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alShaders / Release Notes

alShaders 0.3.3 – 2013/09/06

Features
New shaders
Bug fixes

- (alLayer) Fixed a bug where AOVs were layered incorrectly when the connected surface shaders wrote to different AOVs.

- (alLayer) Fixed the SPDL to stop warning messages when rendering in SItoA

Optimizations
Miscellaneous changes

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alShaders 0.3.1 – 2013/07/18

Features
New shaders
Bug fixes

- (alLayer) Fixed a crash bug where having multiple instances of alLayer or using IPR would trigger an assertion failure.

Optimizations
Miscellaneous changes

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alShaders 0.3.0 – 2013/07/10

Features

- (alSurface) Added support for indirect light groups. This extends the light groups feature to track not only direct light but indirect light as well for diffuse, specular and transmission paths (note that subsurface scattering does not support this feature). The overhead of enabling this feature is very small in my tests (roughly 1%), but if it causes issues you can disable it by unchecking the “Indirect light groups” box in the AOVs section at the bottom of the shader.

- (alSurface, alLayer) Added support for rerouting AOVs to user-defined names, as well as outputting to standard-shader-compatible AOVs only. When the latter is enabled outputs outputs will be summed to produce the standard AOVs: diffuse contains diffuse and backlight, specular contains specular_1 and specular_2 and refraction contains refraction and single_scatter.

- (alSurface) Added support for backlight similar to the standard shader.

- (alSurface) Switched to support the new varying diffuse and specular strength light parameters.

- (alSurface) Added support for MtoA’s matte parameters

- (alInputVector) Added selection for more vectors from the shader globals

New shaders

- alColorSpace – A node for converting sRGB (as opposed to gamma2.2) and log images to linear for use in rendering

- alGaborNoise – An implementation of Gabor noise cribbed from OSL.

- alFlowNoise – Stefan Gustavson’s implementation ported to Arnold.

Bug fixes

- (alSurface) Fixed incorrect handling of internal reflection paths that gave incorrect results when rendering transmissive objects. The new code produces much better results, but unfortunately is also slower due to the fact that it’s tracing more rays. You can speed it up by unchecking “Enable internal reflections” in the Transmission>Advanced section to ignore these paths.

- (alSurface) Fixed handling of roughness down glossy->glossy reflection paths to be similar to the standard shader. Glossy->glossy reflections should now exhibit less noise, at the cost of some softening of the reflections.

- (alSurface) Fixed indirect diffuse crashing and producing NaNs in some circumstances

- (alSurface, alLayer) Fixed AOVs not appearing in MtoA’s AOV manager

- (alHair) Fixed incorrect shader declaration causing the shader to be insanely slow when using geo_opacity

- (alPhotometric) Fixed the shader not appearing in a light’s filters menu

- Fixed a couple of crashes from badly declared enums

Optimizations
Miscellaneous changes

- Added a test suite for regression testing. To run the test suite build and install the shaders to somewhere Arnold can find them, then run “python test.py” from the source directory. The test script will create a test/output/$VERSION directory in which you will find output exrs, logs and a table of render times for each test.

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alShaders 0.2.1 – 2013/02/11

alShaders-src-0.2.1
alShaders-osx-0.2.1

Features

- (alSurface) Enforced energy conservation between all reflection layers and between transmission and diffuse

- (alSurface) Specular layers now take a Normal parameter (in the Advanced section) that allows you to override the normal used for specular calculation. This can be useful for adding a smooth layer over a rough base (by using Ns from an alInputVector node)

- (alInputVector) Added selection for more vectors from the shader globals

Bug fixes

- (alHair) Removed horribly broken fresnel code

Optimizations
Miscellaneous changes

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alShaders 0.2.0 – 2013/02/08

alShaders-src-0.2.0
alShaders-osx-0.2.0

Features

- New shader: alHair. An WIP implementation of ISHair by Ou et. al.
- New shader: alInputVector. A utility node to get arbitrary vectors, transform them by a given matrix and feed them into a shader network

Bug fixes

- (alSurface) Clamped ior values to avoid NaNs when ior==1

Optimizations
Miscellaneous changes

- (alSurface) reorganized parameter layout to make it more logical

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alShaders 0.1.1 – 2013/01/21

alShaders-src-0.1.1
alShaders-osx-0.1.1

Features
Bug fixes

- (alRemap) Fixed a problem with the implementation of bias and gain

- (alRemap) Fixed a UI bug causing the contrast control not to show up

- (alPhotometric) Fixed UI bug with multiple alPhotometric nodes in the scene where only the first would update when changing the IES file

Optimizations
Miscellaneous changes

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Updated