Releases · YafaRay/Blender-Exporter

This repository has been archived by the owner on Jul 18, 2020. It is now read-only.

14 Mar 20:36

DavidBluecame

v3.2.0-ALPHA21

b521835

v3.2.0-ALPHA21, still in developers testing Pre-release

Pre-release

[Blender-Exporter specific changes]

* Show the Physics tab in Blender
Just importing the default Physics tab controls from Blender UI. I suppose some functions like dynamic paint would not work in YafaRay, but still we should not hide all other functions which are mostly blender mesh manipulation that can be later rendered by YafaRay

* AA user interface: fixed disabled filter type and pixel width when passes=1

* Texture mapping: allow MirrorX,MirrorY even when Repeat = 1

* Change plugins folder to unify it to "yafaray-plugins" for any platform

[Changes to the Core code]

* IMPORTANT: Path/Photon OneDirectLight - attempt to sample lights more uniformly

As reported in http://www.yafaray.org/node/803 there are artifacts in the path tracing and photon mapping algorithms when there is more than one light.

I decided to change the input data and use an almost purely correlative numbering for each sample (having separate correlative numbers, one per thread). This seems to improve the noise and still give similar results no matter how many lights are used, and a more uniform light sampling.

This is a very significant change. I would expect scenes to be a little bit noisier now, but having a much more correct lighting when there is more than one light in the scene.

In any case we need to keep an eye on this and perhaps fine tune it more or even revert it back completely and look for another solution. For now I will leave it this way and see what happens...

* IMPORTANT: all integrators, SPPM and path roulette: Fixing non-randomness repetitive patterns
As described in http://www.yafaray.org/node/792 I discovered lack of randomness in the bidirectional integrator.

I found out that it was caused by an insufficiently random "seeding" of the random_t pnrg object. For example during first AA pass, offset = 0 so it the pnrg object was seeded with value "123" for each tile causing the artifact detected in the bidir integrator.

However, and even when it's not obviously visible, I also believe it affected the SPPM integrator as well because of the same issue. Therefore I proceeded to add more randomness to the pnrg seeding for all integrators, including SPPM. I hope this also improves russian roulette randomness.

This change should not cause ill effects and should be beneficial in my opinion, but it's difficult to know for sure. We need to keep an eye on this to ensure no new issues happen now.

* Path Tracing: russian roulette for faster path renders controlled by parameter min_bounces

* If this parameter is set to 0, russian roulette will be enabled.
* If set to the same value specified in depth (max bounces), russian roulette will be disabled
* If set to a value between 0 and max bounces, then russian roulette will only start be applied after this number of bounces, so we can get decent sampling in dark areas for example and get a good speedup with less noise.

The lower this parameter is, the more speed and more noise.

Path Tracing integrator: added new Russian Roulette parameter to speed up path tracing

* * IMPORTANT: big changes to textures interpolation changes to imagehandlers. Now all imagebuffers are internally linear and optimized by default.

To solve the problem detected at http://yafaray.org/node/787 where I found out that YafaRay is doing the texture interpolation *after* decoding the texels color space. This was causing significant differences in color between standard bilinear/bicubic and when using trilinear or EWA mipmaps.

I believe that the correct way to interpolate textures is to decode color space into linear space every time a texel is read, before the texels are used for interpolation. That way the interpolation is calculated correctly in linear color space.

From now on the user will be responsible for selecting correct ColorSpaces for all textures, including bump map, normal map, etc. For example for Non-RGB / Stencil / Bump / Normal maps, etc, textures are typically already linear and the user should select "linearRGB" in the texture properties, but if the user (by mistake) keeps the default sRGB for them, YafaRay will (incorrectly) apply the sRGB->LinearRGB conversion causing the values to be incorrect. However, I've added a "fail safe" so for any "float" textures, bump maps, normal maps, etc, when getting colors after interpolatio YafaRay will to a "inverse" color conversion to the original Color Space. This way, even a mistake in user's color space selection in bump maps, normal maps, etc, will not cause any significant problems in the image as they will be converted back to their original color space. However, in this case rendering will be slower and potential artifacts can appear due to interpolation taking place in the wrong color space. For optimal results, the user must select correctly the color space for all textures.

* Textures will be "optimized" by default. I think it's clear by now that optimized textures greatly improve memory usage and apparently don't cause slowdowns (might even make it slightly faster due to reduced RAM access?)

* Fixed uninitialized values generated by Ambient Occlusion sampling

* IMPORTANT: Initial support for Texture Mipmaps / Ray Differentials. BIG changes to ImageHandlers
* Modifier all ImageHandlers to standardise access and make them more flexible
* Added new Grayscale internal buffers (optional)
* Reorganized all Interpolation and GetColor code
* Added MipMap capability to ImageHandlers
* Added Trilinear MipMap interpolation based on Ray Differentials.
* Added EWA MipMap interpolation based on Ray Differentials
* Heavily modified IBL blur function, to use mipmaps with manually calculated mipmap level instead of the previous dedicated "IBL blur" process

All these changes are SIGNIFICANT and could cause new bugs... we have to closely monitor

* Fixed EXR MultiLayer image file saving

* Angular camera: fixed wrong renders due to incorrect default clipping
As stated in http://yafaray.org/node/779 there was a problem in the Angula Camera rendering. In many cases, the background was shown instead of the surrounding objects.
I've found the problem in the default clipping plane calculation for the camera, when no clipping is supposed to happen. By default, the far clipping distance is set to -1.f, which normally allows rays to travel without clipping as they are not supposed to go behind the camera.
However for angular cameras, rays can actually go behind the camera when using wide angles. In those cases, the rays were incorrectly clipped at a distance of 1.f units behind the camera position.
So, I've set a new default far clipping distance for the angular camera, using a very high negative value. I hope this will allow all rays (in front and behind the camera) to travel without clipping.

* Image Texture Interpolation fixes
Proposed fixes to solve the problems described in http://www.yafaray.org/node/783

The fixes solve the problem with the strange stripes at top and left of the texture.

Also, the changes implement extra code to take into account texture edge interpolation differently when:
* Texture is alone (clip), extended or checkered. In this case, the edges are interpolated against themselves
* Texture is repeated. In this case the way the edges are interpolated depends on the MirrorX/MirrorY parameters. Depending on these params, the edges are interpolated against the opposite edge (normal) or the same edge (mirrored).

* Texture mapping: allow MirrorX,MirrorY even when Repeat = 1

* Added building instructions for several platforms and scenarios

* Qt support reintroduced and updated for YafaRay v3, but still in a basic state, many features not available yet for the Qt interface

* CMake/Swig: modified Ruby interface to avoid Blender crash with Ruby bindings enabled

* CMake: IMPORTANT change/updates to the building system. Versioning integration with Git. Standardisation of paths. Re-introduction of standalone builds and improvements to runtime search of libraries.
Several changes have been introduced to the CMake building system to:
* Integrate versioning with Git for automatic versioning of builds based on the current Git tags.
* Standardisation of installation paths for different OS. Now, the plugins will always be installed in the folder "yafaray-plugins", no matter if it's installed as a pure Core release to the bin/lib system folders or as a Blender add-on.
* Removed the automatic Blender-Exporter git deletion+download every time Core was built as a Blender add-on. This made rebuilds and tests very slow and cumbersome. Also, using "rm -rf" in the CMake building process is a risky and non-portable process. Now, the developer *must* download manually the Blender-Exporter using git and in the UserConfig.txt file, the path to the Blender-Exporter code *must* be specified. It's a little more inconvenient the first time, but I think it's much more convenient for subsequent rebuilds and tests.
* Added CMake option for searching for libraries in an alternate location.
* Removed findOpenCV CMake module that was not working too well (old, outdated maybe?). Without it, it seems finding the OpenCV files is easier in general. However in some cases it might be necessary to set the path to the OpenCV libraries manually.
* For MacOSX, added option to select the Framework in the UserConfig.txt file for convenience
*yafaray-xml: better autodetection of plugins path, but in some cases "-pp" may still be needed

* Fix bug that caused many extra render passes to be generated in some cases

* Fix for SPPM sudden brightness change when reaching approx 4,300 million photons
As reported in http://www.yafaray.org/node/772 when SPPM accumulates a total of 4,300 million photons approximately, the scene brightness changes very suddenly.

Assets 7

25 Sep 17:20

DavidBluecame

v3.1.1-beta

5f9e1f0

YafaRay v3.1.1-beta (2016-09-25) for Blender 2.78: Pre-release

Pre-release

Bug fixes in v3.1.1 respect to v3.1.0:

IMPORTANT: Fixed Volumetrics regression bug introduced in v3.1.0 (artifacts in the images and crashes). This time it should work fine while also solving the original Volumetric bug that v3.1.0 tried to fix.
Fixed incorrect Glass IOR presets retrieval in Blender Exporter

Feature changes/additions in v3.1.0 respect to v3.0.2

New per-material Sampling Factor. New parameter to resample background or not.
These new parameters will not work in the first pass, only in the second and subsequent AA passes.
- Option to resample background, as requested at http://www.yafaray.org/node/214. Works in all integrators except SPPM
- Option to specify a per-material sampling factor to do additional sampling in certain materials, as requested at http://www.yafaray.org/node/746. Works in all integrators except SPPM
New WireFrame material properties as well as a WireFrame render pass, as requested in: http://yafaray.org/node/198

Now, all materials (including Blend material) will have a new Wireframe shading panel. The wireframe can be used in two different ways, depending on whether we want it to be part of the final rendered image or if we want it in a separate Render Pass:
* Embedded in the Render itself: set a wireframe amount (and optionally map the wireframe amount to a texture). Set the other wireframe options such as color, thickness and softness, and render the scene.
* Separate Render Pass: make sure the Wireframe amount in the materials is set to 0.0 so the Wireframe does not appear in the Combined Render. Set the rest of the material wireframe options (color, thickness, etc). Enable Render Passes and select Debug-Wireframe pass in one of the passes (preferrably one of the RGBA render passes such as Vector or Color)
```
Important comments:
 * When using WireFrame, the material may not be fully energy conserving. However, I suppose this is not a problem as the wireframe render is not a photorealistic render in the first place.
 * All Quads and Polygons will be always seen as Triangles (with the crossed line). This is, unfortunately, somthing I cannot solve. YafaRay is currently based on triangle meshes and all Quads and Polygons are first converted to triangle meshes in the Blender Exporter, before entering YafaRay. So, in the Wireframe you will always see triangles, never quads, etc.
 * In the Blend material, the Wireframe shading cannot be mapped to a texture
```
New Render Passes: Basic Toon effect, Object Edges and Faces Edges. See: http://www.yafaray.org/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5181
"Wireframe" material options and render pass will be calculated at "material" integration level. It should be more finely detailed but will only show triangles (quads will show the "crossing" line).

"Faces edges" will be a render pass calculated at Film level showing the edge contours. In this case, quads will be shown more correctly. However, to calculate the faces edges with the current architecture I had to use indirect methods that are way less precise, so some artifacts and missing or incomplete edges are to be expected, including aliasing in the edges. I've added some parameters that can be accessed in the Render Passes tab for users to fine tune the edges generation as much as possible.

"Object edges" will be the same, but only rendering object edges and contour, more useful for toon-like renders, for example. Limitations are the same as with the Faces Edges.

"Toon" render pass: as I already got the above working, I thought it could be nice to work a bit more and get a full "toon-like" Render Pass. This render pass will take the original image, apply some smoothing and color quantization to make the image more "cartoon-like" and add the Object Edge. The users will be able to choose the edge color, adjust a bit the thickness and smoothing/quantization. This will be only a very basic toon render pass, don't expect a perfect contouring, etc!! I didn't even try making an animation yet, I suppose there will some edges changing from one frame to the next, not sure if it will be distracting or not...
Render Badge: ability to select Font ttf file and a font size factor. This will allow better presen
tation and to select fonts with better Unicode support on demand

New Automatic "absolute/numeric" Object/Material Index render passes, as requested in http://www.yafaray.org/node/745

Bug fixes in v3.1.0:

IMPORTANT: The v3.1.0 Linux builds that can be downloaded in yafaray.org should now be free from the issues "file too short" that happened in the v3.0.2 builds, as described in http://www.yafaray.org/node/759
IMPORTANT: Fixed (hopefully) the memory allocation bug in Blend materials described at http://www.yafaray.org/
node/763 that caused either crashes or incorrect render results
Glass material: more realistic, corrected total reflection including the reflection color/texture. In some scenes this could change the results of Glass rendering! See http://www.yafaray.org/node/770
Volumes: fixed issue with white/black areas (negative values, etc) in certain circumstances. See: http://www.yafaray.org/node/766
Object/Material Absolute Index passes: avoid antialiasing in the edges.
As requested in http://www.yafaray.org/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5180
Any "Intermediate" values will be "rounded up" (ceiled). This is one of the many possible criteria to do this, but it gives similar results to Blender Internal, so I will use it.
Image output denoise: denoise parameters added to the XMLinterface, they didn't work in the XML interface in v3.0.2
Fixed colorA_t class initialization inconsistencies. We need to keep an eye on this, could cause changes in the Alpha in some scenes (hopefully not)
Fix problems when rendering a scene that was not yet saved to a .blend file. Now, if the scene has not yet been saved, the secondary output, preset and logs will be saved to a temporary subfolder in the system temporary directory
Removed additional ray depth from Blend material UI. This setting is not used at all in the Blend material, because Core just calculates the maximum additional ray depth between the component materials automatically. So, I'm removing this to avoid confusing users.

Assets 7

20 Sep 17:54

DavidBluecame

v3.1.0-beta

c8e9038

YafaRay v3.1.0-beta (2016-09-20) for Blender 2.78: Pre-release

Pre-release

--------------------------------------------------

Feature changes/additions in v3.1.0:
------------------------------------
* New per-material Sampling Factor. New parameter to resample background or not.
These new parameters will *not* work in the first pass, only in the second and subsequent AA passes.

* Option to resample background, as requested at http://www.yafaray.org/node/214. Works in all integrators except SPPM
* Option to specify a per-material sampling factor to do additional sampling in certain materials, as requested at http://www.yafaray.org/node/746. Works in all integrators except SPPM

* New WireFrame material properties as well as a WireFrame render pass, as requested in: http://yafaray.org/node/198

Now, all materials (including Blend material) will have a new Wireframe shading panel. The wireframe can be used in two different ways, depending on whether we want it to be part of the final rendered image or if we want it in a separate Render Pass:
* Embedded in the Render itself: set a wireframe amount (and optionally map the wireframe amount to a texture). Set the other wireframe options such as color, thickness and softness, and render the scene.
* Separate Render Pass: make sure the Wireframe amount in the materials is set to 0.0 so the Wireframe does not appear in the Combined Render. Set the rest of the material wireframe options (color, thickness, etc). Enable Render Passes and select Debug-Wireframe pass in one of the passes (preferrably one of the RGBA render passes such as Vector or Color)

Important comments:
* When using WireFrame, the material may not be fully energy conserving. However, I suppose this is not a problem as the wireframe render is not a photorealistic render in the first place.
* All Quads and Polygons will be always seen as Triangles (with the crossed line). This is, unfortunately, somthing I cannot solve. YafaRay is currently based on triangle meshes and all Quads and Polygons are first converted to triangle meshes in the Blender Exporter, before entering YafaRay. So, in the Wireframe you will always see triangles, never quads, etc.
* In the Blend material, the Wireframe shading cannot be mapped to a texture

* New Render Passes: Basic Toon effect, Object Edges and Faces Edges. See: http://www.yafaray.org/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5181
"Wireframe" material options and render pass will be calculated at "material" integration level. It should be more finely detailed but will only show triangles (quads will show the "crossing" line).

"Faces edges" will be a render pass calculated at Film level showing the edge contours. In this case, quads will be shown more correctly. However, to calculate the faces edges with the current architecture I had to use indirect methods that are way less precise, so some artifacts and missing or incomplete edges are to be expected, including aliasing in the edges. I've added some parameters that can be accessed in the Render Passes tab for users to fine tune the edges generation as much as possible.

"Object edges" will be the same, but only rendering object edges and contour, more useful for toon-like renders, for example. Limitations are the same as with the Faces Edges.

"Toon" render pass: as I already got the above working, I thought it could be nice to work a bit more and get a full "toon-like" Render Pass. This render pass will take the original image, apply some smoothing and color quantization to make the image more "cartoon-like" and add the Object Edge. The users will be able to choose the edge color, adjust a bit the thickness and smoothing/quantization. This will be only a *very basic* toon render pass, don't expect a perfect contouring, etc!! I didn't even try making an animation yet, I suppose there will some edges changing from one frame to the next, not sure if it will be distracting or not...

* Render Badge: ability to select Font ttf file and a font size factor. This will allow better presen
tation and to select fonts with better Unicode support on demand

New Automatic "absolute/numeric" Object/Material Index render passes, as requested in http://www.yafaray.org/node/745

Bug fixes in v3.1.0:
--------------------
* IMPORTANT: The v3.1.0 Linux builds that can be downloaded in yafaray.org should now be free from the issues "file too short" that happened in the v3.0.2 builds, as described in http://www.yafaray.org/node/759

* IMPORTANT: Fixed (hopefully) the memory allocation bug in Blend materials described at http://www.yafaray.org/
node/763 that caused either crashes or incorrect render results

* Glass material: more realistic, corrected total reflection including the reflection color/texture. In some scenes this could change the results of Glass rendering! See http://www.yafaray.org/node/770

* Volumes: fixed issue with white/black areas (negative values, etc) in certain circumstances. See: http://www.yafaray.org/node/766

* Object/Material Absolute Index passes: avoid antialiasing in the edges.
As requested in http://www.yafaray.org/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5180
Any "Intermediate" values will be "rounded up" (ceiled). This is one of the many possible criteria to do this, but it gives similar results to Blender Internal, so I will use it.

* Image output denoise: denoise parameters added to the XMLinterface, they didn't work in the XML interface in v3.0.2

* Fixed colorA_t class initialization inconsistencies. We need to keep an eye on this, could cause changes in the Alpha in some scenes (hopefully not)

* Fix problems when rendering a scene that was not yet saved to a .blend file. Now, if the scene has not yet been saved, the secondary output, preset and logs will be saved to a temporary subfolder in the system temporary directory

* Removed additional ray depth from Blend material UI. This setting is not used at all in the Blend material, because Core just calculates the maximum additional ray depth between the component materials automatically. So, I'm removing this to avoid confusing users.

Assets 7

22 Jul 17:05

DavidBluecame

v3.0.2-beta

df053e0

YafaRay v3.0.2-beta (2016-07-22) for Blender 2.77a: Pre-release

Pre-release

---------------------------------------------------
** IMPORTANT **
---------------------------------------------------
The new YafaRay-v3 will *NOT* replace the existing YafaRay versions, and it can be installed *in addition* to them.
So, YafaRay-v3 *must* be enabled in Blender user preferences, and in your current YafaRay scenes you have to switch to the renderer "YafaRay-v3" to use the new version.

If you have several YafaRay versions together, *make sure* that you enable in Blender *first* the old and *later* the new v3 in that order. If you have problems, disable both, restart Blender and enable them in that order.

YafaRay v3 has only limited support for multiple YafaRay versions and forks installed at the same time. Having several versions could cause in some cases:
* Black renders
* Random crashes
* Inability to enable the YafaRay v3 plugin or all kinds of strange problems

If you have any of these problems, remove any other yafaray folders (or derived forks) from the Blender addons folder and try again. This typically solves most of the problems stated above.

In v3, support has been DROPPED for Windows XP and MacOSX v10.6

* Important note *: Now by default YafaRay will save the images at the same time as rendering into Blender ("Secondary File Output"). This can be disabled.

Also, YafaRay, by default, ** will change the output folder/file name ** so the images are exported to a subfolder with the same name as the .blend file with suffix _render. This is for convenience and can be disabled, but if you leave the default it could cause you confusion especially when switching to other renderers.
---------------------------------------------------

Changes from v3.0.1-beta to v3.0.2-beta:
----------------------------------------
* ImageFilm load, fix failing load when compiling with GCC v4.8.4

Changes from v3.0.0-beta to v3.0.1-beta:
----------------------------------------
* Important: Background IBL light sampling fix. This solves a long standing problem with incorrect background lighting accuracy and fireflies. (http://yafaray.org/node/752, http://yafaray.org/node/727, http://yafaray.org/node/566).

* IBL clamp sampling parameter no longer needed thanks to the fix above, so it has been removed from the exporter.

* Fix for crash when using yafaray-xml without specifying the type of badge to be used.

* yafaray-xml: new "-ccd" "console-colors-disabled". If specified, disables the Console colors ANSI codes, useful for some 3rd party software that cannot handle ANSI codes well.

* Light photon control: changed back control param names from "shoot_" to "with_" as originally for better backwards compatibility with 3rd party exporters

* Render Passes: added "generic" external render passes for other Exporters and plugins other than Blender Exporter

* Render passes: added new debug passes for diagnosing light estimation problems

Major codebase changes in v3.0.0:
---------------------------------
* Dropped support for Windows XP and MacOSX v10.6. Sorry, but the code changes required this.

* Updated for Blender 2.77a (using Python 3.5).

* Codebase updated from old standard C++98 to the new C++11. This will allow better and easier code maintenance as well as access to newer C++ features to improve YafaRay even more in the future.

* Entire old MultiThreading system replaced by new standard C++11 threads system.

* Windows-MinGW C++11 MultiThreading system using now the library https://github.com/meganz/mingw-std-threads This should significantly improve render speed in Windows in many scenes by reducing the multithreading overhead.

* Added several Boost libraries to allow saving/loading photon map files and improve unicode/multiplatform compatibility.

* Changes to allow compilation in Visual Studio 2013 (although YafaRay is slower when compiled with VS2013 for some reason)

Feature changes/additions in v3.0.0:
------------------------------------
* Multithreaded Photon Map generation, including multithreaded Photon KDTree building: this should greatly improve render speeds when using Direct Light+caustic map, Photon Map, SPPM or Path Tracing+photon.

* Ability to Save/Load/Reuse photon maps: this should greatly improve render speeds in scenes where only camera moves. See: http://yafaray.org/node/460. WARNING: When loading/reusing Photon Map files, the User is responsible to ensure they match the scene. If the User loads inadequate photon maps, the render results could be totally wrong or even have crashes. USE WITH CARE.

* Ability to AutoSave image files, either at the end of each pass or using a user-configurable time interval. This should help if there is a crash or sudden power off, as some images could be obtained from before the incident.

* Ability to AutoSave/Load the main ImageFilm. This might help to CONTINUE interrupted renders or to add additional samples to a render that has already finished. WARNING: When loading ImageFilm files, the User is responsible to ensure they match the scene. If the ImageFilm does not match the scene and render passes exactly, the render results could be totally wrong or even have crashes. USE WITH CARE.

* Ability to perform Multi-Computer distributed render. Each computer should have a different Node number [0..1000] to ensure they don't repeate the same samples. The Node number can be setup in a parameter or in the Exporter under Blender User Preferences -> YafaRay v3 -> Preferences -> Computer Node (remember to Save Settings to store the number permanently in Blender).

Each computer will generate a different Film. If one of the nodes is set to "Load" the film, it will look for ALL the Film files in the same folder (with the same base file name and frame number) and combine them together to create a combined image with all samples from all individual film files.

* Added OpenCV library and added DeNoise options for the exported image files: JPG, PNG, TGA, TIF. This feature is not available for HDR/EXR formats. Three parameters are exposed for the users:
- h(luminance): the higher this is, the more noise reduction you get, but the image can become blurred
- h(chrominance): the higher, the more color noise reduction, but the colors can become blurred
- Mix: this is intended to add (on purpose) part of the noise from the original image into the final denoised image. This is to avoid "banding" artifacts in smooth and noiseless surfaces. Setting for example 0.8 means that 80% of the final result will come from the "denoised" image and 20% will come from the original (noisy) image.

* YafaRay-v3 can be installed "in parallel" with other major versions of YafaRay and coexist with them. "YafaRay v3" will appear as a DIFFERENT renderer and has to be enabled and selected in each scene as if it were a new renderer. This should help to compare the results and features over different major versions as well as allowing using a "stable" and a more "experimental" versions in parallel at the same time. However, support for this is very limited and depends on many factors such as class name clashes, order of registration, dll and library dependency collisions, etc. If having issues, please remove any other yafaray versions and forks and try again.

* Initial support for filepaths with Unicode characters (accents, etc) can be used now for loading textures, etc. See: http://yafaray.org/node/703 This support is still limited and could fail in some cases.

* Secondary File Output: now it will be possible to render into render *and* export to image files at the same time! There are several functions that depend on this now, such as the render parameters badge, which will no longer appear in the Blender render, only in the exported images.

* It's now possible to save the images automatically to the same place where the .blend file resides, into a folder with same name as the blend file and suffix "_render"

* Now the user can use CTRL+C in the console to interrupt a render in progress. This now works in all modes (render into Blender, render to Image files or using yafaray-xml). The interruption due to CTRL+C will now be handled correctly, ensuring the image files and badge are properly saved.

* yafaray-xml: no longer needed to specify the Library path nor the Plugins path. The old Windows Registry requirement has been removed and it's not necessary anymore. Now, yafaray-xml will load the libraries from the same folder where the yafaray-xml executable resides and it will load the plugins from the subfolder "plugins" respect to the folder where the yafaray-xml executable resides

* Removed option -pst in yafaray-xml, now it has to be enabled via parameter in the xml file

* New Logging system
- Title, author, comments can be entered now in the Blender Exporter and will appear in the logs and badge.
- YafaRay compilation information (platform, compiler), Blender information and some System Information will appear automatically in the log for easier support of user problems.
- Console log will show the time of the day, and the duration of the previous event in the log.
- Render log can be exported to a TXT file automatically, which will include the render results and information.
- Render log can be exported to an HTML report automaticall, which will include a link to the rendered image and the render results and information.
- The log verbosity can be selected in the Blender Exporter, to select how much information we want to show in the console or TXT/HTML log (more clear logs when selecting "Info", more details when selecting "Verbose" or "Debug")
- YafaRay-xml added commandline settings for log file output (txt and/or html) and removed old custom string

* Improved Parameters Badge:
- New non-intrusive badge, that is appended to the image. Requires to use "secondary file output" (the badge will no longer appear in Blender due to Blender API limitations that don't allow using a non-intrusive badge when rendering into Blender). See: http://yafaray.org/node/383
- Title, author, etc, can be entered in the Exporter to appear in the badge
- More information, more detailed and clear in the badge. See: http://yafaray.org/node/162 http://yafaray.org/node/224
- New YafaRay icon for the badge, low contrast grayscale.
- Custom icon can be selected to replace the YafaRay icon in the badge.
- Unicode characters can be used now for the badge (accented characters, etc).
- Badge position can be selected: top or bottom (the icon position changes automatically for nicer presentation)
- The amount of details shown in the badge can be selected (show render parameters, AA settings, none or both)
- Show separately render time and photon generation time, plus added total time (including maps generation).

* Added new Render Tile "Centre" (now by default) so the renders start in the centre of the image and expand from there. This should allow a faster view of the to-be render, as typically most objects of interest are in the centre of the image.

* New Dark areas detection type: curve (see http://yafaray.org/node/704)

* New more optimized rendering tile structure, to avoid having to wait for the last 1 or 2 tiles to finish rendering before the next pass/frame starts. Now, the last tiles will be automatically subdivided to reduce the waiting times. See: http://yafaray.org/node/709

* Ability to enable/disable Caustic and/or Diffuse Photons generation in the Photon Map integrator.

* New mirrorX, mirrorY feature for Textures. See: http://yafaray.org/node/227

* More fine-grained Photon Control for light sources. See: http://yafaray.org/node/475

* Ability to automatically save the exported images and logs including the .blend filename and/or current date/time. See: http://yafaray.org/node/331

* Ability to set a per-material raytracing depth, for example to speed up scenes with glass. See: http://yafaray.org/node/494

* Ability to automatically save a preset file with each exported image. The preset can be reused if needed by copying it to the users "home" folder, into the "yafaray_userdata/presets/render/" subfolder

* Fixed the Presets storage and retrieval. They will be saved/loaded in the "home" user folder, inside the subfolder "yafaray_userdata/presets/render/" (will be created automatically if it does not exist). Also, more parameters have been included in the presets now and old parameters were removed.

* Parameter to enable/disable World background shadow casting. Option to control separately World background sky/sun shadow casting.

* Bidirectional integrator declared as "Deprecated" and no longer supported, as explained in http://www.yafaray.org/node/720

* Small optimizations for AA resampling, especially when no more pixels are supposed to be resampled

* Add Volumetric rendering to the Blend material
When using glass or rough glass in the Blend material, volumetric absorption didn't work. I've added the volumetric rendering to the Blend material so glass/rough glass materials render correctly.
However, there is a limitation: if blending two materials with different volumetric options, as I cannot "merge" the volumes, I'm using the volume from the first material for blend amount values [0.0-0.5] and the volume from the second material for blend amount ]0.5-1.0]. This is totally not ideal, but better than before in my opinion.

* Added SmartIBL functionality to reduce noise when using World HDRI textures for lighting. The functionality adds a new parameter "SmartIBL blur" that blurs the World texture used for lighting without affecting the world texture used for reflections, etc. High values can cause slowdowns at render process start. This was requested at http://www.yafaray.org/node/566 and http://www.yafaray.org/node/727

* Added IBL sampling clamp to reduce noise when using World HDRI textures for lighting. In some cases blur is not good enough to remove noise and it causes blurred shadows. IBL clamping would help sometimes to reduce noise so blur is not needed, but it could lead to inexact overall lighting, etc. This was requested at http://www.yafaray.org/node/566 and http://www.yafaray.org/node/727

* Added Texture Color Controls to be able to control the texture brigthness, contrast, saturation, hue, etc, as requested at http://www.yafaray.org/node/334

* Added Texture Color Ramps, to be able to create much more interesting procedural textures, also requested at http://www.yafaray.org/node/334

* Implemented all remaining progressions in the Blend texture (only linear was implemented), requested at http://www.yafaray.org/node/313

Bug fixes in v3.0.0:
--------------------
* Fixed: Soft Spotlight too dark when nearer than 1.0 blender unit from objects. See: http://yafaray.org/node/587

* Fixed: Rough Glass not working in Blend materials. See: http://yafaray.org/node/365

* Fixed: black spots in some cases. See: http://yafaray.org/node/730

* Fixed: bug in border rendering where it was displaced one pixel sometimes. See: http://www.yafaray.org/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5151&start=0

* Clay material default color changed to "real" middle gray. See: http://www.yafaray.org/community/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=5152&start=0#p31497

* Fixed incorrect updating of lamp preview when lamp parameters are modified

* Fix AO Clay pass self shadow problem, reported by RioFranco (Olivier)

* Changes in SWIG code to try to reduce crashes. Not sure if this will solve all problems but I hope this change helps.

* Bidirectional: fix crash when using sky background as only light source

* SPPM progress bar and tags fixed

Assets 7

22 Jul 08:36

DavidBluecame

v3.0.1-beta

2c98149

YafaRay v3.0.1-beta (2016-07-22) for Blender 2.77a: Pre-release