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Solid Angle Houdini to Arnold 2.0.0 for Houdini

Posted By: scutter
Solid Angle Houdini to Arnold 2.0.0 for Houdini

Solid Angle Houdini To Arnold 2.0 for Houdini | 346.2 mb

Solid Angle has released version 2.0.0 of Arnold for Houdini (or HtoA). This add-on provides a tight bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard Houdini interface, in a way that is familiar to both Houdini users and Arnold users in Maya or Softimage. It also enables smooth lighting workflows between Houdini and other DCC applications, since setups can be exported and shared. The plugin has already been used in production by many studios, including Prime Focus World for Hercules and Vampire Academy, Milk VFX for the Sherlock and Doctor Who TV series, and Framestore NY for the Captain Morgan commercials.

Shaders

- Standard Surface: a new standard_surface shader was added, with intuitive and energy conserving parameters, a secondary specular coat with separate normal, metallic Fresnel, thin surface support and more. The standard shader is still available but considered deprecated. (#5372)
- Standard Hair: a new physically based standard_hair shader was added, with much more accurate specular and transmissive scattering, better diffuse scattering for dirty hair, melanin randomization, and simple and intuitive parameters. The older hair shader is still available but considered deprecated. (#5370, #5851)
- Standard Volume: a new standard_volume shader was added, usable for rendering a wide variety of volumes. The shader provides independent control of density, scattering color and transparency, in a way that is energy conserving by default. Fire can be rendered using blackbody emission driven by temperature. Displacement can be used to add more detail to volumes. This supersedes the density volume shader, which has been removed. (#5090)
- Shader mixing: surface, hair and volume shaders now output closures rather than colors. This makes it possible to mix shaders efficiently, using the new mix_shader node to blend or add two shaders including all their light AOVs. Adopted from the common shaders, there is also a vanilla color mixing shader mix_rgba. The ray switch shader has been split up into two ray_switch_shader and ray_switch_rgba nodes, for switching between shaders and one for switching between texture colors respectively. (#5494, #5495)
- Bump shaders: bump2d and bump3d now output a normal vector that can be linked to new normal parameters in ambocc, lambert, standard_surface and utility shaders. These bump shaders no longer function as passthrough shaders. The @before syntax for bump shaders has been removed as well. (#5599)
- Noise shader: The noise.coord_space parameter now has a uv enum value for texturing using the object’s local UV coordinates. Note that this calls the faster 2D noise API, not the 3D noise like all other coordinate spaces. In addition, an arbitrary coordinate space can be specified manually by linking another shader into the new P parameter. The shader can now output colors, in scalar mode by blending between color1 and color2, and in vector mode with a separate noise signal per color channel. A new time parameter can be used to smoothly vary noise over time. (#5195, #5235, #5247)
- Utility shader: the utility shader has been enhanced with a new metal shading mode, and a roughness control has been added that affects plastic and metal modes. (#5018)
- Legacy standard shader: the Beckmann specular distribution in the (deprecated) standard shader now uses more correct per-microfacet fresnel, as was already used for GGX. sss_profile has been removed and the empirical BSSRDF is now always used. (#3285)
- Legacy hair shader: uparam and vparam have been removed from the (deprecated) hair shader. Instead, curves now support UV sets. This shader does not fully support light path expressions. (#5646)
- Env vars in image filename: the image node filename field will now expand environment variables of the form [var], in addition to it already expanding them when they are in the texture searchpath. (#5671)
- New tags in image filename: the image node filename field now accepts <utile> and <vtile> tags. They take an optional integer offset <utile:2> that adds to the tile number; e.g. an offset of 2 from a U coordinate of 1.4 will output tile number 3. (#5753)
- Renamed image missing tile parameters: on the image texturing node, ignore_missing_tiles has been renamed to ignore_missing_textures, and missing_tile_color has been renamed to missing_texture_color. The handling of missing textures has been extended to non-tagged textures. It is still recommended to not ignore missing textures and fix them (the render will emit an error to the log and abort if options.abort_on_error is left on). However in some cases missing UDIM or other tiled textures may be a deliberate choice. These options allow control, per image node, what happens in those cases. (#5753)
- Built-in utility common shaders: The common utility shaders that shipped at least in part with MtoA, C4DtoA, HtoA and KtoA have been integrated into the core. A few shaders from the set have not been added, such as print, linearize, ln and the matrix shaders, and a few have improved parameter defaults, and others have been optimized, but they are largely the same. (#5714, #5749)
- Color Jittering shader: a new color_jitter shader can be used to generate random colors within a specified gain, hue and saturation range. Colors may be randomized per face, object, procedural instance or user data, or a combination. (#5793)
- Triplanar Shader: a new triplanar shader can be used to quickly map image textures without needing UV coordinates. The texture is projected onto the object from the 6 sides, and smoothly blended together at the seams. (#5770)
- Dedicated normal and vector map shaders: The common shader space_transform had extra functionality for dealing with tangent-space normal or vector maps, and that has been removed. Instead, there are now two new shaders, normal_map and vector_map that take typical normal map and vector displacement map data, respectively, and prep them for their typical use later in a shading network, similar to how the bump shaders would be used. (#5714)
- Skydome light camera visibility: New camera and transmission parameters set the amount of light contributed to camera and specular transmission rays, so that it is no longer required to use a separate background shader for such purposes. A new shader parameter may be used to link closure shaders to control color and transparency. Skydome lights are now preferred over background shaders, as they provide the same functionality with better sampling. (#5744)

Sampling

- Dithered sampling: most samplers (e.g. soft shadows, indirect illumination, depth of field) will now take advantage of dithered sampling, which improves the visual distribution of noise especially at low sample rates. (#5047, #5412)
- Quad lights: sampling has been improved, reducing noise for surface lighting. For comparisons with the previous sampler, options.enable_new_quad_light_sampler can be disabled. (#4961, #5780)
- Cylinder lights: sampling has been improved, significantly reducing noise for cylinder lights in volumes or where cylinder lights are located near other surfaces. (#5347)
- Disk lights: a novel sampling algorithm has been implemented for disk lights which can greatly improve their rendering quality when shading points near the disk's surface, particularly in volumes. (#5316, #5856, #5862)
- Russian roulette: on average better performance for hair, transmission and volume scattering. (#4052, #5789, #5690)
- Motion blur time samples: rendering motion blur is now faster when using non-default deform_time_samples or transform_time_samples. (#5336)
- Caustic noise reduction: a new method was added to reduce noise from caustics. Noise from GGX microfacet speculars in particular is reduced. options.indirect_specular_blur controls the trade-off between more accurate noisy renders at 0.0, and more blurry biased renders with reduced noise at higher values. (#4498)
- Faster opacity mapping: opacity-mapped transparent surfaces, such as tree leaves, are now sampled more efficiently and can render up to 20% faster, specially in machines with many threads. (#4704)

OSL, Closures and AOVs

- Open Shading Language: shaders can now be written in Open Shading Language, an advanced shading language for production GI renderers. OSL shaders placed in the shader search path are automatically registered as Arnold shader nodes, with their parameters converted to Arnold parameters. Once loaded, they can be inspected, instantiated and linked in exactly the same way as C++ shaders. OSL shaders can be used to implement texture patterns and materials using closures. See the Arnold OSL documentation for more details. (#4357, #5400, #5487, #5526, #5471)
- Closures: a new closure parameter type has been added, which shaders can output instead of final colors. There are BSDF, BSSRDF, emission, matte, transparency and volume closures. See the API documentation and examples for more details on how to use these. Linking a color to a closure parameter will automatically create an emission closure with that color. A closure parameter however can't be linked or converted to a color, as the integrator only computes lighting after shader evaluation. (#4793)
- Light group AOVs: surface shaders now natively support light group AOVs, previously this feature was only available for volume shading. (#4305)
- Light path expressions: light path expressions are used to write lighting components into separate AOVs. No longer should individual shaders define AOVs for direct/indirect light and various layers, rather a regular expression syntax is used to define the subset of all scattering and emission events in the scene that should be written to each AOV. Built-in AOVs are available for the common cases. See the LPE documentation for details. (#5491, #5581, #5582)

Color Management

- Color Managers: custom color_manager nodes can now be implemented to handle input and output color transforms. A color manager is a package similar to SynColor or OpenColorIO. If no color manager is specified in options.color_manager, Arnold will use the built-in one which supports linear (no transform), sRGB and Rec709 (non linear) (#5262, #5527)
- OpenColorIO: color spaces defined in OpenColorIO configurations can now be used in .ass files through the built-in color_manager_ocio node. (#5598)
- Linear color spaces: any linear color space can now be specified through the color manager for any output driver that supports halfs or floats. (#5552)
- Color space metadata: OpenEXR files have additional metadata fields with color manager type (arnold/color_manager), color space name (arnold/color_space) and chromaticities (ColorSpace/Red Primary, etc) when known. (#5263)
- Rendering color space: using specific implementations of a color manager it is now possible to specify Arnold's rendering color space. Arnold's default rendering color space is Linear sRGB. For other color spaces Arnold will try to auto-detect chromaticities and illuminant, and will expect all data (textures and .ass file parameters) in that same color space. An important note is that different rendering color spaces will yield different render results when compared with the default sRGB linear. These color and intensity shifts will be more visible with transmission, but will also affect illumination and subsurface. Because of this, shader adjustments and texturing should happen in the same color space as the rendering one. (#5262, #5527, #5819)
- Color space-independent spectral effects: effects that perform spectral integration, like refractive dispersion, thin_film, blackbody and physical_sky now take into account the rendering color space and provide accurate results for wider gamut spaces, or spaces with different illuminants. There might be some differences for these effects, like higher saturation, due to improved color computations. (#5819, #5835, #5836, #5837)

Namespaces

- Namespaces: Arnold scenes are organized in hierarchies of procedurals, which previously could lead to naming conflicts when identically names nodes existed in different procedurals. Each procedural now has its own naming scope, with the following rules: (#2712)
- In procedurals .ass files, node names are looked up first in the current scope. If not found, they are looked up in the parent scopes until the scene root is reached.
- Alternatively, an absolute path may be specified to look up a node starting from the scene root, for example: "^root_node^proc1^proc2^node_name".
- AiNodeLookUpByName() now has a parent parameter to specify the scope where recursive lookup begins.
- Procedural plugins creating nodes using AiNode() and AiNodeClone() must now set the parentparameter, to indicate that the node is a child of the current procedural node.
- Procedural Node Overrides: nodes inside a procedural can be replaced by other nodes with the override_nodes parameter. This may be used for example to replace shaders in an existing .ass procedural. When the parameter is enabled, nodes in the immediate parent scope of the procedural will replace identically named nodes inside the procedural. (#2712)

Other Enhancements

- OpenVDB: rendering of .vdb files is now supported in the Arnold core, using OpenVDB 4.0. The volume node now has a filename parameter that accepts .vdb files. The volume_implicit node may be used to render OpenVDB volumes as an implicit surface. The parameters for both nodes are the same as in the previous OpenVDB plugin, except for the velocity shutter start and end which has been replaced by motion_start and motion_end parameters shared with other shapes. Velocity grids named v, vel or velocity are automatically detected and used if motion blur is enabled in the scene. options.texture_searchpath is used to resolve relative filepaths. (#4844, #5801, #5814)
- Improved OpenVDB startup time: On Linux when rendering with many threads, large OpenVDB datasets could cause significant slowdowns at the start of rendering. Startup times are noticeably improved, resulting in buckets rendering faster especially for low AA samples such as during IPR. (#5816)
- Faster implicit surfaces: Implicit surfaces, through the implicit geometric primitive, render faster, particularly when using the uniform solver. The uniform solver requires fewer solver samples to accomplish much-improved quality, and the levelset solver got slightly faster as well. (#3221, #5472, #2097)
- Faster curves: The curves geometric primitive now renders about 5 to 15% faster. In addition, when rendering dense hair clumps, min_pixel_width is now up to 2x faster and results in more accurate shadowing, at the expense of a slight increase in sampling noise. (#4417, #5725, #5806, #5684, #5806)
- Faster object initialization: The initialization time for motion blurred objects is now about 700ns faster. For a scene with 1M motion blurred objects, that's a savings of about 0.7s. (#5379)
- Quad and spot light roundness: Quad and spot lights now have a roundness parameter, going from a square shape at 0, to rounded corners, to a disk shape at 1. Quad lights also have a new soft_edge parameter to soften the edges, similar to the penumbra_angle for spot lights. (#5144, #5222)
- RGB camera filter maps: The data type of camera filter maps has changed from float to AtRGB so that colored effects are possible. (#5299)
- Object transform_type: Shape objects (ginstance, polymesh, etc.) now have a transform_type parameter that specifies what type of motion the object has. Options are linear, rotate_about_center, and rotate_about_origin. linear corresponds to the linear interpolation between matrices that Arnold 4.2 used to do when options.curved_motionblur=false. rotate_about_origin corresponds to curved_motionblur=true. Unlike rotate_about_origin, which sets the rotation pivot at the origin, rotate_about_center will rotate about the object's center. This is the default mode and is useful for wheels, propellers, and other objects which spin. (#3962, #5376)
- Hair UVs: curves.uvs is a new parameter to set sg->u and sg->v default texture coordinates, similar to polymeshes. UVs may be specified per curve or per point, with an array that has the same length as uniform and varying user data respectively. sg->bu and sg->bv still contain the UV coordinates along the width and length of the curve respectively. The hair parameters uparam and vparam have been removed, as they can now be set through curves.uvs. (#5646)
- ARNOLD_PLUGIN_PATH: This environment variable is now used automatically in AiBegin() to load plugins, and to find procedural and volume DSOs. Previously this was a convention used by kick and the DCC plugins. (#5282)
- Tagging deprecated nodes: Nodes can be tagged as deprecated by adding boolean metadata named "deprecated" (with the parameter name empty) set to true. These nodes will be listed in kick -nodes with [deprecated], and when they are instantiated in an Arnold scene they will issue a warning to remind the user. (#5746)
- Updated to RLM 12.2BL2: We have upgraded the license server and the external library controlling the licensing subsystem from version 12.0BL2 to 12.2BL2, a more stable release fixing various crashes, bugs, hangs and memory leaks. (#5754)
- Updated to OIIO 1.7.12: We have upgraded from OIIO 1.7.7 to OIIO 1.7.12. (#5672, #5826)

Options

- Added options.subdiv_dicing_camera, replacing the per polymesh adaptive subdivision dicing camera with a global one. (#5029)
- Replaced options.aspect_ratio with options.pixel_aspect_ratio. The new pixel aspect ratio follows the usual definition pixel_width / pixel_height. Note that the new attribute is the inverse of the old options.aspect_ratio. (#5392)
- Renamed options.shader_searchpath to options.plugin_searchpath, all types of node plugins are loaded from this path. (#5779)
- Removed enable_fast_opacity, so that the fast opacity mode is always used. (#5158)
- Removed auto_transparency_threshold: The options.auto_transparency_threshold has been removed. As long as shaders make sure to use AiShaderGlobalsStochasticOpacity(), there is no need for manually specifying a transparency threshold. (#4842)
- Removed ignore_direct_lighting: The AOV system provides various indirect lighting AOVs that can achieve the same result as this old debugging option. (#5029)
- Removed options.curved_motionblur, in favor of a per object transform_type parameter. (#5437)
- Removed options.bump_space and options.bump_multiplier. Bump mapping is now always in object space. (#5029)
- Removed options.GI_fallof_start_dist and options.GI_fallof_stop_dist have been removed. (#4793)
- Removed options.light_gamma and options.shader_gamma. All shader and light attributes are now assumed linear. The always_linear metadata is therefore no longer needed and is no longer supported. (#5245)
- Removed rarely used bottom, right and woven modes from the options.bucket_scanning enum. (#5642)
- Removed options.enable_threaded_procedurals, this was previously already enabled by default. We now require clients to make their geometry procedurals thread safe. (#5029)
- Removed options.CCW_points. If polygons have a clockwise winding order, they are now expected to be converted to counter-clockwise when translating the geometry. (#5029)
- Removed options.shadows_obey_light_linking, this is now off as was already the default. To have light groups affect shadows, set the shadow group to the same value as the light group. (#5029)
- options.preserve_scene_data is no longer propagated when writing to an .ass file. (#5651)
- Removed options.procedural_force_expand, since procedurals are always expanded during initialization now. (#5612)

Lights

- Lights with normalize off and radius zero now no longer emit any light, for consistency with lights with very small radii. Previously these would work as if normalize was on. (#3851)
- Light sampling now uses options.GI_diffuse_samples and options.GI_specular_samples for multiple importance sampling. If existing scenes render with more noise, increasing these samples maybe be necessary. (#5423)
- Removed constant light decay, and the decay_type parameter, so that all lights now have quadratic decay. (#5147)
- Removed support for negative lights (negative color, intensity, or shadow_color). Negative values will now be clamped to zero. (#5162)
- Removed affect_diffuse, affect_specular and affect_volumetrics parameters. Instead diffuse, specular, sss and volume multipliers can be set to zero. (#5423)
- Renamed gobo parameters scale_s, scale_t, wrap_s, wrap_t to sscale, tscale, swrap and twrap. (#5183)

Ray Types

- The ray types used for ray visibility, the ray switch shader, GI depth and samples have changed. There are now 5 scattering ray types: diffuse reflection, diffuse transmission (includes SSS), specular reflection, specular transmission and volume scattering. In the options node there is now a GI depth and number of samples for diffuse, specular and transmission rays. kick now has arguments to set the diffuse, specular and transmission depth and samples. (#3462, #5572)

Motion Blur

- Arnold and its DCC plugins used to encourage the use of "canonical" 0..1 time for all data in .ass files and in Arnold. For example, if motion blur samples went from frame-relative time of -0.25 to 0.25, in Arnold-land the -0.25 time sample would become 0.0 and the 0.25 time sample would become 1.0. This simplified the data in .ass files, etc but made it difficult or impossible to share .ass standins among vendors or even shots that differed in their time ranges, and to know why the motion blur was mismatched. Now, the transform_time_samples and deform_time_samples arrays, along with time_samples arrays on lights and cameras have all been removed in favor of the simpler motion_start and motion_end float parameters on each object. These should always be frame-relative values, e.g. -0.25 and 0.25 respectively in the example above. NOTE that this means non-uniform motion time samples are no longer possible; if an object has N motion keys, the time interval will always be divided up into N-1 equally-space time intervals. Also, this means that transform motion blur and deformation motion blur will always use the same time range. (#4916)
- Volume motion blur is also controlled by motion_start and motion_end parameters. The velocity_fps should be set to the framerate, so that the velocity can be scaled to the length of the frame. With the frame relative convention, motion start and end should typically default to -0.5 and 0.5 respectively, indicating the velocity was sampled at the center of the frame. (#4844)

Other Changes

- Visual Studio 2015 redistributable: In Windows, we now require the VS 2015 redistributable to be installed in order to run Arnold. We expect most of our users to have it already, but if not the installer can be downloaded from the following link: h t t p s://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48145 (#4445)
- Geometry ID: The type of geometry id attribute and of the associated built-in AOV has been changed from INT to UINT. (#5315)
- AOV filtering: Built-in linear filters (gaussian_filter, etc) will no longer work on AOVs of type INT, UINT or BOOL. closest_filter should be used instead. (#5175)
- Custom cameras: Custom cameras can now implement camera_reverse_ray to convert from camera space to raster space. This makes it possible for any custom camera to work as a dicing camera, support min_pixel_width, support accurate raster-space wireframe width, etc. (#4477)
- procedural node: The procedural node now only supports loading .ass, .obj, .ply files, and creating procedurals using methods provided through funcptr. The dso parameter has been renamed to filename. options.procedural_searchpath is now only used for this node. Procedural plugins instead register new node types now. (#5154)
- Deferred procedurals: Removed support for deferred procedurals. All procedurals are now loaded during scene initialization (right before rendering). Also, load_at_init, min and max parameters have been removed. (#5612)
- Gamma options removed:
Output drivers now take a color_space string attribute to specify which color space to use for rendered images. Built-in values are linear, sRGB and Rec709. The default value auto will use sRGB for 8 bit formats and linear otherwise. All driver_*.gamma have been removed. (#5244)
image nodes now have an color_space attribute to specify which color space the texture is assumed to be in. Built-in values are linear, sRGB and Rec709. The default value auto will use sRGB for integer (8 or 16 bit) formats and linear otherwise. The attribute options.texture_gamma has been removed. (#5254)
Legacy gamma related options in kick (-g/tg/sg/lg) have been removed. You can now set the output color space for a render with kick -ocs <string>. (#5267)
- 32-bit Integer TIFF: Removed the broken int32 format from driver_tiff. Note that 32-bit integer TIFFs cannot be read by Nuke nor Gimp, and OSX Preview displays a reduced bit depth version, making this format pretty useless anyway. (#2976)
- Removed legacy pixel filters: The following pixel filters, which were rarely used, have been removed: catrom2d_filter, cook_filter, cone_filter, cubic_filter, disk_filter, video_filter. (#5673)
- Always use auto-bounds for volumes and implicits: Volume and implicit plugins already notify Arnold of the bounds around the data they provide. Users could previously override this with min and max parameters, but those have been removed for volume nodes and are unused for implicit plugins. All volume plugins will automatically have a bounds_slack parameter available to expand the natural bounding box around the data for purposes of adding positional noise in shaders, etc. Volume plugins are responsible for increasing their reported bounds by the bounds_slack amount. Also, the load_at_init parameter has been removed from both volume and implicit type nodes, as it had no effect in practice. (#5831)

Plugins

- Procedural and volume plugins now work more similar to other plugins such as shaders, drivers and cameras. They are automatically loaded from paths passed to AiLoadPlugins(), ARNOLD_PLUGIN_PATH and options.plugin_searchpath, registering new node types and defining parameters when they are loaded. The available methods are the same, but the syntax has changed, for details see this procedural API example. (#5154)

About Solid Angle

We are a leading provider of rendering software for animation and visual effects. At its core, Solid Angle is based on a passion for numerical methods and an obsession for performance. We believe that accurately and efficiently computing light transport in CG scenes is the best way to create stunning imagery for films and TV. We strive to provide our clients with the best rendering tools to efficiently create realistic images.

The company is privately owned and has its offices in Madrid and London. We hire the brightest rendering researchers and engineers around the world.

Product: Solid Angle Houdini To Arnold
Version: 2.0.0
Supported Architectures: x64
Website Home Page : www.solidangle.com
Language: english
System Requirements: PC / Linux / MacOsx
Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7 x64 (vc14) | Linux x86_64 (gcc4.8) | Mac OS X 10.8+ (clang7.3)
Software Prerequisites: *
Size: 346.2 mb

*Note: This release uses Arnold 5.0.0.1 and OpenVDB 4.0.0. Binaries available for the following Houdini, Houdini FX, Houdini Indie and Houdini Education production builds: 15.5.717, 16.0.504.20, 16.0.557

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Solid Angle Houdini to Arnold 2.0.0 for Houdini