OTOY Forums

Hi there,

I just jumped on the train testing octane. Maybe some of you guys could help me out with couple of basic questions.

1) Are there some good material setups available? Skin a.s.o.
2) What is the difference using the medium input of i.e. the diffuse material and the one on the variable output vop?
3) Why there si no mediumchannel on the glossy material?
4) Is the diffuse and the glossy material ment to get combined for getting standard paths like diffuse, bump, specular, SSS in one shader?
5) Is there a way to seperate object and light reflections?
6) Is there something like "colorlimit" in mantra to prevent harsh white dots (two or more rays hitting the same spot)?
7) How i can render thin translucent objects like leafs?
8) Is there a way to use one of houdinis geointerpolation methods like polysoups or packed prims? i ve seen in the forums that packed prims are not supported and the advatanges would get lost. I understand that for rendering but soups and packed prims are also very handy for scene interactivity cache - reload times. How to handle a crowd workflow in octane i.e.?
9) Why the titan X is still 999$?

Thanks a lot for your Time!!

Cheers,

Lucas

Hi! Some notes about your questions related to the Houdini plugin:

1) You can use the LiveDB material library ... they need some cleanup once loaded in Houdini, but can be a good starting point.
2) The 'medium' pin in the output VOP is used for the volumetrics shading, to link the volume medium node.
3) This is a limitation of Octane, it is not available even in the Standalone.
4) Yes, usually the Octane users are mixing two or more material nodes using the materials mixer to build complex materials.
5) The lights in Octane are also objects (with an emissive material) so I don't think so, but perhaps the render layers feature could help, I am not sure.
6) You have a feature in the render target imager node 'Hot Pixel Visibility' that perhaps could help with this problem.
7) Linking a texture to the diffuse material 'transmission' pin, usually mixed with a glossy material to have specular reflections.
8) Currently you can use packed primitives or polygon soups if you convert them to polygons for the render SOP. The support of polygon soups can be possible in the future, but the packed primitives express a procedure to generate geometry at render time in Mantra. They can include geometry, external references, HDAs, scripts, mantra procedural objects, etc, so they encompasses lots of features, some of them not easy or even impossible to support by other render engines due to the procedural nature and the Mantra only related features of the primitive. Of course you can "unpack" the packed primitive to render it in Octane, but to render heavy geometry or large number of copies/instances, I want to add in the near future the support of Octane proxy objects, loaded at render time.
9) Because a TitanX must be more expensive than a 980ti to not be a 980ti?

-Juanjo

thanks for the quick reply!

sorry for the question but where i can find the live db library ?
regarding the instancing topic i think it would be great to support something that works along with houdinis copysop system. although i m not shure how to do that without packed prims...
anyway. Impressive how fast octane is.

regards,

You can open the LiveDB tool from the icon in the shelf.

-Juanjo