KtoA 4.2.3 now available!

[Stephen.Blair]

Installation

• Download the Arnold for Katana plugin
• Follow these installation instructions

Katana 4.5 and 5.0 compatibility

Katana 4.5v3 and 5.0v3 introduced a change that affects the Arnold USD plugins support in Katana. This release of KtoA supports those Katana versions or newer within their release series. Katana 4.5v1, 4.5v2, 5.0v1, and 5.0v2 are not supported by this KtoA release.

Enhancements

• Global light Sampling support on GPU: Global Light Sampling (GLS) is now available with GPU rendering. Many scenes with moderate to large number of lights render 2-6x faster with GLS. Scenes that do not benefit from GLS tend to be a few percent faster or slower. See the GLS documentation for important information on the optimal number of light samples to use with GPU. (ARNOLD-13109)

	Speedup over 7.2.2 GPU version using 1 light sample
City (100000 lights)	Classical interior (80 lights)	Automotive studio (9 lights)
48x speedup	2x speedup	2.6x speedup

• Multi-channel render outputs: You can now render multi-channel EXRs and TIFFs by selecting more than one output channel in RenderOutputDefine nodes. Note that for preview and live renders only the first output channel is shown in the monitor for the render output, but for disk renders all output channels are rendered in the same file. (KTOA-898)
• Multiple shader outputs improved support:
  • state_float, state_int, state_vector now have multiple outputs: The state_* shaders now have multiple outputs, so you can use a single state shader with multiple output connections in a shading network. (KTOA-894)
  • Traditional out port: Shaders that have multiple output ports but also have the traditional "out" port will show both. (KTOA-905)
  • ArnoldIn and UsdIn import of multiple outputs: Both import nodes properly handle shaders connected to others with multiple outputs. It is still required that the root shader of a network provides the traditional "out" port, however. (KTOA-905)
• Pixel probe picking mode for instances: By default, picking an instance in the monitor now picks the instance location instead of the instance master location. You can go back to the old behavior using the new ArnoldGlobalSettings > Debug Settings > Picking option. (KTOA-886)
• Disable GUI for analytics and error reporting in batch mode: KtoA now explicitly disables any dialog boxes that could have popped up when Katana was running in batch, shell, or script mode. (KTOA-897)
• Return direction and distance to nearest hit in distance shader: Arnold 7.2.3 adds out_distance and out_direction output parameters to the distance shader, which return the direction and distance to the nearest surface, respectively. The shader still returns the color-mapped result by default, which is now available as the out_rgb parameter. (ARNOLD-13473)

distance shading effect

Tutorial - Building facade fire damage

Tutorial - Eye makeup shading effect

• state_float, state_int, state_vector multiple outputs: The shading state shaders now have multiple outputs, so you can use a single state shader with multiple output connections in a shading network. (ARNOLD-13579)

USD Enhancements

• Support vertex UV coordinates on Curves in the render delegate usd#1435
• Curves without width should render with a default value usd#1579

API Additions

• AiProceduralExpand: A new API AiProceduralExpand expands on demand the contents of a procedural (such as a 'usd', 'alembic', or 'procedural' node), as it would happen in a regular render. You can use this to force the creation of procedural child nodes before the rendering starts, and to avoid race conditions when the procedurals are not thread safe. (ARNOLD-7067)

Bug Fixes

• KTOA-880 - Curves that render in Solaris do not render in Katana

• KTOA-881 - UsdIn sets output ports incorrectly

• KTOA-883 - Vertex ordering differs between UsdIn and ArnoldIn

• KTOA-884 - Invalid warning about live render differing shaders

• KTOA-886 - Pixel probe in monitor does not pick instances

• KTOA-887 - Vertex scope and uniform int user-data on curves not handled correctly

• KTOA-890 - UsdIn enum shader parameters sometimes wrong type and value

• KTOA-893 - Subdiv type not set correctly from UsdIn

• KTOA-896 - Subdivision type set to invalid value from UsdIn

• KTOA-909 - UsdIn arnold-specific subdiv type and other object settings erroneously overridden by mesh subdivision scheme

• ARNOLD-10643 - FIS no longer forces a box filter

• ARNOLD-12917 - Viewport API uses incorrect motion blur reference time

• ARNOLD-13645 - Instancer crash if a single node is instanced but set to null

• ARNOLD-13678 - Holes in alpha channel when opacity is almost 1

• ARNOLD-13741 - Log messages missing colors

• ARNOLD-13770 - Name scope clashes with nested procedurals

• ARNOLD-13776 - NaNs when using global light sampling with low-light-threshold

• ARNOLD-13789 - Corrupted tiff output if skip_alpha and unpremult_alpha are both enabled

• ARNOLD-13908 - Windows and macOS license failures with single-user and network Arnold licenses

• usd#1538 - Fix triplanar in USD MaterialX

System Requirements

• Windows 10 or later, with the Visual Studio 2019 redistributable.
• Linux with at least glibc 2.17 and libstdc++ 4.8.5 (gcc 4.8.5). This is equivalent to RHEL/CentOS 7.
• x86-64 CPUs need to support the SSE4.1 instruction set.
• GPU rendering works on Windows and Linux only and requires an NVIDIA GPU of the Ampere, Turing, Volta, Pascal, or Maxwell architecture. We recommend using the 525.89 or higher drivers on Linux and 528.49, or higher on Windows. See Arnold GPU for more information.
• For GPU rendering, the cache also needs to be re-populated after installing a new Arnold version, updating to a new NVIDIA driver, or changing the hardware configuration of GPUs on the system. More information can be found here.
• OptiX™ denoiser requires an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA™ Compute Capability 5.0 and above.
• Katana Katana 4.0v1 or newer, Katana 4.5v3 or newer, Katana 5.0v3 or newer, or Katana 6.0v1 or newer.