Hi Everyone,

We at Otoy have been holding our horses from stampeding up the track, but now it is definitely time again to let one go and we are proud to publicly announce the development of OctaneRender for Daz Studio. The collaborative integrated plugins projects is moving forward and has resulted in the successful integration of the OctaneRender engine into Daz 3D Daz Studio using the SDKs of OctaneRender and Daz Studio.

With this plugin, users will have a faster workflow through modelling scenes and animating in the Daz Studio environment whilst firing up a render pipeline that allows interactive editing resulting in fast final animation rendering output. Daz Studio aficionados will be able to fine-tune and animate all parameters and see instantaneous rendering results by OctaneRender, all this from inside Daz Studio.

This is the fourth of a new series of fully integrated plugin solutions, embedding the OctaneRender GPU-based rendering engine directly into major 3d Modelling applications.

Here are the FAQs regarding compatibility, licensing, and features.

The Integrated Daz Studio Plugin is compatible to the current Daz Studio Version 4.5, and immediate two previous versions of Daz Studio. Like the other integrated plugins, this plugin product will require an authenticated version of OctaneRender Standalone Edition present in the same machine.

Latest preview:

Some of the concepts that can be seen here: Viewport camera controls and pickers (focus, material, ...), Nodegraph Editor, search materials by name (in the scene or in the Live DB), cached(!) Live DB materials, and last but not least applying materials by drag & drop them directly into the viewport (or group-wise within the material trees).

Of course there is a lot more to enhance this scene further - This should just show what can be achieved in a very short time with a few clicks only, without digging into the deeps of scene & material tweaking.

Features:
- All scene elements settings by OctaneRender from within the Daz Environment

- transfers entire scene (scene elements) to octane and then editing octane nodes through octane render setup

- OctaneRender viewport to view rendered image or animation in real-time:

- OctaneRender LiveDB access to a large amount of community-made materials:

- Custom Nodegraph Editor, node types can be added via drag and drop
- tree structure allows users to access a static list of available nodetypes as well as used nodes


Below are videos of the integrated Daz Studio plugin in action:

OctaneRender for DAZ Studio Sunlight (new model) & Google Maps

http://www.vimeo.com/55246483
... how to use an integrated Google Maps browser to set up the sunlight environment

OctaneRender for DAZ Studio Live Geometry test

http://www.vimeo.com/53776177

OctaneRender for DAZ Studio live cam & material test

http://www.vimeo.com/36740970
All done in realtime, no special preparation of the scene, no speed-ups, just using a 3DConnexion
SpacePilot for realtime navigation.

OctaneRender for DAZ Studio Aniblocks test

http://www.vimeo.com/39469759
Quickly put together, rendered over night;
ca. 1mio tris, only diffuse & some direct light from a single sun environment, directlighting kernel, ~1min. per frame
(quickly = simple cam move, Jeans fitting not perfect, some mats to glossy, and much, much more )

OctaneRender for DAZ Studio Nodegraph Editor preview

http://www.vimeo.com/43451537
The custom Nodegraph editor; on the left a static list of available nodetypes as well as used nodes,
which can be added via drag&drop; The view supports panning and zooming, and of course all features
of the standalone. Also added "extracting" and "inserting" of nodes (mostly to keep the graph clean from
unneeded wiring)...

The launch date and pricing is still TBA , this plugin is currently undergoing closed beta tests and will soon be released.
Feel free to post your comments here.

Best regards,
The OctaneRender Team

Very Nice. Looking forward to this project.

Come on guys, hurry up, i'm on the starting blocks !

It looks really nice, just what I was dreaming of . What are the specs of the computer the first video was made on ?

thanks
the system was a dual gtx580 one at that time, but the screen recording is still much more choppy than it actually works

Thanks for quick reply, t_3. Very impressive work you did there !!

Just curious to know how you consider the Daz lights in octane ? Do you ignore them, or do you convert them into mesh lights, or ... ?
Will it be possible to use LiveDb materials ? Will it be possible to tweak and modify materials the way I do in the standalone version ?

I'm sorry to ask so many questions, but the videos have really enticed me

well, every question deserves an answer

• livedb materials will be possible; along with global user presets (shared within different scenes).
• different render settings (e.g. render targets) and as a subset the environment can also be saved into the scene or as global presets.
• material editing works just like in the standalone.

about the latter: if content is loaded, which wasn't used with the plugin before, its materials will be converted into some basic octane materials automatically; with "basic" i mean, using all of the maps and colors, while trying to find a suitable node type (diffuse/glossy/specular) and octane settings. and this is ever only a try since i.e. glossiness and specular settings in daz represent completely different things. as content creators usually tweak daz mats to look good in the 3delight render, this makes a conversion a bit of a lottery. but imo for the average daz shader it will work fine. custom shaders are not supported at the moment, means you'll get just a default diffuse material for these. we will of course try to improve the conversion process over the time.

note: what is shown in the videos wasn't altered at all; just plain result of the automatic conversion.

daz lights are completely ignored; most of them wouldn't convert into anything that makes sense in octane anyway.
this means:

• currently you get your scene lit by the default environment of octane; if you just don't do anything but open the viewport, it'll already look nice
• every object can be used as mesh-light, just like in the standalone.
• at a later stage, we want to include an additional (simple) editor for the emitters in the scene, where you can tweak the lighting without searching through all material nodes.
• even later we want to add the ability to push some specially prepared mesh light objects directly from the plugin into the scene (lets say, add a light bulb, add a flashlight as parent to a camera, add a soft box, add a spotlight, ...)

hey, t_3, that sounds perfect to me !

I much prefer working with material in octane than in daz, so a simple conversion as a diffuse material with the texture maps assigned is exactly what I need.
The way you plan to manage the lights sound good and logic to me, it works perfectly this way at the moment (I mean when you use the export/import).

Man, I am even more impatient to use this plugin

now that makes at least 2 impatient people, as i'm just the same to have it done

something i forgot:
the image selector of the plugin allows to select maps already loaded in ds or octane; means you can load something from disk or you can pick something else from the list.

note: since usage of maps is crucial - because of vram and texture count limitations - the names of the maps in the list have their current usage within octane appended (like <i>, <f>, oder <i+f> for image/floatimage), and the selector also tells you the current overall statistics (number of used different image/floatimage maps, and needed vram)...

I was wondering if you are doing anything special to keep the texture counts under control? I notice you loaded the Streats of Asia 2 scene and in my testing using the export/import into Octane standalone there are more textures than Octane supports. I had to use the texture atlas to combine textures and generate a new UV set. What did you do to get the scene to fit?

Also, are you supporting the new instancing capabilities of DS4.5?

Also, are you storing all the octane material settings/node graph in the scene file (.daz/.duf)?

Oh man, I am so excited about this right now...

Looking good can hardly wait to try it out!