Owlet 1.8 (beta)
17 Jul 2019
This is a beta version of Owlet 1.8 showing a very promising feature and we need your feedback on it. It also fixes some problems you reported, so the update is definitely worth trying. Although it is beta, the software is stable enough for production work.
The New Feature
Although path tracing provides very realistic images, the rendering time is usually not that perfect. The time is needed to settle down the noise that is caused by the path tracing algorithm. It’s like the noise you get on low-light photos and as with photos there are methods to fight the noise. This update adds one.
Yes, we’ve added de-noiser to Owlet. It is quite experimental, so it is disabled for production rendering by default, but you can easily enable it in the rendering window just before you start the process. It is enabled in preview, so you can see it works right after the preview settles down a bit.
The algorithm we use is a post-processing one, so you see the noisy image during the rendering and then it gets updated at the end. If you save to multi-channel formats, you get both noisy and de-noised versions of the image.
Give it a try and let us know if it works for you.
Other Changes
This update also fixes some problems that you reported:
- shadows over transparent background are black again;
- better translucent medium rendering on transparent background;
- transition animation camera issues fixed;
- materials library improved;
- scene tree got “search” field as in Koru;
- recent documents list is now longer and more convenient;
- GPU compatibility improved on Windows.
If you have any issues with shadows or noise in the current version of Owlet, there is a good chance that this update will sort them out.
We Need Your Feedback
As with other apps, we’re slowly switching to the multi-steps release scheme. We first release a couple of beta versions, then a stable one. To make sure that the stable one is really stable we need your feedback on the beta versions.
Cheers!