OTOY Forums

I'm trying to use a greyscale depth image as a world position offset in the material editor as a way of deforming the mesh (without tesselation) giving an object percieved depth.

It looks fine in Unreal's path tracer and lit modes but Octane isn't picking up the mesh deformation.

Is this a current limitation or should I be doing something in the plugin to enable WPO?

Hi Chris,

Any word on this? I can't get WPO to work with the plugin.

WPO does not currently work because of limitations in the vertex displacement node in Octane.
The main issues are that octane only supports object space, tangent and height displacement, and not world displacement. There are also a list of smaller issues aswel.

Theoretically a workaround could be implemented by me, but that would require a lot of work and provide limited results.
I believe there is better displacement on the octane feature list, but I dont know when this will be implemented.

If you really need displacement, my advice would be to create an octane material in unreal and create the displacement you need in there.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the reply. It's a tricky pronblem since tesselation was removed from UE5 so I'm looking for solutions to using materials to deform meshes. Nanite is of course great for single objects but my deformations are media textures and move, whichso far I'm not sure how to do in the new software other than WPO. Maybe a bump offset node might help or similar. Do you know any methods I could look into that are suppoorted by Octane?.

Otherwise I may have to look at a more complex workflow like importing an alembic geometry from another software package like blende ror houdini.

joshuamkerr wrote:Hi Chris,

Thanks for the reply. It's a tricky pronblem since tesselation was removed from UE5 so I'm looking for solutions to using materials to deform meshes. Nanite is of course great for single objects but my deformations are media textures and move, whichso far I'm not sure how to do in the new software other than WPO. Maybe a bump offset node might help or similar. Do you know any methods I could look into that are suppoorted by Octane?.

Otherwise I may have to look at a more complex workflow like importing an alembic geometry from another software package like blende ror houdini.

Octane Materials can have a displacement node. The vector displacement nodes in octane can support OSL texture nodes.
Which means you can pipe through the deformation via the parent unreal material to the Octane Material.

Should look like this:

Hi Chris,

Sorry for the later response to this. I'm currently trying to get this working exactly as you have suggested via an octane material. I have displacement turned on in the octane plugin settings also but still not seeing any change in the material.

Is there anything else I should be doing?

joshuamkerr wrote:Hi Chris,

Sorry for the later response to this. I'm currently trying to get this working exactly as you have suggested via an octane material. I have displacement turned on in the octane plugin settings also but still not seeing any change in the material.

Is there anything else I should be doing?

Does it work on models in the scene? The octane material preview in the octane material editor does not show displacement.

The setting was a setting for unreal materials with offset, it doesnt do anything for octane materials.

The octane material is causing displacement on a mesh I have in the scene when viewed through the unreal viewport. However I see no displacement when rendering with octane.

I do get a result when selecting auto bump but it doesn't give the result i'm after. But it does at least suggest that the material is working in some respect.

joshuamkerr wrote:The octane material is causing displacement on a mesh I have in the scene when viewed through the unreal viewport. However I see no displacement when rendering with octane.

I do get a result when selecting auto bump but it doesn't give the result i'm after. But it does at least suggest that the material is working in some respect.

With octane material I mean the unreal asset type "Octane Material Instance". Not the converted octane material.
That being said, the World Position Offset is currently ignored because it doesnt properly work in octane as there is no "world space" in octane displacement, meaning I would need to add displacement for every mesh placement.
Octane Material Instances on the other hand can have displacement, because you can use the octane displacement nodes.

On another subject:
I just saw your video on youtube where you compare the various renderers in UE5 and said your scene takes 8 hours to render in octane.
Im a bit suprised by that. Could you share you scene with me? Id like to test why this is taking so long.

Hi Chris,

Yes I saw you popping up the comments the other day. The render did take a while. I did as much optimising as I could in the time I took to build the scene (lowering texture sizes mainly). I'll happily send you the project but I'm not very clear on the most efficient way to do this. Do you simply need the whole unreal project folder? It is 18GB in size.

Regarding the WPO issue, I am using an octane material instance to try to convert the WPO to a displacement but it simply isn't getting me any results. The only thing that seems to work is the auto bump boolean in the vertex displacement node but the results are too harsh. I have attached two pictures below that shows the setup.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IsBp11AZRRnaqdEcSCCE0fk_6G6kWycq/view?usp=sharing No auto Bump
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yZuDK_INIGlqfzRh5sQ0sDOSmn0MhlOy/view?usp=sharing Auto Bump enabled