Isotropix Forums

Dear Clarisse users,

We're extremely proud to release the first public release of Clarisse iFX 1.5 (build #7253) to all our maintenance customers.

UPDATE: Mac OS X version is now available

As always, you can get this build from your download area.

If you already have a Clarisse configuration we advise you to delete it to get the proper shelf. An alternative is to go to Layout > Shelf Toolbar > Reset to Default

What's new since build #6223-SP6

General

• Python scripting is now enabled. See the online documentation, Reference > Scripting/API section, for more information.
• Clarisse now allows the option -script filename.py to execute a script at startup.
• New clarisse.env file to specify ILISE_SERVER and PYTHON_HOME environment variables. This file is located where your Clarisse configuration file is located (see User Guide for more information).
• In documentation, keywords from the User Guide are now added to the search engine.
• Fix crash when creating new scene with several opened floating windows.
• Fixed a bug that was crashing Clarisse when using a live render as a texture with the Image Gallery opened.
• Fixed name collision issue that was sometimes happening when renaming objects and contexts.
• Removed white spaces at the end of lines when saving a script or a project.
• Fixed duplicate information saved in project for widgets that are opened in windowed mode.
• Fixed a bug that was crashing Clarisse when using a render as a texture for another render.

User Interface

• Fixed a general bug that was causing keyboard shortcuts to get often missed.
• On OSX, the COMMAND key is now used like a CTRL key.
• Added Shelf widget bind script files to Clarisse's user interface. See the documentation for more information.
• Script Editor has been greatly improved. See User Guide for more information.
• Resource View has been improved. See User Guide for more information.
• Timeline now supports long ranges (several million frames).
• In Material Linker, fixed a bug that was crashing Clarisse when using the popup menu to select materials.
• Fixed position of the file browser with dual screen.
• Fix crash when opening twice a floating window.
• Fix tablet behavior that was misbehaving in some cases.
• Pick Fit tool now has a new icon.
• Material Linker has been optimized for large scenes.
• Fixed menu position that were displayed off-screen in some cases.
• In Layer Editor, layer object states (like instance) are now displayed properly.
• Fixed visual glitches in Attribute Editor and Material Linker.
• Search speed has been greatly improved on large scenes.
• Local widget selection is now properly saved into the project.
• Now clicking on the status bar opens a Log window.
• Now clicking on the progress bar opens a Progress View window.
• Fixed context selection in Explorer: now when selecting a context, the working context is properly set.
• Fixed menu position with dual screens configurations and fixed menu appearance display on Linux.
• On Windows platform, menus will not popup under the main window bottom position.
• Fixed drag'n drop issue on Linux.
• Fixed a multi-selection refresh bug in Browser that was occurring just after creating an object.
• Log widget is now cleared using CTRL-L shortcut.
• Fixed scrollbar behavior in Script Editor and Log.
• When picking an object via a Browser window, the current context is now set properly.
• In Script Editor, added "Run Selection" in the toolbar to only execute the selected code.
• In Script Editor, added the "Command" menu containing "Run" and "Run Selection".
• Picker tool now supports multi-selection using SHIFT and CTRL keys.
• Path Manager as been optimized and is now much faster.
• In Path Manager, fixed a crash occurring when drag & dropping an object on the scrollbar.
• In Hierarchy View, newly created items are now properly displayed.
• in Search Widget, the clear function now works properly.

Project

• Evaluation engine has been optimized to greatly improve user feedback when editing massive scenes (up to 1000x faster).
• Fixed Make Local action on instances that was not working properly.
• Context creation date is now saved into project files.
• Project parsing engine is now upgraded to version 1.1 (and is fully backward compatible). It now supports escape characters properly.
• Fixed a bug that was crashing Clarisse when creating/loading a new project with the Material Linker opened.
• Disabled Animate > Set Motion Key for read-only Scene Items.
• Projects with very small attribute values are now read properly.
• Fixed Edit > Make Instance Of and other instancing bugs.
• When a project is not saved properly, a warning is now logged.
• Users are now warned when trying to save a project on a read-only file.

Modules

• Groups:
  • By default, the value of the Filter attribute is now Project Items.
  • Users can now nest Groups into Groups. To do so, first make sure the Filter attribute value is Project Items, then add the Groups to the References attribute. If an object is referenced twice by several Groups, it will only appear once.
• Combiners:
  • New combining mode: Group List. Users can now use groups as scene objects input.
  • Now combiner pivots are automatically centered to the bounding box when the combiner is created via Edit > Combine.
  • It is now forbidden to drop objects other than Scene Objects in the combiner object's list attribute (before, it was crashing Clarisse).
• Scatterers:
  • Scattering attributes can now be textured and the numeric values act as multipliers on the texture bound to them.
  • Improved the computation of matrices when using support normals.
• Images:
  • Added resolution preset.
  • Layer File now uses '#' wildcard to specify a the padding of a sequence instead of '*'.
  • In Layer File, added "Single Channel File Behavior" attribute to choose how the single channel must be used. The 4 choices are:
    • Use File Channel Name: loads the image in the channel which name matches the name of the channel in the file.
    • Force Luminance: loads the image in the luminance channel.
    • Force Alpha: loads the image in the alpha channel.
    • Force Luminance + Alpha: loads the image in the luminance and alpha channels.

Material Editor

• Item creation menu now pops-up using '`', '~' (on qwerty keyboards) or '²' (on azerty keyboards).
• It is now possible to navigate the items of the popup menu with arrow keys and item creation can be triggered using the ENTER key or the keys that pops-up the menu. Hence, double hitting the popup keys validate the creation of the last selected item in the popup menu.
• Items created via the popup menu are now located where users performed the right click to popup the menu.
• Double clicking in the texture tree does not create multiple nodes anymore.

Attribute Editor

• Color fields can now be edited numerically by double clicking on the color component. Color components can now be edited when moving the mouse up and down.
• Double clicking on a numeric field now selects the entire text.
• Pasting text in text fields in now working properly.
• Fixed ALTGR and numpad ENTER handling in text fields.
• Referenced object lists are now updated when the current context changes.
• Referenced object lists have been optimized for large scenes.
• Now gradient attributes fit all keys at opening.
• Creating keys on curves attributes now uses the default key interpolation type set in the Preference panel.

Browser

• It is now possible to enter into a context using the ENTER key.
• Read-only objects can no longer be renamed.
• Search filter is not case sensitive anymore.
• Fixed item sorting by columns when the sorting is disabled.
• Fixed a bug that was sometimes freezing Clarisse when moving a context with a Browser and an Explorer opened at the same time.
• Fixed item creation via keyboard shortcut that was sometimes creating the item twice.
• Fixed item selection when creating an object or a context.
• Fixed Browser opening in windowed mode.

3D View

• Added a "Look Through..." button in the toolbar to select which item is looked through.
• Icon size set in the preferences of the 3D View is now working properly.
• Shading Layers can now be applied to the 3D View so that the view displays the materials assigned via a shading layer in Previz mode.
• Fixed a animation refresh bug when looking through an item that is not in the current context that the 3D View displays.
• Fixed a display bug of wireframes where the backfaced objects were totally black.
• Fully transparent fragments are not displayed anymore in Previz mode.
• Now occluded parts of selected items, bounding boxes and tool handles are drawn semi-transparent.
• Fixed a bug where the selection mode was sometimes switching alone to Custom.
• Fixed a bug where the displacement was not displayed correctly in some cases.
• Fitting a constrained camera is now forbidden.

Image View

• It now supports channels and layers display. "Show Rendering Progress" is enabled for the RGBA layer and AOV layers.
• Added image history. See User Guide for more information.
• Fixed a bug in image selection that wasn't working as expected in some cases.
• Fixed a bug that was hiding Translate, Rotate, Scale tools gizmo display when copy/pasting objects.
• It is now possible to define a render region when any tool is active.
• Fixed a bug in the picking of transparent objects that were not taken in account properly.
• Fitting a constrained camera is now forbidden.
• Bilinear filtering when displaying low quality images can now be enabled/disabled in the Image View tab of the Preference panel. Bilinear filtering is enabled by default.

Shading Layer Editor

• Shading Layer Editor has been improved. See User Guide for more information.
• Creating, deleting, moving, editing rules and replacing text is now undoable.
• Objects renaming is now properly taken into account.
• It is now forbidden to edit read-only shading layers.
• Shading layer object state (instance, source, read only..) is now displayed in the shading layer hierarchy pane.

Shading

• Improved the reflection model used in material Standard and added support for anisotropy. Anisotropy is controlled using Anisotropy and Anisotropy Rotation attributes in the Shading tab.
• Fixed a bug in the sampling that was introducing too much noise in some cases.
• Fixed a bug in the Marschner shader that was very rarely generating infinite numbers.
• In Standard material, sub-surface scattering sampling quality as improved and its rendering speed is faster. A new attribute "Sss Light Oversampling" has been added. This oversample lights in order to remove noise due to lighting. See documentation for further details.
• In Standard material, changed how the glossiness of materials is computed, improved ray differentials and removed the attribute to enable/disable glossy reflection and refraction. Glossiness has been normalized and setting a glossiness under 100% enables glossy reflection or glossy refraction.
• In Standard material, glossy refraction quality has been improved and like reflection it supports anisotropy too.
• In Normal material, the camera space export option is now properly applied.
• Fixed a bug in the SSS that was trying in some cases to trace empty rays.
• Fixed a bug in the SSS that was occurring when there were more than 1 light in the scene.
• Fixed a bug in the Marschner shader where light sets were not taken in account.
• Fixed a crash in the SSS when there were several directional lights in the scene.
• The standard material has now a new energy conservation mode based on the value of the Reflection attribute instead of the result of the raytracing. The specular color is not affected anymore by the energy conservation modes.
• Now the composition of the diffuse with the transparency in Standard material is done using luminance values in order to avoid color inversion.
• Fixed a crash that was happening when setting bump mapping on animated objects with subdivision surfaces.

Lighting

• Color and Shadow Color attributes of Point, Linear, Distant, Area and Spot lights can now be textured.
• Improved illumination model of Area, Point, Spot and Linear lights. A new attribute "mode" is now available for users to choose for a physical lighting model. The non physical model, called Normalized, does not scale the light intensity along its size and falloff attributes are enabled whereas the physical model scales the intensity along the size of the light and uses an inverse square distance falloff.
• Added intensity attenuation to Area, Point, Spot and Linear lights.
• Monte Carlo GI is now faster with multiple bounces and fireflies have been greatly reduced.
• Area, Point and Spot lights are now occluding Monte Carlo GI rays thus improving greatly global illumination both in quality and realism.
• Added sideness control to Area lights: users can now specify if the light is single or double sided.
• Added Shadow Offset to specify a shadow exclusion range.
• Changed the boolean attribute used to choose the shape of Area lights into a preset attribute.
• Fixed a bug in the Spot light where the falloff angle was not working when the light had a radius over 0.

Texturing

• Added a Grid texture node.
• Added Distance To UV texture to texture lights with a radial gradients.
• Added Reorder texture node in order to shuffle the color components by specifying the Channel Order attribute. Ex: "rrrr" copies the red channel to all the others; "r001" will leave red unchanged, set green and blue to 0,and alpha to 1; "rgba" does not make any change. Accepted characters are: r, g, b, a, 0, 1.
• Added Point Cloud texture node that allows to sample a point cloud thus to texture scattered objects.
• Added Utility texture: it can be used to output shading context values such as world position, normals etc... as input for AOV Store nodes.
• Reflection texture is now handling reflection anisotropy.
• Fixed a bug that was crashing Clarisse when a texture file was not found in Streamed Map File, Map File and UDIM.
• Streamed Map File now supports file sequence. An action has been added for auto-detection and the '#' character can be used to specify the sequence index position in the filename.
• Streamed Map File now supports UDIM and Mudbox naming convention. UDIM texture is now deprecated and have been removed.
• In MapFile and Streamed Map File, channel layers are automatically created when some are found in the file. Use Channels attribute to specify which channels are read and mapped to the RGBA texture output.
• Fixed a bug in the randomness of the Cellular Noise.
• Map File now uses '#' wildcard to specify the padding of a sequence instead of '*'.
• Changed the EWA mode in the image in order to be more precise.
• Added parametric UV and UV Map as new Gradient texture node inputs
• Fixed a bug in spatial textures where some values were not initialized properly.
• In Map File, added "Single Channel File Behavior" attribute to choose how the single channel must be used. The 4 choices are:
  • Use File Channel Name: loads the image in the channel which name matches the name of the channel in the file.
  • Force Luminance: loads the image in the luminance channel.
  • Force Alpha: loads the image in the alpha channel.
  • Force Luminance + Alpha: loads the image in the luminance and alpha channels.
  * Fixed trilinear pixel interpolation that was offset by 0.5 pixel.

Rendering

• Total rewrite of the raytracing engine. Scenes with transparent objects render much faster.
• Max Alpha Depth in Raytracer is now set to Infinite by default.
• Depth of Field is now enabled. See User Guide for more information.
• Added Focus Object attribute to Camera Perspective and Camera Advanced in order to control depth of field focus point automatically.
• Tone mapping effect is now skipped when the rendered alpha value of a fragment is zero.
• In Raytracer, Shading Oversampling changing rate is now slower for more precise user control.
• Fixed a bug in the computation of surface differentials for the implicit Box geometry.
• Fixed crashes in the displacement when binding textures that are depending on the incident ray.
• Fixed a bug that was freezing Clarisse when rendering with a frame step value at 0f.
• Fixed several bugs with motion blur on point clouds, combiners and scatterers.
• Fixed a computation bug of ray differentials when looking at backfaced geometries.
• Sampling is now more precise and noise is reduced with low sampling quality.

AOV

• AOV engine is now enabled.
• In Clarisse AOV are HDR channels grouped into layers. By default, Clarisse defines "rgba", "depth" and "coordinates" layers. Channels are managed using the Layer Editor found in the Buffer menu of Clarisse's main window.
• AOV are exported by attaching a AOV Store node (via the Material Editor or the Attribute Editor), binding a texture node, that defines the AOV values, to the Input attribute and selecting in which layer the values are stored in the 3D Layer via the Output Channels attribute of the AOV Store.
• AOV are saved in the same file if the chosen image format supports multiple channels (EXR, TIF). For other formats, each channel will then be saved as a single file.
• 3D layer now defines channel layers that can be exported as AOV in the rendered image when the Export Shading Aovs attribute is enabled. The available channels are:
  • K Diffuse: the shader diffuse reflection coefficient.
  • Diffuse Illumination: the diffuse illumination received from direct and indirect lights.
  • Luminosity: the light emitted by the shader.
  • K Specular: the shader specular reflection coefficient.
  • Specular Illumination: the specular illumination received from direct and indirect lights.
  • K Reflection: the shader reflectivity coefficient.
  • Raw Reflection: the raytraced reflection as if the shader was a full mirror.
  • Refraction: the raytraced refraction as if the shader was a full glass.
  • Normal: the surface normal.
  • Alpha: the shader opacity.
  • SSS: the shader sub-surface diffuse and single scattering.
  • Position: the surface position in world coordinates.
  • Depth: the distance of the surface from the camera in the world.

Shading Layer

• Shading layers now accept local rules: when a rule starts with the "./" tag, object resolution starts from the context in which the shading layer sits. Ex: to apply the same material on all the objects on the context where a shading layer sits, type "./*"
• Shading layer are now hierarchical. In the Attribute Editor, users can now populate the Children Shading Layers attribute or the left panel of the Shading Layer Editor to manage hierarchies. Note that the rules of a shading layer are applied on top of the rules of its children.
• Material resolution speed has been optimized.
• Shading Layer rules now support variables in their definition.

Geometry

• Fixed a crash in Polymesh when the geometry had no polygon (only vertices).
• Fixed a bug in the OBJ export that was not saving polygons in some cases.
• OBJ importer now supports vertex color maps exported from ZBrush.
• Fixed a bug in subdivision surfaces computing that was giving different results on Windows and Linux.
• Fixed a bug in subdivision surfaces computing when using Evaluate Surface mode that was sometimes causing NaNs.
• Fixed a bug in subdivision surfaces computing when using Evaluate Surface mode when there was a scale on the object.
• Fixed a bug in Point Cloud when Global sampling modes were used.
• Fixed Point Cloud decimation when using spatial textures in local or world coordinates.

Fur

• New fur rendering engine that is much faster and uses far less memory than the previous engine.
• Fur Generator and the Fur Interpolate now work like scatterers: they only grow fur on vertice of a geometry, they don't generate a point cloud and users must provide a Point Cloud as roots of the fibers.
• Fur Generator is now able to read the color maps from the support geometry used to grow the fur on.
• In Fur geometries, default Radius Values is now Use Custom Values.
• In Fur Generator, Knot Count now ranges from 2 to 16 and Length default value is now 0.1 and ranges from 0.001 to 1.0
• Added Fur Interpolate that is used to generate interpolated fur from another fur geometry.
• Fixed a bug in the Fur geometry where the bounding box was not updated correctly when changing the decimation value.
• Fixed a display bug on fur geometries when the object was scaled.
• In Fur Generator, many attributes are now texturable.
• In Fur Interpolate, many attributes are now texturable.

Alembic

• Support for Ogawa format is now enabled (woth Alembic library version 1.5).
• Added Alembic Camera to support animated attributes read in Alembic files.
• Fixed a filename check bug causing Clarisse to ignore valid Alembic files.
• Curve radius is now properly read from file.
• Fixed a crash that was occurring when loading curves that do not have any root color nor radius defined.

Variable Editor

• Total revamp of Variable Editor. See the User Guide for more information.
• Users can now define their own custom variables. Variables can now use other variables in the values.
• Environment variables are now imported into Clarisse.
• Custom variables are stored into projects and can be imported/exported using the File menu in the Variable Editor toolbar.
• Custom variables can be managed via script using:
  • ix.application.add_custom_variable("name", "value")
  • ix.application.remove_custom_variable("name")
  • ix.application.save_custom_variables("filename.txt")
  • ix.application.load_custom_variables("filename.txt")

CNODE

• An interactive mode has been added to CNODE (use command line option -interactive to enable this mode). In this mode, CNODE behaves like a Python command line and you can input Clarisse specific Python code using the ix module.
• In interactive mode, CNODE behaves like a real Python command line and outputs the result of each input in the terminal.
• User can interrupt a running script using CTRL + C.

Third Parties

• All platforms (Windows, Linux, OS-X) use the same third parties library versions.
• alembic-1.5
• open image io 1.3.2
• boost-1.44
• hdf5-1.8.10-patch1
• ilmbase-2.0.1
• openexr-2.0.1
• jpeg-8d
• libpng-1.5.10
• libtiff-4.0.3
• zlib-1.2.7

Known Issues

• Shading Layer instances are not supported.
• BMP file format cannot be used to export AOVs as separate files.
• On ATI graphics card, bilinear filtering does not work in Image View.
• Alembic file changes are based on the file date and size. We are working on a new method to improve this as we get false positive when the file is moved or copied to another location.