OctaneRender® for Maya® 3.06.1 - 11.3 [OBSOLETE] Tweet

[Jolbertoquini]

Wow ! I think things are going a bit weird... I think is good to have more contact with us I give you all this points for that.
Would be great to have more feed from "Jim" just for us to now where we can go for the next step.

I would say is great "Calus" show some points here, and we should have a better development information. and consult our opinion, I fell like people are saying get "Calus" he will fix everything, and you know is not like that, at all Calus as different point the view doesn't mean everything is the right direction nobody is perfect specially as dev side surprise and problems can happen all the time... We need give the respect on the jim's and Bikram's experience and also mistakes the guys can have.

I think Jim and Bikram are doing right and yes they need work together with us and have more "communication".

I think is great to put all points there. the guys they are not our enemies they are working hard.

I want changes, and better thing for Maya plug aswell, sometimes I get frustrated with the lack of communication.let's be honest plug is working we got a workflow and people get money from. Would be great to have a better plug for sure.


Best wishes,
JO

[leehenshall]

Compared to the C4D plugin the Maya plugin is still very disappointing....at least from my point of view. Although the Maya plugin technically works (if you want to learn all of its quirks) I personally have no interest in working that way. I've owned Octane for Maya plugin for over 2 years and never once trusted it to do a paid job mainly due to not wanting to learn how to use a buggy plugin and the fact that I find it very frustrating to use. I don't even know c4d very well but I was able to get up and running with c4d plugin very easily and it felt just as interactive at standalone. I've been using Maya & V-Ray for years but still struggle to be productive with the Octane Maya plugin.

The fact that there are some plugins that are much better implemented than others is a real shame and will only make the unfortunate people who own the lesser plugins feel ripped off. Personally I love standalone and would prefer to see better exchange between plugins and standalone.

I was really excited about the potential of a full rebuild of the Maya plugin core where everything was created in the node editor like standalone. What ever happend to that? we seem to be back on the old crappy plugin implementation? from before the Maya team received more devs resource.

I don't think this is a question of whether the devs currently working with OTOY are the cause of the problem. The problem for me is why were were even sold a Maya plugin that needed serious work in the first place?....for the same price that you can pick up a very polished c4d plugin .

The people working on the O4M project now are just fighting fires for a frustrated user base where in reality I think it needs a complete rethink. That sounds like a very thankless task......does it ultimately come down to OTOY not investing enough time and money to bring the Maya plugin up to scratch? There were positive talk a couple of years back but not enough action and results to convince me to use O4M.

As users we can't complain about the asking price of the plugin but if somethings cheap and useless to your business compared to your other rendering solutions (in my case v-ray) then it's still money wasted. If you combine the price of Standalone and 1 plugin it's only about £250 extra to purchase v-ray who offer excellent support for no extra cost.

Maybe this is what you get when you don't pay for support? I've made my peace that O4M has probably been money down the drain (at least in the short-mid term) but it still fascinates me that after all the time I've been following the O4M story it still doesn't feel much better than when I first picked up a few years back. In a similar time Chaos Group have practically re-written their entire plugin in CUDA. Not to mention maintaining near uniform feature implementations across numerous plugins. My impression of OTOYs plugin development is that it's every man/plugin for them selves with some getting it more right than others. Does Octane have all it's developers all in one place with a unified objective of bringing the entire product line forward by sharing knowledge and comparing each plugins progress? or are the plugins outsourced to contractors so that OTOY can advertise a longer list of plugins on the homepage? I'm curious as to whether that plays a factor?

Perhaps the company ethos is at the heart of O4M problems? or maybe i'm just talking rubbish

It's a shame because Octane core/Standalone is actually a much better GPU renderer than vray but as a Maya plugin it's truly awful in my opinion.

I don't mean to complain or be rude just trying to express my opinion which is of course relative to my experience and requirements. I know there are other users who are able to use O4M for their business needs.

[calus]

Wow ! I think things are going a bit weird... I think is good to have more contact with us I give you all this points for that.
Would be great to have more feed from "Jim" just for us to now where we can go for the next step.
I would say is great "Calus" show some points here, and we should have a better development information. and consult our opinion, I fell like people are saying get "Calus" he will fix everything, and you know is not like that, at all Calus as different point the view doesn't mean everything is the right direction nobody is perfect specially as dev side surprise and problems can happen all the time... We need give the respect on the jim's and Bikram's experience and also mistakes the guys can have.
I think Jim and Bikram are doing right and yes they need work together with us and have more "communication".
I think is great to put all points there. the guys they are not our enemies they are working hard.
I want changes, and better thing for Maya plug aswell, sometimes I get frustrated with the lack of communication.let's be honest plug is working we got a workflow and people get money from. Would be great to have a better plug for sure.

That's not the point, nobody said Jim and Bikram didn't do their best...
but even if they are doing their best, since these last 2 months they are doing it wrong (whatever is the reason).
And looking for who is faulty is not relevant here, this is about facts and how to improve the situation.

As you know I spend a lot of time to gather user's feedback on the forum and on the Skype group,
I offer my help and my expertise to the OctaneForMaya team, but since these last two months I'm just completely ignored on this subject
So as expected, plugin development goes wrong again...

Indeed Maya users just have a very good point when they ask the OctaneForMaya team to listen to me.

[calus]

@leehenshall,
Thanks for the details, I can say that most of the Maya plugin users I know, have the same feeling as you

Octane rocks but the Maya plugin is so far behind others, it's hard to not give up on it.

[leehenshall]

Thanks Calus

The Maya plugin has become a bit of a curiosity for me. I don't hold a lot of hope of it getting on par with OTOYs other plugins until I see a change in policy. Something about the push to make it better a couple of years back has failed quite badly.

I think this post of yours sums things up:

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=57250&start=30#p311831

Although other plugins are clearly going in the right direction I can't justify abandoning my Maya based animation workflow just to use their nice shiny Octane plugins. I liked the C4D plugin so much though I was tempted.

That's why i sometimes think it would be better to figure out how to send stuff back and forth to standalone which I think is the purest and most pleasant way to use Octane. I've briefly looked at the Lua scripts out there to help with the downsides of working in standalone but there but It's all new to me and I have no intention of scripting anything my self.

If there was a way of sending still and animated cameras back and forth between Maya and Standalone using LUA or some better plugin communication features and with the upcoming HDR Light Studio plugin for Standalone. I think I would have nearly everything I need to do a lot of projects with Standalone.

[calus]

If there was a way of sending still and animated cameras back and forth between Maya and Standalone using LUA or some better plugin communication features and with the upcoming HDR Light Studio plugin for Standalone. I think I would have nearly everything I need to do a lot of projects with Standalone.

Well Octane 3.07 standalone is coming soon with LOTS of amazing features and improvements,
for example FBX I/O so you will be able to export back your camera from standalone to Maya trough FBX.

[leehenshall]

That would be amazing!

Where did you learn about this? are there threads for this I should be following?

[brianbrook]

Jules Urbach shared a link.
May 23 at 11:45pm
Hi everyone,
NVIDIA will be posting these slides at some point on the GTC site, but I don't see any reason not to share them here first with all of you.
These notes annotate the slides in the link:
- GPU rendering advancements over this past decade, and where we may be heading next (#1-5)
- 12 month recap since GTC16 - major OR partnerships & productions since 3.0 launched a year ago (#6-13)
- 3.07 features in the next release: FBX I/O (more formats likely - DAE, etc.), viewport Gizmos for pos/rot/scale editing in real time, full node UX in plugins, ORBX importing (using this node UX), native node module API (across plug-ins), render to texture for biased and baking render jobs, full set of texture blend ops, local ORC jobs that mirror cloud jobs, improvements for fake spot lights (#14-20)
- 3rd party Native node/tool module overview + 1st party experiment we've made - e.g. vector displacement. This is an important system for growing Octane node and engine, just as our DCC plug-ins did up to now (#21-24)
- Cross compiler post-mortem - Intel/x86: iGPU is 4x faster than x86 on same chip, and we still have OOC memory for meshes. This is tantalizing, but not easy to support beyond internal testing. Intel iGPU drivers are not ready for stable use, and x86 backend more likely on CPU in short term, but slower than what we know is possible. But we will at least have fallback in cases w/ no GPU. Headless rendering will be another option shortly, and AMD (even if slow) is looking realistic before 3.1. (#25-26)
- Overview of OSL. The current 3.10 build (3rd drop I've tested this year) is progressing well and I am now able to copy & past public OSL texture code from the open web - (Arnold, VRay, etc). Also the OSL metadata in the shader generates the right node and pins automatically now (#27-32)
- ORC will be on shop page once new OB is out (OB == render credits - so we have to get this done first). ORC will be another plug-in for the subs. ( to keep it simple) - but all existing ORC users to date will get this sub. free for a year (there are some nice extras you also get in that package, see basic sub. below). ORC will add BYO OR licence to 3rd party services and render farms, and offer $5 buckets for 400 OB/hr.. OB/hr is easier to value when you can run local ORC jobs before sending to cloud; new lower pricing options are on ORC now: max $/frame and >24 Hr turnaround for increased savings (#33-35)
- ORC as on demand real time web service - including the SA UX and node system in HTML5, and created a REST API around Octane itself.Full integration with Dropbox and gdrive and more... (#36)
- Basic Subscriptions - the current $20 month subs will soon add a number of DCC integrations which do not count against your 1 plug-in choice. This includes Unity (obviously), UE4, After Effects (+other Adobe CC apps as we develop), Nuke, and soon ADSK Fusion 360. (#37, #39)
- Pro Subscriptions - details are still being worked out, basically: access to all plug-ins, up to 20 GPUs, one monthly price in ~ballpark as full Adobe CC sub -will be restricted to your personal SSO account. Boxed licences will continue alongside these subs (#38)
- OctaneImager - we've added biased ray tracing in real time to the OI viewport (which is still own module on top of Octane), in addition to the NPR, LUT, ICEfx and other effects we showed a year ago. This rendering is 100% super-biased, yet approaching Octane DL AO quality in real time with near zero noise. We can also add light field and other pre-computed data into this stack.. Lots of possibilities, that is why this is is as much an SDK as an art tool. (#39-45)
- Octane 4: Out of core geometry on GPU is now working in Brigade,so it will likley work in final V4, which is focused on getting game engine speed and dynamics into Octane API. Unity in '18 should expose what we need for ideal integration of V4 speed. V4 will have many other optimizations that will improve offline rendering in general, especially for small point and IES light sources. PVR ASIC - this we've talked about publicly since last SIGGRAPH - we have confirmed it scales, maybe even better than 10x vs GPU RT - I don't know when this will go into mass production, but impossible to ignore going forward (#46 - 49)
- Octane AI - this is a set of modules we are testing in the imager layer with the following features: deep learning super resolution (already working in real time) and deep learning de-noising (similar to Iray example, i.e. no AOVs and near R/T - but unrelated to NV work). AI is a huge part of everyone's long term roadmap, important in the short term at minimum for improved photogrammetry, BRDF capture and scene reconstruction. (#50-57)

[calus]

Where did you learn about this? are there threads for this I should be following?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/OctaneR ... 643308749/

[renmaxhb]

Where did you learn about this? are there threads for this I should be following?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/OctaneR ... 643308749/

calus

Thanks .