Support Arnold 5.1.0.0

[caron]

Lots of new stuff to support...

https://support.solidangle.com/display/A5ARP/5.1.0.0

First ticket to start tracking these changes.

[JenusL]

That is indeed a lot of new stuff. Awesome! New MtoA is just released as well with a major version bump to v3.0.0. I hope I'll have some time to dig in to this soon.

[JenusL]

I started with this yesterday and you can follow along here: JenusL/sitoa/devel

[kikou]

Nice! Please break you changes down in smaller chunks and create pull requests that we can easily review and accept.

[JenusL]

@kikou I'm trying to :)

[JenusL]

So I've made a start with PR #4 #5 and #6. This passes the testsuite so it should be safe to use. However, right now there are three warnings when you render.

// WARNING : [arnold] unable to load dynamic library <my_local_git_path>\Softimage_2015_SP2\Addons\SItoA\Application\Plugins\bin\nt-x86-64\optix_denoiser.dll: The specified module could not be found.  
//  
// WARNING : [arnold] cannot declare constant FLOAT frame on options - name already in use  
// WARNING : [arnold] cannot declare constant FLOAT fps on options - name already in use

The first one I have to investigate... The path is right so it's something else. The other two has to be related to this new feature:

Frame and fps global options: current frame and frames per second attributes have been added to options as options.frame and options.fps. This information will also be exported to rendered images as EXR metadata. (#6474)

So that's what I will do next and also focus on the other new render options like adaptive aa.

[JenusL]

So I just put up #7 which fixes the frame and fps warning and adds some new features including Adaptive AA. I don't get why the optix_denoiser.dll warning exists because the DLL is in the correct folder. Will open a Issue about that. With PR 4, 5, 6 and 7 I consider the main work for Arnold 5.1.0 done. Now it's just adding new features as we see fit.

[JenusL]

So with 5.1.0.0 "support" done.... What new features should be added? What's realistic to pull of? I know AOV Shaders have already been discussed on mailing list and there's a ticket in the trac so that should be pretty easy to add. Would be nice if more people would chime in and create issues of features they would like to be added.

[sjannuz]

Right, AOV shaders were the main request. The consensus seemed to be to abuse the output shaders port. For denoising, I would wait a few weeks, to see if core simplifies the workflows. Biggest things missing are the alembic procedural and the operators, the latter needing some thinking.

[JenusL]

Yeah I haven't dug in to the Operators yet but I'm guessing it'll be some work. OSL comes in at the top of my personal requests list as well and that will probably need some work as well. Is the new Render Control API required for any of the new features like Progressive or Optix Denoiser or could those be implemented with the old AiRender()?

[sjannuz]

The render control API should not conflict with any of the other features. However, for now we have not included it in the other plugins, mostly for not having had the time to test it thoroughly.

[JenusL]

I created separate tickets for Arnold 5.1 features that hasn't been worked on yet. So I think we can close this one now.

[caron]

Closing issue so we can track 5.1 and 5.2 features one by one