDA device(s) will be enabled using a listbox with selective checkboxes.
• Automatic detection of the maximum number of CUDA threads per block (ready for future card models).
• Better handling of heavy geometry (ability to open much larger scenes).
• Max number of materials pushed up to 128 (no performance hit).

Fixed

• Sun radius (soft sun shadows).

Changed

• Moved on to CUDA Toolkit 3.0 Release.

Arion v1.0.00

 2010.03.15

Initial release

• Arion Render. The first hybrid unbiased render engine in the world.