This is not meant to be a complaint, but more of a current state of affairs report:
Unfortunately, my progress from here on out is nearly halted until this update comes out. Of course, I'm still going to use it to dial in my current work.
Bugs:
I have a few new tests I've been trying to run using water specularity, but it always crashes on resolutions at or above 640x480.
I also have some images that are affected by the displacement shadow bug. Hopefully this update will resolve or atleast minimize this.
Node network "movements" eventually cause a crash, though this can be dealt with since it still allows a save of the .tgd
The application crashes if image projection is used and then the camera is moved around in the scene.
Product Functionality improvements:
multicore support - this is one of the most important improvements needed in my book, especially since the renderer is not optimized for speed yet. Having to render individual crops on 4 separate cores is a pain in the rear, and the GI bug means I have to "overlap", else have visible bands in the image. The overlapped areas are wasted render areas (aka wasted time). I found that a good overlap is 12%, and on 4 cores, that means 4 areas of 12% overlap, so 48% is wasted. This is still better than rendering with 1 core, but still, its a bummer.
shader transparency - definitely looking forward to this increase of functionality
fractal preview window - this will be very valuable for sure.
better renderer - possibly improved for speed and shadow/GI accuracy. I know this is being worked.
Final thoughts: With these bug fixes, the application will be untouchable... but until then, its almost a show stopper. If you look at the public galleries, there really aren't many high res images generated by TG2 yet, since the rendertimes are just so long. I know of one incredible artist who gave up on TG2 and went back to TG1 due to this.
Additionally, I think the paying user community could really use frequent micro-updates, rather than less frequent larger updates. This makes the application more useable. If this is not possible, atleast more communications on progress of the application, with samples. I want to see how water transparency will look, and/or comparison images between the old and new renderer, even if just to pique our curiosities!