General stability has greatly improved in this build specially for Mac users, and we are extremely happy to announce you we've started to integrate some part of Clarisse 2.0 evaluation engine.
This new build features the following changes (since build #5630):
General
- Integrated partly Clarisse 2.0 evaluation engine. Now Clarisse evaluation engine controls thread spawning and never spawns more threads than what is set in the Preferences Panel. Evaluation memory footprint is greatly lowered and overall interactivity and performance has greatly improved.
- Fixed a bug where items could be referenced twice in groups after an Undo. This was invisible to users and led to catastrophic performance issues.
- Fixed non local deformers such a Flatten. They now work properly on motion update.
Rendering
- Added new features to the Raytracer in order to control time-sampling algorithm and Shutter curve velocity for more accurate motion blur.
- Fixed a crash that could occur randomly when creating new objects during an evaluation.
- Improved Global Illumination sampling in secondary bounces.
- Fixed a bug that could lead to disable direct light shadows in Global Illumination secondary bounces.
Lights
- Lights have now an Intensity attribute so light colors stay understandable. Light intensity UI range is between 0-1000 for lights with falloff and 0-10 for others. You can still type in negative and out of range values.
- Light color is now under Lighting category.
Alembic
- Reload Resource now works on imported alembic files. Animation and deformation are now automatically updated.
- Added "abc" extension (Alembic) in geometry Fur File.
Geometry
- Reduced memory foot prints of Polymesh (part 1). We plan to divide polymesh memory foot print by 3 compared to build 5630 in the next few maintenance builds.
- Fixed a crash that could occur when importing a Polymesh from a file that didn't have any polygon but had only vertices and UV.
3D View
- Fixed a bug that could lead to a crash when drag and dropping geometries in the 3D View.
- Fixed a glitch in the 3D View that could lead to have some unselectable objects.
- Fixed a bug that was leading Clarisse to crash if a context currently displayed in the 3D View was re-parented.
User Interface
- Number fields mini-sliders operate now also when the mouse is dragged on the y axis.
- Changed timeline behavior: after a pause, a forward or backward play will resume from the current frame.
- Added support for UNC path on Windows (ex: \\my_server\my_folder\my_file)
- Attribute Editor now supports drag and drop of objects. On drop the Attribute Editor will lock itself and display the dropped selection.
- Fixed Layer Editor not displaying opacity and blending value when opened.
- Fixed a display glitch in the Material Editor preventing from seeing the new name right after a node was renamed.
- Fixed a glitch in Preferences Panel that was not showing up any options after loading a new project if the panel had been already displayed.
- Fixed a crash when the user pressed Abort in the Render Manager during a render.
- Fixed a crash that was occurring when saving the project after doing a mass rename using Ctrl+R in text field attributes.
- Fixed File Browser "Open" button behavior. It now checks if the specified filename in the text field is either a file or a folder. If it's a file it opens it, whereas if it's folder it displays its content.
- Fixed a display glitch in the Image View that was occurring when the widget was resized.
- Fixed a bug that could slow Clarisse down when a key was pressed and a Material Editor was displayed.
- Fixed two DND glitches on Windows: (1) tree item stayed preselected even after the drag and drop ended, (2) a refresh was not always performed after the drop.
- Fixed a crash that could occur if two or more gradient or curve keys shared the same position value.
- Fixed a bug that was preventing keys to be changed using the number field (Gradient and Curve).
- Fixed a display glitch that was not removing rendered tiles from the Image View.
- Fixed a bug that wasn't removing properly gradient keys.
- Fixed a bug that could lead to a crash if the user was calling undo after removing a context.
- Embedded groups in 3D Layers and Preferences are now unlisted by the Search widget.
- Fixed user interface glitches in the Attribute Editor when editing gradients.
- Fixed a bug in groups that were not properly updated when objects were created in project root.
- Fixed pop-up menu glitches that were occurring on Mac OS X.
- Fixed Material Editor panning glitch on Mac OSX
- Fixed pen tablets support on Mac OSX.
- Fixed a crash that were occurring on Mac OSX when creating Open GL based widgets from the Window menu.
Known Issues currently being addressed
- We found out a big bottleneck in Global Illumination that is slowing down secondary bounces evaluation. We are working on a solution that will greatly improve secondary bounces evaluation speed.
Image View is slightly slower on Mac OSX than on Windows and Linux. We are currently investigating this issue. - Geometries in alembics that have changing topology are not supported.
- Contextual displacement localization doesn't work.
