New Brigade path-tracing kernel due in OctaneRender 2022.1 RC1 Advantages over the existing Volume medium include better handling of black body emission, and better control of the colour of light scattered by the volume, and of objects seen through it. Again, it “provides a familiar interface” for anyone used to Arnold’s Standard Volume, and offers finer control than the existing OctaneRender Volume medium, including the option to use texture maps with most inputs. OctaneRender 2022 XB1 also introduces a new Standard Volume shader for volumetric effects like clouds. New Standard Volume shader similar to that in Arnold The anisotropic reflection channel in the specular and coating layers of the new material also accepts texture maps as inputs, and subsurface scattering is now defined by two separate layers rather than one. Otoy has also updated the way that individual layers are implemented compared to OctaneRender’s existing Universal Material, including an Oren-Nayar BRDF to represent diffuse roughness more accurately. Using the new ubermaterial for shading should ensure greater visual parity between output from OctaneRender and other renderers that support the specification, like Arnold. Other changes include a layered Standard Surface material based on the Autodesk Standard Surface spec. You can see side-by-side comparison images with OctaneRender’s existing PMC and path tracing kernels in this forum thread. The new kernel uses a “novel combination of GPU photon mapping and path guiding” to generate sharp, non-noisy caustics even at very low sample counts. New features in OctaneRender 2022.1 include a new photon tracing kernel, which Otoy describes as making rendering caustics “about 1000x faster ” than the previous implementation. New photon tracing kernel makes rendering caustics ‘nearly free’

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