Thursday, July 14, 2011

Release 0.8.2, Blendernation article, ...

Yesterday, I released 0.8.2. Unfortunately, I just found some bugs 
I'm currently fixing, so this release will be short lived. 


New things include:


- New expression editor for GenerateX, ColorX, ... 
- Updated most third party dependencies.
- The Resize node is now faster, has better quality,  and had a number of  bugs fixed.
- PySide is now bundled with Ramen.


- CUDA is detected and initialized at startup if you have a suitable GPU.
If you have an ATI card, Ramen should still work ok, but I can't really test 
it. Can anyone confirm it?


- Bug fixes and other general small improvements.


Ramen was featured in Blendernation this week. It was completely unexpected.
The response was amazing. We had 8000+ pageviews and almost 500 
downloads in just two days. Probably, a better website is needed for the project.


I'd like to thank the people at Blendernation for writting the article and all of you 
who expressed interest in the project.


And finally, a preview of what's coming next:
I've been working on adding better resampling filters. You can see 
the current results in the screenshot:




The example is a bit extreme, and jpeg compression does not help, but it's a big 
improvement.

9 comments:

  1. just trying it. look promising.
    how can i darken the UI like your screen shot above? now it's white so I cound't see the lines connecting nodes.
    anyway, keep up good work!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for trying.
    Now the program uses the global Qt configuration.
    To change it, open a terminal and run qtconfig.

    I'll see if I can improve this for the next release.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I tried the OFX (Blender defocus) plugins with an earlier version. Is support for these planned for the future?

    If not what alternative is available? I can't figure out how to apply Z-Depth matte as a blur mask.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I will add support for OFX plugins again in the future, but I'm not going to support or distribute the blender defocus plugin because of licensing incompatibilities.

    For now, there's no alternative. When OpenEXR 2.0 is out, with support for deep images, I'll try to support it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. ok, cool. Thanks for the information.

    ReplyDelete
  6. I've just started using Ramen, but already I'm thinking of testing it in my visual effects pipeline. Even though it's not at a 1.0 release it beats the crap out of AE's as far ease of use goes (In time I'll see what the capabilities are like, having had time to fully test them all yet)

    Is there a good place to post bugs?

    Thanks,

    Dan.

    P.s. I noticed during testing that multi-layer EXR images with multiple render layers don't open correctly in Ramen. It displays the beauty pass, but all other passes are either black screens or the beauty pass. I believe Blender uses the EXR format a little different to something like Nuke, would there be a possibility of solving an issue like this with a specific image import function to import Blender EXR images. I could see Blender + Ramen as a solid pipeline for a lot of artists, so having this capability would be a great benefit.

    Once again, thank you for taken the time to develop and release this piece of software! :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. A quick question if anyone knows, how do I actually render out a sequence of images.

    I create an output node, the range is set from 1 to 100 but it only ever outputs one image.

    Is this not implemented yet or am I doing something wrong? :/

    ReplyDelete
  8. You can post bug reports to the google group or my email.

    I tested multilayer exr support with OpenEXR's example images and other images generated with Mental Ray and 3Delight. It works correctly for all the images I have.

    As far as I know, Blender writes incorrect OpenEXR multilayer images. It used to write them upside down and with non standard layer names.
    The import multilayer exr command expects standard layer names and maybe it fails in your case. It's still possible to manually open them in Ramen and correct them with a flip node.

    To render image sequences, in the output node's filename add a %d where you want the frame number, for example: my_seq.%d.exr

    ReplyDelete