OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.03c [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.


This is the "quick-fix" version.

BUG FIXES SINCE LAST RELEASE:

• Fixed Info-Channel kernel settings issue.
• Made the workaround that eliminates the "more than 8192 particles = broken shaders" bug in almost all cases. "Almost" - is for cases where you will use the pseudo-random shaders (Octane Virtual Materials) with more than 8191 particles having more than 7 materials in object - which may lead to more than 8191 combinations of shaders in the shader-set of particle-object. In this case this bug will be still there... But this workaround at least allows you use big partile-systems if not randomly-shaded with more than 7 materials in object, before this bug will be fixed completely...
• As a sideeffect of previous workaround - the particles compilation speed was increased even more.

DOWNLOAD

Next version HERE.


Yours,
The OctaneRender™ Team.

[TBFX]

As a sideeffect of previous workaround - the particles compilation speed was increased even more.

Yeah, by a factor of four! Awesome! and once I switched my ground geo and light back to common mesh I got another almost 3x loading speedup! 41000 trees, 2 varieties loaded and rendering in 2min 20sec!!!!!

Everything else is working as stated above and with your shader bug workaround I'll be able to complete my shots now without waiting for the engine fix.

JimStar, you ARE a star!

T.

[JimStar]

Everything else is working as stated above and with your shader bug workaround I'll be able to complete my shots now without waiting for the engine fix.

It is still not known what for bug it is... Not the fact that it is necessarily engine bug, just seems like this... But it may be some plugin bug too... The investigation still continues...

[TBFX]

It is still not known what for bug it is... Not the fact that it is necessarily engine bug, just seems like this... But it may be some plugin bug too... The investigation still continues...

Someone on the 3dsMAX plugin thread was having a very similar problem with shaders and instances.
Thanks for the workaround anyway.

T.

[MTECH]

JimStar, thanks for all of your great work and speed for getting this plug-in so functional so quickly!

Today is my first time trying out any of the 3.xx versions, as I was mid-project earlier and didn't want to change anything. I have a scene I've been waiting to render for a long time since it contains 5.5 million polys worth of instanced pennies via particles. While the scene successfully renders and looks exactly as hoped, I noticed it takes a looooong time from hitting the IPR icon until the renderview begins showing Octane samples. Furthermore, there is only one non-instanced penny on the screen, and one hidden as a template for the several thousand instances - in this case GPU memory usage should be at a minimum, should it not? Unfortunately I'm getting over 1gb of RAM used out of my 1.25GB GTX 470.

The samples per second are surprisingly fast once I get past that initial loading period, so kudos to that.

Please let me know if this is something already noted, or if I'm a rare case here. (and if you need additional info I'm happy to share). Thanks!

p.s. Using Maya 2013 x64 on Windows 7, Octane for Maya beta 3.03c

[jmfowler]

yeah - I too have a problem in that it takes hours for a scene to start IPR rendering when using a heavy mesh that is instanced - in my case only about 50 times, but its heavy.

something is definitely wrong - because after i see the system ram drop ( which usually is when it starts rendering ) it then sits on 0-1% cpu and lower system ram for AGES doing nothing, then eventually it starts...( in my full scene it took hours to start and was only using 3.4gb v.ram on 4gb 680's )

I'll try and prepare the scene with just the necessary geometry etc. and send jimstar a private message.

[TBFX]

something is definitely wrong - because after i see the system ram drop ( which usually is when it starts rendering ) it then sits on 0-1% cpu and lower system ram for AGES doing nothing, then eventually it starts...( in my full scene it took hours to start and was only using 3.4gb v.ram on 4gb 680's )

Is your system ram reaching capacity during load/voxelization? It sounds as though you are encountering swap during the load. My current scene is pushing my system ram quite high so if I have anything else running that soaks up a bit of ram I can go from a 3 minute load time for 40000+ trees and a fair amount of static geo to 15-20 min if it starts to swap.

T.

[RayTracey]

Hi Jim,

the real-time movable proxies are very exciting (using the Maya plug-in is really fun now), although I found that it doesn't seem to work for every mesh. For example, the wheel of the firetruck in the video below is set as movable proxy but doesn't move in the Octane viewport like the other parts, requiring manual updating:



Also when scrolling through an animation, the movable proxies don't budge, at least not in real-time. Nevertheless great work.

[jmfowler]

something is definitely wrong - because after i see the system ram drop ( which usually is when it starts rendering ) it then sits on 0-1% cpu and lower system ram for AGES doing nothing, then eventually it starts...( in my full scene it took hours to start and was only using 3.4gb v.ram on 4gb 680's )

Is your system ram reaching capacity during load/voxelization? It sounds as though you are encountering swap during the load. My current scene is pushing my system ram quite high so if I have anything else running that soaks up a bit of ram I can go from a 3 minute load time for 40000+ trees and a fair amount of static geo to 15-20 min if it starts to swap.

T.

the problem seems more complex than I originally realized - instancing is not working for me - after some tests I have found my v.ram has been increasing with each 'instance' copy and so has the vox time. I have certainly encountered a slowdown with max'd ram but in my tests I've discovered that octane appears to be treating instances on a particular object set as normal copies.... will do more tests - if I cant find the prob - I'll msg the file to jimstar.

UPDATE - I can't get instancing to work on any objects full stop???

maya 2013 64 bit. The objects all behave as instances inside maya but octane is treating them like normal objects - just tested a poly sphere - then 897 instance copies - and time and v.ram went through the roof??? ( didn't reach max system ram )

[TBFX]

Are you manually instancing them? Have you checked that the shape node has movable proxy on? Everything working great on my system?

T.