OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 2.58p [OBSOLETE]

[JimStar]

Refractive Software®/Otoy® is proud to announce the availability of a new version of OctaneRender™ for Maya®
The world's fastest and most feature-rich unbiased render engine that integrates completely into Autodesk® Maya®.


Maya® Version Requirements

This release will work with Maya® Versions 2011, 2012 and 2013 / 32-bit & 64-bit on MS Windows operating systems.

Notes regarding features/functionality

OctaneRender™ for Maya® implements almost full functionality of OctaneRender™ standalone inside Maya®. Materials from the Live DB are currently not available.

COMPATIBILITY AND OCTANERENDER STANDALONE REQUIREMENT

To run OctaneRender™ for Maya®, you need to also have an activated OctaneRender™ Standalone copy activated on the machine you wish to install the plugin onto.
You cannot purchase and use only the Maya plugin and use it without also owning an activated copy of OctaneRender™ Standalone on your machine.


HOW TO PURCHASE LICENSES

Go to our online shop here: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/shop/

If you do not own an OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition License yet:
You can purchase both the OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition and the OctaneRender™ for Maya® Edition as a reduced price bundle, purchase the bundle priced at 179€

If you already own one or more OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition licenses you want to pair the plugin with:
Purchase an "OctaneRender™ for Maya® Beta License" priced at 99€

You can also purchase a 3, 5 or 10 pack of OctaneRender™ for Maya® licenses,
just like OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition packs.


OCTANELIVE

Just like OctaneRender™ Standalone, the Maya® plugin product also needs an additional OctaneLive license and be activated on a machine.
This has to be done in the plugin interface panel in Maya, and is covered in the included PDF manual.
It can only be done after an OctaneRender™ Standalone license is already activated on the machine in question.


BUG FIXES SINCE LAST RELEASE:

• Fixed batch render file naming bug (when name#.ext naming scheme was choosen).
• Escape key now works in standard render mode.
• Fixed the RederView bug when the current default camera was not changed after previous render.
• Few minor bug fixes and improvements...

NEW FEATURES SINCE LAST RELEASE:

• Added Octane SunSky and Light nodes support to Viewport 2.0.
• Added "Show batch render" feature to batch render mode.

DOWNLOAD

Next version HERE.


Yours,
The OctaneRender™ Team.

[ZLOy]

Hello, is it possible to add support subdivision mode? I mean If you want to see how the model will look smoother - you can press key "3" (subdivisions mode-viewport feature) and when i render models in Mental Ray and VRay they continue to be smoothed aftrer render in framebufer. This mode is very useful. But Octane does not support it.

[JimStar]

Hello, is it possible to add support subdivision mode? I mean If you want to see how the model will look smoother - you can press key "3" (subdivisions mode-viewport feature) and when i render models in Mental Ray and Vray they continue to be smoothed. This mode is very useful. Butoctane does not support it.

It was already discussed in previous threads...
In short - Maya has no standard API means to get the smoothed data of object elegant way. Only by smoothing the objects right in the scene before the render and "unsmoothing" after render (otherwise the info about poligon-shader binding will be lost). It is the ugly way, I don't want to do it this way, ideally the render process must not change the scene objects.
And doing it the "right way" not only will take a lot of work (writing the redundant code that doubles Maya's "hidden" smoothing), but in addition it crashes all "plugin-engine" ideology: as smoothing the meshes must be the engine's work, not plugin's, this engine behaviour must be identically realised through API to all plugins that use it, to have the same smoothing behaviour in all Octane plugins... Instead of each plugin developer will have its own bunch of code that smoothes the meshes its own way... E.g. - Arion engine has such smoothing behaviour, so its plugins just use it giving the mesh (with bound materials) and its "smooth factor" to engine...
So, this problem is not only the coding itself, I should first to discuss it with Otoy - where must reside this smoothing code, in the engine or in plugins... If Otoy will decide that it must be the plugin's responsibility - I will add this code to plugin itself. I already wrote, that I will surely add smoothing one or the other way, just after all other, more needed things will be done... I think that you do need the instances support?..

[face]

I don´t know, but either Softimage use the same subdivision methode as MentalRay or MentalRay can´t render a subdivision level.
I say this because i can choose the subdivision level for every geometry and get the subdivided vertexes, triangles, faces and uv´s.
But maybe a Softimage gizmo

face

[JimStar]

I say this because i can choose the subdivision level for every geometry and get the subdivided vertexes, triangles, faces and uv´s.

If in addition to vertexes, triangles, faces and uv´s you get the shader-face binding info of the smoothed geometry - I can say that Softimage programmers did their job the right way. Not the case of Maya. Maya has a weird subdivision API capabilities, it seems that it is simply not completed yet...

[RickToxik]

Thank you JimStar.

I can't see where to access the added "Show batch render" feature, can you help please?

[RickToxik]

you can press key "3" (subdivisions mode-viewport feature) and when i render models in Mental Ray and VRay they continue to be smoothed

You probably know that, but you can /Modify/Convert/Smooth Mesh Preview to Polygons

The advantage I found is that in some cases it renders faster than the subdivision mode ("3"), but you can't come back to the basic mesh, unless you have history I guess.

[JimStar]

Thank you JimStar.

I can't see where to access the added "Show batch render" feature, can you help please?

In the standard place, in the render menu, near the "Batch render" and "Cancel batch render" items.

[ZLOy]

You probably know that, but you can /Modify/Convert/Smooth Mesh Preview to Polygons

The advantage I found is that in some cases it renders faster than the subdivision mode ("3"), but you can't come back to the basic mesh, unless you have history I guess.

I know about it, but this modification increases the number of polygons and viewport are slows - its very difficult to work with the scene.

[doctorpangloss]

I've built among the only binaries for the OpenSubdiv Maya viewport 2.0 primitive. It's a pure CUDA subdivision engine that's super fast, and there's already code for quickly getting geometry out of the Maya API.

Please email me—I'd love to give you an overview for subdivision with creases fast in Octane.

p.s. thanks for implementing ESC key