Miscellaneous Changes

• Added more mitigation against corruption in denoised images when there are NaNs in the albedo variance channel

• A new attribute, "displacement" "ignorereferenceinstance" has been added. It takes the value 0|1 and is off by default. If set to 1, displacement shading will ignore the  referenceinstance; this may be useful for eliminating any instance-related variability in displacement shading
  

• Add basic scene graph translation stats to "Expert View > Plugins"
• Add primvar buffer (scene translation) stats to "Expert View > Memory"
• Added new "objectdistance" dicing strategy that is guaranteed to be stable across all geometry instances. This dicing strategy dices to a object space distance length set by dice:worlddistancelength
• Improved threading behavior of light selection setup
• Remove unused master attribute "trace:samplemotion", we suspect you want true raytraced motion blur everywhere by now
• The texture3d() OSL function has been implemented.  It can read 3D texture data from point cloud files, organized point cloud files, and brick map files. The return type can be float or color.  (The OSL function resembles the old RenderMan RSL texture3d() function.)
• Improved performance of light selection setup in scenes with many thousands of lights and light linking
• On Windows (only) the default number of textures that can be opened is changed, which can result in dramatic speed ups for scenes with thousands of textures. The rendermn.ini setting /prman/textures/maxfiles is no longer ignored on Windows. On Windows the default is now 2048 (was 512) which is the same as the maximum allowed on Windows
• Added a new option to reduce the amount of memory used by the raytracer: Option "trace" "float bvhcompression" [0] // values in the range [0, 1] When enabled, you can reduce the memory being used by the scene for raytracing at the expense of render speed as you may lose efficiency at higher compression levels but allow you to render in the physical memory available
  • Not all primitives are affected by this control, here is what this will operate on:
    - polygons / pretessellated subdivs
    - curves
    - points
• Significant memory reduction of curves geometry, the improvement is more pronounced for cubic b-spline and catmull-rom basis. This may cause a very small look difference if examining close individual strands
• Reduced OSL compile times
• Images rendered with more than 4K samples per pixel will have less noise than before
• The time to first pixel for dense subdivision meshes with watertight dicing has been improved
• Max resident memory reporting on Linux has been improved
• Peak memory consumption for dense subdivision surfaces partitioned into many facesets has been greatly reduced
• Checkpoints are now written to .part files during checkpointing and only replace the prior checkpoint once all of them have been successfully written
• Memory statistics tracking for scenes with huge numbers of instanced objects has been significantly improved
• OSL shading sytem optimization levels have been adjusted for better performance out-of-the-box

Fixes

• Fixed a bug where editing a geometry master instanced inside a group would yield a crash

• The normal N on brickmap gprims has been fixed
• Addressed a bug with checkpointing that could corrupt tiled openexr file output
• Fix incorrect transformations for geometric lights
• Bug fix in "it" that would lead to a crash if you opened a image file from disk while the A.I. denoiser was enabled
• Fixed bug in PxrRemap pattern where uninitialized values are retruned when the value of inputMin and inputMax are equal
• A problem with facevarying interpolation near semi-sharp geometric creases on subdivision meshes which could lead to swimming textures has been fixed
• Fixed a bug that could lead to incorrect transformations when using named coordinate systems during cached presence and opacity calculations
• The peak memory consumed by the ray accelerator is now correctly counted
• A small memory leak incurred by the ObjectInstance RI call has been fixed. Besides plugging this leak, the memory consumption per instance has also been reduced slightly
• Fixed a bug that could cause checkpoint recovery to fail when the "origin" Display parameter is used