Support for Blender 2.92 in early access... and happy new year :)
A very warm well wishing to you all reading this. Its now 2021 and hoping its going to be a much better year than last, or at least break even.
First on the agenda for Crowdrender this year is making sure we keep up with Blender which is currently racing ahead with its development at quite a pace. Blender 2.92 is in beta as of today! We too have not been idle and we've just made available to our supporters an early release of V0.2.10 which has a fix for a problem that prevents our addon from working with Blender 2.92 alpha.
We expect that V0.2.10 will be released in a couple of weeks where it will be available to anyone supporting our development fund until a certain level of funding is reached at which point it will be made freely available, if you hadn't caught our last post we just released V0.2.6 to the community on reaching our first such goal about 48 hours before 2021 began :)
More Passes
V0.2.10 now also supports Cycle's debug passes and AOV passes, which is cool. If you've not used either before here's a quick rundown on what you can do with them.
Debug passes
Available as "Render Time" and "Sample Count", these debug passes show how long each render tile took to render, and how many samples each pixel received. The images below show both of these (render time on top or left, samples per pixel below or right) for a distributed render using two machines in V0.2.10 of Crowdrender.
For render time, the image shows render tiles and the brightness indicates how long a single sample takes for the sampled pixels in that tile, not sure what algorithm is used to arrive at the brightness value, but it might be a simple average.
AOV passes
Exclusive to cycles, these allow you to output arbitrary values from your shader and have them available as regular passes in your final images. You can then use them for compositing. Might be handy for outputting custom normals, height values and so on.
I made a quick couple of AOV passes from the noise texture and from the layer weight nodes of the shader for the car's body. In the image below you can see the pass for the noise texture on the car, something that you normally can't export because it is a colour, though I suppose you could just put the texture into an emission shader and you'd have the same result. However, you can have as many of these custom passes as you like for use in other packages or in Blender's compositor.
Another example of the AOV passes, this time I exported the result of the layer weight node and I guess this could be used for replacing the image being reflected in the paint? In any case, its another example of data that you can now export from the shader at render time and make use of. If this is useful or exciting in anyway, please, give us a comment below!
Well that about wraps up the intro for V0.2.10. Now for the schilling :)
If you'd like to stay up to date with what we're developing, you can subscribe, simply sign up here, you'll be able to download our free version of Crowdrender too :) -> signup or download
If you'd like to support our project you can make a one off or monthly donation and get some perks as well :)
Wishing you all the best for 2021!
Chao :)
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