OctaneRender™ is currently recognized by many industry professionals and 3D graphic visualization artists as the most advanced and fastest
GPU-based physically-based render engine with an advanced and flexible node-based workflow and user-interface. Now, with our new plugin
products, you can have the most advanced, fastest physically-based render engine on the market tightly integrated into your 3D modeling and
animation software.
This new plugin will provide a fast workflow and rendering pipeline suitable for interactive editing and fast final animation rendering output by using
DAZ Studio's environment for scene setup. Fine-tuning and animating all parameters for objects, materials, lights, media are done all from inside
DAZ Studio.
- Rendering by Isotemod
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DAZ STUDIO VERSION REQUIREMENTS
This release requires DAZ Studio 4.5.0.114 and up, 32 or 64bit, on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8.
FEATURES/FUNCTIONALITY
OctaneRender™ for DAZ Studio™ supports almost all features of the Standalone, including graph-based Node editing. Updates and new functions
made available to the Standalone will usually appear in an updated Plugin version after a short period of time.
- Interactive use
OctaneRender for DAZ Studio is especially made to work interactively on a scene. Unlike common renderers or rendering plugins, all changes to cameras,
geometries, lighting and materials in a scene are sent immediately to the render engine. Depending on the complexity of a scene and the available GPU
power, the viewport is updated nearly in realtime or within a few seconds only.
Transferred scene information includes:- Camera updates; switching cameras and all relevant camera parameters (including Focal length and F/Stop) are supported
- Geometries add to a scene (by loading/importing content) are added to the rendering instantly
- Object positioning – using ultra-fast updates, without the need to transfer new geometry data
- Geometry deformations (Morphs) are update extremely fast on a per-object basis
- Instant hiding of scene elements (by using the “visible” property of DAZ Studio)
- Base and subdivided geometries are fully supported; The use of the base geometries can be forced to allow even faster viewport updates.
- Material system
Since OctaneRender uses its own, physically based material system, the Plugin converts existing DAZ Studio materials to basic Octane materials – automatically
or on demand. In particular it takes over used texture maps and converts parameters as possible. Furthermore the plugin cares about specifics of the DAZ Studio
material management to provide easy and fast material editing for OctaneRender.
The plugin supports all materials and material-specific functions (Nodes) found in the Standalone version.
Material editing includes:- Automatic and on-demand material conversions, taking diffuse, bump, specular and opacity channels.
- Auto material grouping: identical DAZ materials are bound to a single Octane material; though it is still possible to assign new individual materials to grouped elements.
- Automatic texture map assignment; since GPU based rendering still needs to tamper with VRAM and texture count limitations, the Plugin chooses the best possible map
type (color/bw) to make optimal use of the available resources. - Surfaces filter; hides scene elements by their surface name.
- Material editing & Nodegraph Editor: The Plugin features a complete editing system for Octane materials; all parameters are available and can be shown and edited using a
graph/node based visual frontend. - Material assignment: Materials can be assigned to scene elements by drag & drop, individually or in groups; furthermore Octane materials can be directly dropped onto the
Octane viewport to assign them. - Material management: Octane materials are always saved within the DAZ scene, additionally “User presets” can be saved to have own materials at hand whenever needed.
- Rendering
The Plugin supports all render setup specific features of OctaneRender; in particular the different rendering Kernels (Direct Lighting, Pathtracing, PMC, Info Channel), as well as
Tonemapping and post processing functions. Also fully supported are the base lighting types (HDRI and Sun environment).
In addition complete render setups (including render sizes) can be created and immediately switched, and also saved as “User presets”. Base lighting setups are managed
independently from the rendering setups and can also be saved and recalled on demand and as “User preset”.
Additional rendering features:- Aspect frame control; always shows the current rendering aspect frame in the DAZ Studio viewport; the camera perspective is changed accordingly.
- Scale to viewport mode; sets the render size always to the size of the viewport.
- “Final” rendering mode; collapses all individual geometries into an unified mesh, in order to provide 15-50% better rendering speed compared to the standard mode (which uses independent geometry objects).
- Clay rendering and lowered resolution rendering; to instantly strip materials from the rendering and allow faster viewport updates.
- A rendering lock secures an ongoing rendering from any changes.
- Viewport tools/pickers to select nodes/materials, open materials, set focus points, white point (for Tonemapping) and to reload individual geometries if needed – all right
from the Octane viewport. - Additional camera control of Focal length and F/Stop directly from the Octane viewport.
- Animations
OctaneRender for DAZ Studio allows unrestricted animation rendering; 3rd party plugins to extend the animation possibilities of DAZ Studio are supported as long as they
use standard methods to update DAZ scene elements. In addition the plugin provides an animation cue which allows to switch cameras, Render setups and Lighting setups
based on cue frames – for animations as well as rendering non-animated image sequences.
. - OctaneLive™ DB
Using community made materials form the OctaneLive DB is fully supported. Live DB materials can be directly assigned to scene elements like own created Octane materials,
even by drag & drop them onto the Octane viewport. Since Live DB materials need to be downloaded from the Internet, the Plugin caches them locally to speed up further
use of materials once downloaded. Community made Live DB materials are fully accessible and editable, and may serve as starting point for own material creation as well.
. - Other features
- Support for standard and orthogonal cameras and DAZ Studio viewport modes
- Texture map replacement and updates allow to change only used texture maps in complex Octane materials if a new material set was loaded.
- Basic support for image sequences aka Video texture maps
- All OctaneRender specific scene data is saved directly within the DAZ Studio .duf file.
- Texture maps transferred to Octane still respect their “Runtime” folder origins; the Octane saved data thus allows to fully load scenes even if the Runtime folder structure
is different from the saved one. - Texture maps used in Live DB materials are automatically downloaded if they are missing (given an active Internet connection).
- GPU cooldown; if needed, the Plugin may pause a rendering if a certain GPU temperature is reached
- Windows 7 Aero can be turned off directly from within the Plugin to free resources for rendering; this can be also automatically done every time the Plugin starts.
- and much more…
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COMPATIBILITY AND OCTANERENDER STANDALONE REQUIREMENT
To run OctaneRender™ for DAZ Studio™, you need to have an activated OctaneRender Standalone license on the machine you wish to install the plugin onto.
You cannot purchase only the DAZ Studio plugin and use it without also owning an activated copy of OctaneRender Standalone.
USER MANUAL
The user manual can be found here: http://render.otoy.com/manuals/DazStudio/.
The manual is currently a work in progress and will be completed and updated during the next few weeks.
DEMO VERSION AVAILABLE
A demo version will be available soon.
HOW TO PURCHASE LICENSES
Go to our online shop here: http://render.otoy.com/shop/
A license for the plugin product alone will cost 99 € while in the initial open beta phase, and 199 € when the final version of the plugin is released.
The plugin will require the user to have a valid OctaneRender™ Standalone version installed and activated. If you don't have an OctaneRender license yet, you can purchase
both the plugin and the engine/standalone licenses as one bundle during the beta phase for 279 €.
You can also purchase a 3, 5 or 10 pack of OctaneRender™ for DAZ Studio™ licenses, just like OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition packs.
INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS
Please follow the installation instructions in the manual http://render.otoy.com/manuals/DazStudio/?page_id=29. The provided Installer executable contains all data
for all supported DAZ Studio versions (32bit and 64bit). After downloading and starting the Installer, please follow the necessary steps to install OctaneRender for DAZ Studio
on your system. The installer can be found in the downloads section of the customer area of our website: http://render.otoy.com/account/download_archive.php.
The installer needs to be “run as administrator” otherwise windows UAC won’t let it copy files.
OCTANELIVE™
Just like OctaneRender Standalone, The DAZ Studio Plugin product also needs an OctaneLive license and needs to be activated on a machine. This has to be done in a separate
Activation Manager - whenever needed - and is covered in the manual (http://render.otoy.com/manuals/DazStudio/?page_id=31). It will also activate the required
Standalone license if needed.
NVIDIA DRIVER REQUIREMENTS
This version requires video driver 301.42 or higher.
It is also highly recommended that you have your Windows display adapter set to a non-Octane rendering graphics card (ie. your on-board graphics card, or a second graphics card).
LIMITATIONS
- Geo grafts might work but might also have issues with geometry updates and material assignment; this is currently being worked on.
- LIE – Layered Image Editor; layered images/texture maps are composed at runtime, and might therefore be not recognized by the Plugin.
- Shell nodes, Geometry groups and Instancing. Implementation of this DAZ Studio features is scheduled for upcoming versions of the Plugin.
ISSUE RESOLUTION
If you have any issues, please report them here, and include the following information:
- Operating System (ie. Win XP, Vista, 7, 8)
- 32 or 64 bit
- Amount of RAM
- Graphics Card(s) and VRAM (ie. GTX 580, 3GB)
- Nvidia driver version
- DAZ Studio version
In the unlikely event of a crash, please provide the dump report that can usually be saved from the DAZ bug reporter. Either post them at the designated Daz forum area or
attach them to an email to support[at]octanerender[dot]com
Cheers to all,
from the OctaneRender™ Team
Congrats t_3 on a job VERY WELL DONE! 
