Over the past week I have been testing it on a non-critical project and I must say I have got a lot of surprises in the implementation of the Maya plugin.
I have made a list and will add to it as I go on this little adventure, but before I go on my rant I will say the most surprising thing is the sheer speed of Octane and the stabelness of the implementation in Maya. I'm coming from Mental Ray, Renderman and Arnold - Octane has by far been the must fun and enjoyable to work with in a long time. But Octane is also the most limited render I have every worked with the past 10 years, but hopefully with 3.0 it catches up a fair amount. The implementation in Maya has to bee a lot better for me to consider using it in our pipeline on bigger projects, it is not great, a lot of missing stuff and it kills our compositing pipeline.
I have followed the forum for a few weeks and can see a lot of frustration on the Maya forum, it looks like we are neglected a bit over Cinema 4D, Modo and the standalone, but I will take my chances and post some of the issues and bugs I have run into and hopefully it could help (or if nothing else, be a channel for my frustrations).
I have numbered the issues and I will provide scenes or screenshots if the explanation isn’t enough. Some issues would surly be “user” error because I’m still learning
First off my specs and Octane verseion:
Mac Pro 2010, GTX 980 Ti GPU, 64GB ram.
OSX 10.10, Maya 2016 EXT1-SP4
Octane for Maya 2.24.2-7.14 (single seat license)
Here goes (the first 20):
1) EXR - feature
16-bit half float option is missing. 32bit is in most cases total overkill. 1080p frames in 32bit with multiple passes (beauty around 32mb) kills the compositing workflow. For stills 32bit is fine, but for animation 16bit must be an option! It’s possible from the standalone app (not when batch) when “save rendered to image file.” Also add compression to EXR - right, it’s missing? a black frame take up as much space as one filled with colors :/
Composit EXR file option is missing from the manual (as of 14. januar 2016):
https://docs.otoy.com/#56Additional%20s ... nal”%20tab
2) EXR - feature
When using “save composite exr file” the file prefix/suffix for animation should follow Mayas. If prefix is set to name.#.ext Octane should not write name.#_passes.exr. but rather name_passes.#.exr (or not even write “passes” at all) - leave animation number+padding alone or your compositor will hunt you down
This is really a big issue for animation and a clear indication that the maya plugin developer(s) hasn’t got the full workflow in mind.
3) Motion blur - feature
Motion blur is not visible in maya render view, only when batch rendered. Both subframes and internal is not rendere in renderview render.
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=50851&p=253144&hilit=batch#p253144
Edit: This has been clarified by capmotion. It should work on moving proxies - so not a missing feature
4) Motion blur - bug
Batch render is also suffering with “animation requires extra frames” on subframes. A camera turntable animation from 1-200 with render settings from 1-201 gives this error on “Subframes” motion blur.
Maybe this is also why motion blur don’t show up in renderview (issue nr. 2 from above).
5) Skip existing frame - feature
The much beloved skip existing frame is not working. This must be easy to implement and a big timesaver for the wranglers.
6) Texture - feature / or bug?
Why is power on textures set to 0.9 as default, makes no sense. It should be 1.0.
7) Shader undo - bug
Normal and bump values doesn’t work with undo.
8) More textures + displacement - feature
As far as I can see (or guess) octane can’t use any of Mayas shading nodes, right?.
No on can live without ramps, how can octane - life is no fun without ramps
Displacement can’t use any octane textures, only image files. So stuff like ocean’s is hard to do, also a ocean texture would be nice. A internal texture bake like in cinema 4d and lightwave could fix this (right?).
9) Maya License UI - bug
When entering octane account password in the render settings you can’t press Activate, you have to “unselect” the Password field before Activate accept the password.
10) Slider - bug
Sliders in maya is very hard to control on octane elements, it’s like the default values is set way to high and there for uncontrollable / useless. Examples on a default scene in centimeter linear scale:
- Focal Depth on camera can go crazy high up, even when far plane is set to eg. 500 the Focal Depth max is 100000.000
- Rayepsilon seldom goes over 10.0 but maxes out at 1000.0
- Spec, glossy, AOdist under Direct Light.
- Power in lights and environment. Who crankes up the value to the max of 1000.0 when the default is 0.3 with the slider?
- Edges rounding when octane scene scale is set to 0.001 (used to get aperture to work on small scale scenes).
It makes it very difficult to do quick settings like the guys does in this video (even if it’s cinema 4D, it has the same values etc.)
https://vimeo.com/124066262
A solution would be like AutoDesk does, set the max value to something reasonable and unlock the max value so it kan be overdriven - and maybe put the min, max value in the tool tips.
A workaround is to use cmd+mouse left/middel/right drag on the value, but that doesn’t work in even higher values, so it’s not bulletproof.
11) License cooldown - “feature”
This is just plain stupid
Why is this a thing, it restrics paying customers in using octane on different machines like workstation + laptop + home workstation etc. It’s nice that a license can be moved around (like every other modern software should). But why the cooldown period, if it’s for protecting the license servers for being hammered this “feature” hammers it a lot more (“click, click, click, through… reload. click, click dammit go through”).
Instead of using different user/passwords for the standalone and different plugins, just make a simple login system with email and password (like Adobe CC) and deactivate other machines than the one logged in to. We have to have a text file with user/pass to keep track of your licenses, that’s not very secure, but necessary.
12) Focus pick - feature
Should be disable by default, it’s a nice feature, but isn’t used that much compared to the problems it creates by accidentally using it
Region render is more important for most cases.
It could also be a toggle button in the renderview and not hidden away in the camera.
13) DOF / Scale - bug
Nice touch with the Scale (1 unit = x meter) option, but it is har to set the DOF when aperture don’t follow the same scheme (value of over 100 is sometimes necessary for scene with centimeter scale). Overall the Aperture is very hard to control (or overdrive) depending on the maya scene scale and octane scene scale.
Has Aperture been overlook in the scale (so it doesn’t follow scale) or am I holding it wrong?
14) Pass - bug
Shadow passes are empty.
15) Render Settings - feature
What is the Octane LiveDB tab doing, it’s a weird “feature” is what it is!
Edit:This has been clarified by "capmotion". Not a weird feature after all
16) Render Settings - feature
Max samples is set to an odd number (right), something like 2048 or 256 (preview) would make more sense for an initial setting. The max is 64000 so why set it to 16000 anyways.
17) depth pass - bug
Depth pass does not respect a z-depth max of 1. It should be possible to clamp depth to 1 for After Effects 8/16 bit compositing workflow.
18) depth pass - feature
Depth should not be filtered if used for Depth Of Field, so a unfiltered depth would be much appreciated by compositors.
19) Extra Attributes - features
Attributes like geometry type, visibility and layer ID should not be excluded to meshes, it should also be possible to add to groups/hierarchy as well (haven’t tried to add the manually).
This is a very BIG issue for complex scenes!! A bit of scripting could hack this fairly quickly, but it would be better for Octane to accept group attributes - it’s for the children for god sake
20) Render files - feature
Make it possible to put passes in folders instead of on big pile of files (for EXR that ain’t combined). Try rendering 2000 files with 20 passes with non-combined EXR. Again this makes me think that the workflow hasn’t been fully tested by the developers(s).
Like in 2) Octane should follow Mayas prefixes like <RenderPass>, so the good old <RenderLayer>/<RenderPass>/<RenderPass> puts everything in it’s right place.
I have more, but I will let you (that has gone all the way though) have a breather.
To be continued, cheers!
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