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New Clarisse 1.5 SP1 PLE

Dear Clarisse users,

We're pleased to announce the release of Clarisse iFX 1.5 SP1 PLE over 8 months after Clarisse iFX 1.0 5700B PLE release.

We've been also listening to PLE users feedback that complained about the watermark being too strong. We've decided to reduce its intensity quite dramatically.

This new build features the following changes (since build #5700B):

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.
• ILISE now has explicit error codes to help understand why a license is rejected.
• Fixed "Make Local" on an instance that was randomly crashing Clarisse.
• Fixed copy/pasting of layers that was randomly crashing Clarisse
• Missing geometries which filename is not resolved are no longer crashing Clarisse
• Major stability improvements when deleting objects.
• Fixed a bug that was crashing Clarisse when saving a project and having a Browser in "Icon View" mode.
• Clarisse now warns if users try to overwrite a project having directives.
• Importing projects using "File > Import > Project" now properly imports projects having directives.
• Added '-recent' argument to Clarisse command line: you can now specify the project to be loaded at startup from its rank in the recent files list. For example: 'clarisse -recent 1' will load the latest opened project in your recent files list.
• Fixed a crash when saving a project with Clarisse having a floating window which is not using selection.
• Added 'File > Import > Texture > Map File | Streamed Map File' to import multiple image files into textures at once. The textures are imported into the current context and they are named after each file they use. Map File textures are suffixed by a '_map' and Streamed Map File textures are suffixed by '_smap'. Examples:
  
  • importing "my_texture.exr" into a Map File will create a texture node named 'my_texture_map'
    
  • importing "my_texture.exr" into a Streamed Map File will create a texture node named 'my_texture_smap'
    
• Fixed a bug that was crashing Clarisse when clearing the scene if the Hierarchy View was opened.
• Fixed a bug that was crashing Clarisse when removing multiple objects using the Browser in some cases.
• On OSX, using Alembic items is not crashing Clarisse anymore.
• Now Texture Cache is properly set when modified in the Preference Panel.
• Added a CNODE section in the user manuals.
• Third party libraries OpenImageIO and OpenEXR have been updated to newer versions: OpenImageIO (1.2), OpenEXR(1.7.1). You can expect some performance improvements in the texture node Steamed Map File.
• Warning and Errors are now displayed in a single message box.Now, errors are stacked in a log window instead of poping individual message boxes for each error. On the bottom right of the application status bar there's now an icon left to the evaluation button (bottom right).
• Alembic objects can't be created manually via the Create menu.
• Changed Image default resolution (now 1280x720) and default resolution multiplier (new 50%).
• Fixed project referencing when included in a sub-context
• FPS, motion blur direction/length/sample count and texture cache size are now saved in the project as well as in the config file (when loading a project, it overrides the config settings)
• Projects are now using less memory and load faster. Typically memory went down from 4.9 GB to 1.4 GB
• Project statistics can now be logged using Help > Log Statistics in Clarisse's main menu.
• Some memory leaks are fixed.
• Importing data in the default context is now forbidden.
• Fixed a bug that was crashing Clarisse opening a new scene when the Render Manager was already opened.
• Exporting geometries using File > Export > Geometry now works properly.
• On Linux, Clarisse exits properly: no more 'X_GetProperty: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 0x0' message.
• Memory footprint has been greatly reduced when loading large project files. For example, on a 100K+ objects project, memory usage was 5.8GB (with a peak at 6.6GB) and is now 4.7GB (with a peak at 5.3GB). The total gain is 1.1GB of memory usage (and 1.3GB of peak memory usage).
• File extensions are now properly supported when importing images using File > Import > Image menu.
• In Combiner, Image mode is now working properly.
• Added File > Resync Resources that launches a resynchronization of all the resources that depend on external files (like Alembic files, textures...). Even up-to-date resources are reloaded.
• Fixed a bug that was introduced recently in copy/pasting of contexts and pasting into another Clarisse works again.

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".
• In Script Editor, you can now duplicate a line or a selection of text with CTRL-D.
• In Script Editor, backspace key now removes many spaces matching the tab behavior.
• In Script Editor, fixed HOME and CTRL-LEFT shortcuts: they now set the cursor position at the start of text.
• In Render Manager, fixed duplicates in the list of invalid path
• In Render Manager, the output message of an empty path is now "Path is empty"
• 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.
• Added a new widget Path Manager to manage, replace all project filename attributes in a single and unified spreadsheet.
• In Hierarchy View, newly created items are now properly displayed.
• in Search Widget, the clear function now works properly.
• In Attribute Editor, removed mouse wheel scrolling on sliders and curve edition widget so that they don't prevent scrolling in the main editor.
• In Browser, you can now enter into a selected context using the ENTER shortcut.
• In text inputs, hitting the CTRL+Z shortcut doesn't crash Clarisse anymore.
• In Layer Editor, layer duplication using RMB Menu > Duplicate is now working properly.
• Fixed a bug where minisliders output value would go crazy on Linux.
• Escape key in line edit cancels any edited value and return to its original value
• Escape key in search field clears the search/filter
• Memory unit base is now in MB (was in Byte). This fixes Preferences Panel texture cache settings issue.
• Copying and Pasting a texture from the Material Editor will now import the new texture in the Material Editor workspace.
• Removing links by the right click lasso will now spawn one Undo command in the Material Editor.
• Materials can no longer be created into the Default context.
• Fixed tab key support in text edits
• Massively selecting objects for the Attribute Editor does not freeze Clarisse anymore. Instead a progress bar has been added.
• Items can now be selected by drag and dropping them into the viewport bar (the bar with the "lock" icon). This automatically open the selection toolbar and lock the selection.
• Zooming glitches in Image View while rendering have been fixed.
• In curve and gradient widgets: (1) fixed crash when setting a key position or time using a number field and validating with Enter; (2) fixed the offset of several keys using a number field.
• In History Editor, added a Cancel button option when clearing the history.
• In Log, fixed horizontal scrollbar behavior.

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.
• Multiple objects deletion is now much faster.
• 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.
• Clarisse project now supports directives. Directives can be seen as commands that are called when loading a project in Clarisse. This powerful feature allows you to generate Clarisse projects from third parties applications. Combined with the #include feature, directives can be used to assemble shot/sequences using external assets such as ABC. More on this is coming soon. Currently there are two directives:
  
  • import_abc(alembic_path)
    
  • set_value(attribute_path, value)
    
  • For example:
    

    Code: Select all

    import_abc("/contents/abc/my_shot.abc")
set_value("project://scene/image.layer_3d.active_camera", "project://scene/camera")

    
    
• #include directive now supports file path relative to the project file path.
• Project directives now support file path relative to the project file path.
• Directives usage documentation is available here.
• Added project_directives sample files to Clarisse content.zip.

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:
  • Loading tiled images is now much faster. Expect up to 30x performance boost!
  • Added resolution preset.
  • In layers, offsetting images using Pre Filter Offset and Post Filter Offset attributes is now working properly.
  • 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.
• Fixed nodes auto-layout.

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.
• Improved greatly multi selection refresh speed (X 8) and deselection speed (x 10000)
• Numeric fields now supports operations such as '+=' '-=' '*=' '/=' to modify underlying value(s). For example type '*= 2' will multiply all the attribute values by 2.
• Object list display in tool tips are now limited to 20 items when many items are selected.

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.
• "Filter field" is now replaced by a "Search field". Now the search engine looks for its items in current and sub-context.
• Fixed a bug where Class Filter was incorrectly set in the Item Picker.
• Reset pre-selection when the BrowserPicker window reopened
• Browser have been optimized (both memory and speed): it now easily displays 100K+ items.
• It now displays a spreadsheet like view in the item panel
• Items can be sorted by left-clicking in the column headers
• Columns can be added/removed by right-clicking in the column headers
• Search field now widens automatically when the field is selected
• Search field is now displaying "0 matches" when no result is found.

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.
• Fixed a bug that could lead to a crash when changing Custom Previz Lightset while creating a new scene.
• Added an automatic show rendering in progress which is very useful for previz mode.
• Full Resolution in 3D View is now 25% faster.
• In 3D View, fixed a selection bug on Scene Items like lights, cameras, locators...
• Fixed a refresh bug that was preventing manipulators to get updated properly when changing the selection.

Graph Editor

• Keyframe tangents can now be linked in angle and/or length.
• Added "Auto Tangents" mode to get smoother bezier curves. These tangents will update automaticaly when moved depending on their neighbours. This mode is enabled by default to get smooth curve on keyframe creation.
• Add "Flat Tangents" mode to flatten several keyframe tangents at the same time.

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.
• Minimum requested image quality is now saved in the project.
• It is now possible to set properly the limited region on linux.
• Fixed a bug that could potentially freeze the application if a tool was displaying a bounding box.
• Fixed some visual glitches during the display of show rendering in progress.
• Show rendering in progress fix: tiles were not correctly aligned.
• The Image View now displays the nth mipmap of the highest quality computed instead of a low quality full of noise when zooming out.
• Now bbox display only draws the bbox frame of the selected object. (fill happens only on mouse hover)
• Render is stopped only if the min quality requested is raised. (not recompute since we already have a better quality available)
• It is now possible to choose the minimum quality that will be rendered from 1/16 to full resolution.
• Tiles overlay (green box) were not correctly drawn when moving a zoomed image.
• Fixed a refresh bug that was preventing manipulators to get updated properly when changing the selection.

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/Texturing

• 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, SSS diffuse scattering is now more realistic as it takes Luminosity and Transparency into account in addition to Diffuse.
• 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.
• 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.
• Added Blur Texture: it allows to apply a gaussian blur on the given input color.
• 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.
• In texture Map File and layer File, image sequence detection is not automatically performed anymore. Now, you must use the "Detect Sequence" action button to manually perform the sequence check.
• Clarisse now releases SGI files imported via Map File textures correctly. You can now overwrite the imported file even if Clarisse is using the texture.
• Fixed OpenImageOI bug that wasn't properly reading grayscale images with alpha.
• Fixed a bug in UDIM and Streamed Map File that could occur when the Pre Multiplied attribute was enabled.
• Added a texture node InstanceColor to map a scatterer instance using point cloud information for texturing.
• Added a texture node FurSupportColor to extract color a texture using fur support geometry projection
• Added a texture node that is able to extract vertex color maps
• Added ray exit color for gi. When a GI gather ray misses geometry or is clipped using distance clipping the exit color is returned.
• Added Marschner fur shader.
• Added backlighting support in Standard material: use the "Backlighting" attribute to control the diffuse backlighting color.
• Added "Enable Backlighting" to all lights to specify whether a light affects diffuse backlighting or not.
• Fixed crash when using UDIM node in some cases.
• Added "Fit to Bounding Box" action to spatial textures. It allows users to pick an Scene Object and its bounding box will be used set the projection attributes of the texture so that the texture "fits" the selected object.
• Fixed evaluation glitches on tile corners of textures.
• Fixed bilinear filtering on texture edges.
• Fixed numeric precision issue in bilinear color evaluation that was leading to a crash.
• Default texture cache size is now 512MB.
• Fixed sub-surface scattering in Standard material that was creating black spots when the Diffuse value (textured or not) is 0.
• Fixed a bug in Subsurface scattering that was computing wrong shadows with multiple Point lights.

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.

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.
• Added Subsample Quality in Renderer to control the quality of ray differentials for each subsamples.
• Fixed trilinear mipmapping mode that leads to much better results.
• Improved ray differentials computation, as a result texture cache coherency is now greatly improved.
• Global illumination is now properly rendered in the 3D View while in Previz mode.
• Fixed a bug that was crashing Clarisse when a scatterer referencing a null support geometry was rendered.
• Added deformation motion blur! Motion vectors are computed on the fly or directly read from an alembic file. Please note there is currently one limitation that will be addressed soon: Texture displacement deformer doesn't return motion vectors yet.
• Added motion blur support for scatterers and combiners.
• Added tone mapping in Raytracer. This can be used to remap sub-pixel values before integration by pixel filters resulting in better anti-aliasing when dealing with HDR values.
• Enabling/disabling "Render to Disk" attribute in images or layers don't trigger a new evaluation anymore.
• Added tone mapping in Raytracer. This can be used to remap sub-pixel values before integration by pixel filters resulting in better anti-aliasing when dealing with HDR values.
• Fur tip UVs and derivatives are now properly computed.
• In images, enabling/disabling "Render to Disk" don't trigger a new render anymore
• Motion blur on items imported from Alembic scenes is now computed properly.
• In Raytracer, Shading Oversampling values are now properly read from project files.
• The attribute 'Raytrace Offset' in Scene Objects (Geometries, Combiners, Scatterers) can now be used to prevent self-intersection of transparent objects.

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.
• Large OBJ files (larger than 2GB) are now supported.
• OBJ import is now streamed thus it uses less memory while loading.
• 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.
• Point clouds using an animated Alembic mesh as base geometry are now correctly computed.
• New attribute Use Support Normals to align the instances according to the input point cloud normals.
• Fixed raytracing glitches in subdivision surfaces.
• Reduced greatly up to 1000% general fur/hair memory usage.
• Added a decimation value to the Fur file geometry
• Improved greatly Fur File. You can now override or multiply radius values of alembic files.
• Modified the Fur File geometry in order it supports base and tip radius by hair.
• FurFile now imports radius and colors from file as well as deformation.
• AbcMesh/FurFile: new attribute to force the computation of motion vectors (interpolation) in case values in the file are null.
• Imported vertex normals are now automatically normalized after load.
• Added Fur Interpolate, a new geometry able to interpolate furs. You can control the smoothness of the interpolation via a curve and also clumping.
• Added support for vertex color map on geometries.
• AbcMesh now supports motion blur: if deformation is homogenous, if deformation is heterogenous and motion vector are present in file.
• Greatly reduced memory foot prints of Polymesh (part 2). Polymesh usage is now divided by 3-4 compared to build 5630. Typically an OBJ that was using 11.9 GB of geometric data is now using 3.2 GB
• Fixed a bug that was producing an infinite loop on bad topologies while computing smooth normals in the polymesh.

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.
• Animation playback speed have been improved.
• Fixed a bug when importing a Fur File which wasn't visible a the current import time.
• Fixed a bug where when saving a project containing an imported ABC that was never evaluated, had incorrect ABC item information stored.
• Fixed a bug where camera settings were not imported correctly.
• Fixed a crash that was occurring when an already imported alembic was re-synched when Clarisse detected ABC file had changed.
• A message box now pops to ask the user if he wants to resynch its items to a previously imported alembic file flagged as changed (file/size date changed) Note: CNODE just skips the resynch but pops a warning.
• Reload Resource now works on imported alembic files. Animation and deformation are now automatically updated.
• Resynching of updated alembic files is up to 20 times faster.
• New alembic import (part 2): when importing an alembic scene, geometries and xforms are now merged thus reducing the number of nodes created and the memory usage. The scene hierarchy is now identical to Maya's one. Projects with alembic scenes imported with the previous system are supported but are not converted into the new scene hierarchy. This system uses AbcMesh objects instead of Polyfile and it handles deformation directly (no deformer is added).
• With the new system, animated heterogeneous topologies are now supported.
• Importing geometries using File > Import > Geometry is now faster.
• Importing scenes using File > Import > Scene is now way faster.
• Translate tool now properly translates items imported from Alembic scenes.
• Importing Alembic geometries without xform is not crashing Clarisse anymore.
• Clarisse does not crash anymore if an object in an Alembic file does not have a parent XForm.
• Alembic tools 'abcecho' and 'abcconvert' are now released for Linux and OSX.

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:

  Code: Select all

  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")

Third Parties

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

Known Issues currently being addressed

• Instancing is not supported in the Shading Layer Editor.
• 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.