OctaneRender™ Standalone 2.24.2 Tweet

[augdalmo]

do the ies lights work as texture projectors now?

You can add an image to the "Distribution" input. Set the "Projection" type to "perspective" and the "Border Mode" to "Black color".

The projector by default is pointed along the Z axis and it has a projection angle of 90°.

You can aim the projector to different directions by either transforming the instance or by putting a rotation in the "Plane transformation" input.

Changing the UV transform scale will change the projection angle and aspect ratio.

projector.png

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Roeland

Hi Roeland,

has there been some change about IES lights? With this release 2.24.2 I have seen that the resolution is displayed now as 128x128 pixels instead of 1x128 pixels of the precedent realease. Was there a rethinking?
I have observed also that "Normalize" look to much the intensity of IES light, if I reduce the power the intensity remain almost the same. The function promise to mantain the same intensity when you change the Temperature of light, but if I reduce the power the intensity seem doesn't go down accordingly.

Manu

[darkline]

Please help - not sure if this a 3DSmax specific problem, but I find compositing a real nightmare with the tools in octane unless I'm doing things very wrong. (I hope I am). I'll give you an example of a very simple shot I was trying to do for VFX. I have real life moving background footage of a reflective table, and I'm trying to composite a 3D robot sitting on it. So to be clear all I need as passes are - the solo robot lit with HDRI, the shadow pass, the table reflection pass.

I took a HDRI globe of the real room for lighting and put that as my HDRI map slot. Robot looks good... I create a plane under it's feet to catch the reflection and shadows. But there seems to be no way to simply catch a reflection with any material. So as a workaround, I create a second scene where I assign the floor plane a simple mirror which I can composite in After Effects as a pass with a 'screen layer' - but the mirror reflection also picks up the HDRI background too, there is no way to exclude HDRI from reflection material, which makes it impossible to composite onto my real table. So what I had to do was create another scene, switch the environment to black, add an octane light on the front of the robot, simply to get a clean reflection off black. (to be honest the reflection doesnt match the lighting on the Robot now, but at least I have a reflection pass off a black background)

Secondly I need the shadows, so I tell my robot to be invisible to camera but the HDRI map casts shadows all over the ground plane - there is no control over them on the matte material. Is there no way you can pick which light in the scene contributes to the matte shadows? exclude the HDRI, or even control the density of the shadows received? So, I have to set up another scene with a simple light right above my robot, turn HDRI off to create a 'simple' clean shadow on the floor and render that as a pass too.

Now finally the camera is aiso a moving shot, which I solved in a tracker. The robot is obscured by some 3D objects at points, these objects also affect the lighting on the robot - so I need them as part of my main 'beauty' pass. I recreate them in 3D and apply a matte material and tell them not to receive shadows, but the shadows still appear all over the matte objects (not sure if this is a bug?). This is a big deal beacuse I can't 'matte' anything out if there are shdaows all over them. I have to ditch the idea and set up a 4th scene with no lights on at all and the robot hidden. I use the alpha channel of this as a way to matte out my beauty pass. Or I hand animate the matte object shadows in my beauty pass.

I could go on, but either I'm missing a trick, or octane is lacking some serious features for VFX work.

Any thoughts, workarounds, solutions or upcoming fixes for any of these issues?

many thanks

[mib2berlin]

Hi, thanks for the update.
@roeland I cant get it to manage IES files or projection in Octane.
There was some changes to setup IES in Octane over the years but it is still hard to setup.
Here is a simple file with included IES file from Erco a big lighting company.
In addition I have a simple alpha image for projection, I cant get this to work at all.

Thanks, mib

[v-cube]

Hello octane team,

Paul told me to post this bug here:

Hello Paul,

I made a quick test and I think something might be wrong here...

when I look up the surface brightness use here:

https://docs.otoy.com/Standalone_2_0/?page_id=390

It should distribute the amount of light independant from the surface area. However in this scene there are two surfaces the larger one is 9 times bigger than the smaller one. both have the same material assigned to them, so surface brightness disabled they should emit the same amount of light, right?
The picture shows that the bigger area is producing much more light...

SB bug.png

A I missing something or is it a bug?

best
Andreas

just redid the test, now I used 2 materials, first one with SB enabled, second one with SB enabled all other parameters are the same. I also attached the 3dm file in case someone would like to experiment with it.
I will also post this together with the orbx file in the 2.24.2 thread.

SB test2.png

lightest.orbx

thank you for an feedback

Andreas

[kavorka]

We still get random crashes when saving images. It happens on 3 different computers.

[roeland]

Hi Roeland,

has there been some change about IES lights? With this release 2.24.2 I have seen that the resolution is displayed now as 128x128 pixels instead of 1x128 pixels of the precedent realease. Was there a rethinking?

The resolution displayed is dependent on the data in the IES files, so it can change if you load another IES file. Symmetric files will be displayed as 1px wide. Very detailed patterns may be displayed as having a higher resolution, like 256×256.

I have observed also that "Normalize" look to much the intensity of IES light, if I reduce the power the intensity remain almost the same. The function promise to mantain the same intensity when you change the Temperature of light, but if I reduce the power the intensity seem doesn't go down accordingly.

Can you explain what exactly is the difference between what you expect and what is actually rendered? Blackbody emission nodes have a “Normalize” input, which will make sure the intensity stays approximately constant when changing the temperature. If disabled the intensity will increase rapidly with increasing temperature. Reducing the power should always reduce the intensity.

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Roeland

[roeland]

Hi, thanks for the update.
@roeland I cant get it to manage IES files or projection in Octane.
There was some changes to setup IES in Octane over the years but it is still hard to setup.
Here is a simple file with included IES file from Erco a big lighting company.
In addition I have a simple alpha image for projection, I cant get this to work at all.

Thanks, mib

For an IES light it's the easiest if you make the light a separate instance. Otherwise if the light is a plane and the IES pattern is symmetric then you can change the input "projection" » "coordinate space" to Normal space.

For a projection use the settings displayed above, and use a smaller emitter, the plane in the attached ORBX file is too large to create a well-defined pattern.

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Roeland

[roeland]

But there seems to be no way to simply catch a reflection with any material.

You can render an approximation in Octane by using the layers system:

• Add a ground plane under your robot, and assign a material to the ground plane which approximates the actual material of the table top.
• Assign different layer IDs to the ground plane and to the robot.
• Enable the layer system and set the layer to the layer ID of the robot.
• Enable render passes: under Render layer passes you will need the Shadows and the Reflections pass.

Composite the resulting passes as follows:

1. Beauty (alpha-blend)
2. Reflections (addition)
3. Shadows (multiply)
4. Table footage

The long explanation is in the manual:
→ Explanation of layers in the stand-alone manual: https://docs.otoy.com/Standalone_2_0/?page_id=2961
→ Render passes in the 3ds Max plugin manual: https://docs.otoy.com/3dsMax_2_X/?page_id=528

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Roeland

[mojave]

We still get random crashes when saving images. It happens on 3 different computers.

How are you saving your render and what format are you using to do so? Could you please provide the steps to try to reproduce this?

Thank you.

[darkline]

But there seems to be no way to simply catch a reflection with any material.

You can render an approximation in Octane by using the layers system:

• Add a ground plane under your robot, and assign a material to the ground plane which approximates the actual material of the table top.
• Assign different layer IDs to the ground plane and to the robot.
• Enable the layer system and set the layer to the layer ID of the robot.
• Enable render passes: under Render layer passes you will need the Shadows and the Reflections pass.

Composite the resulting passes as follows:

1. Beauty (alpha-blend)
2. Reflections (addition)
3. Shadows (multiply)
4. Table footage

The long explanation is in the manual:
→ Explanation of layers in the stand-alone manual: https://docs.otoy.com/Standalone_2_0/?page_id=2961
→ Render passes in the 3ds Max plugin manual: https://docs.otoy.com/3dsMax_2_X/?page_id=528

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Roeland

Hi Roeland,

I never knew about this and I have to say it's fantastic. Eliminates the need to use matte materials, and all that 'visible' to camera fiddling around. Thank you so much for this explanation. I am almost there now with what I'm trying to do. The layer ID system is really good!!

A question about 'reflections'. If I understand this right, reflection direct, and reflection indirect passes are all the reflections from other layers/environment onto the current layer ID.... However 'reflections' pass are all the reflections from the current layer ID onto other Layers? This is great as it allowed me to render a single session with the passes I need, the 'reflections' pass is showing the table reflection of the robot, while the beauty is just the solo robot - which is great. However, the reflections pass is also showing other objects resting on my table which are assigned to other layers. Not just their reflection, but the actual objects themselves. These objects don't have reflective materials on them, they are diffuse materials with no reflective properties, so to my understanding should not be showing anything in a reflection pass.

Is there any way to exclude other layer ID's from reflections? What am I not doing right here?

But thanks so much for your help, I have a much better understanding of how octane's layers work now, and it'll make this process a lot easier.