Animated Texture problem Tweet

[sachakogel123]

Hey,

I am experiencing a very strange problem in octane within Maya. I have tried and tested this several times now with the same result each time.

If I place a keyframe on a texture attribute, in this case the emission attribute to simulate a flickering neon light, my scene becomes impossibly slow to work with, I am unable to drag my time slider and Maya then keeps crashing non stop.
I created a scene recently, finally decided that I will use Octane as my render for a small production and at the last minute I had to switch back to Arnold as I was unable to continue with the project in Octane due to this problem.

Now if I animate a non Octane shader like a blinn then its fine, however as soon as I place a keyframe on an octane shader attribute it kills my scene to the point where it becomes unworkable. I can delete all the geometry and objects from my scene and it makes no difference at all, as long as that animated shader exists in the scene I cannot drag my time slider properly it just becomes impossible to work with and causes crash after crash after crash.

I have tried this on two machines now and I have tried it with Maya 2018.4 and 2018.5

My hardware setup is:

AMD Threadripper 1950x
3x 1080ti Founders Edition
1x 1070 Founders Edition
32GB G-Skill 3200MHz Ram
Samsung NVME 960 Pro 512GB
Samsung NVME 960 Evo 500GB
PSU Corsair AX1500i Titanium

GeForce driver = 416.16
OS = Windows 10 64bit Enterprise
Maya 2018.4
Octane Version 4.00.0 - 13.19 ( I also tried 13.17) Made no difference.

The other machine I tried it on was:
I7 - 4770K
32GB - Corsair Vengance
Samsung SSD 256GB & 3Tb non SSD
1x 1080ti Founders Edition
1x 1070 Founders Edition
1200W Coolermaster PSU

Windows 10 Enterprise
Geforce Driver = 416.94
Maya 2018.5
Octane Version 4.00.0 - 13.19

Let me know what your thoughts are. Thanks.

[calus]

Right, this is a terrible issue in the new plugin (nothing relative to your setup) :

If any attribute of an octane node is animated, this makes Maya so slow that the scene is unworkable.
I found that even one unused animated octane node in a simple scene can slow-down Maya viewport 300 times, going from 600 fps to 2 fps

This is obviously a bug or a wrong usage of the Maya api in the Octane node implementation,
hopefully JimStar will fix this soon.

You can reduce a little the problem by setting texture quality (spp) and swatch quality (spp) to 0 in render settings.
But to be able to work with the plugin in animation production, I just NEVER animate any attribute of an Octane node :
Instead, as soon as I have an animated octane attribute, I export as ORBX and remove from the scene the object and its animated shading, and render it in the scene trough an ORBX proxy node.

[sachakogel123]

Thanks for the reply, appreciate it. I hope the octane team can sort this problem out as its really a deal breaker for me, I mean I animate texture attributes all the time in pretty much every single project I work on, I am not sure how a 3d animator can work without this functionality in the real world. I am not even going to go into the plethora of uses for animated textures but just one example is animated noise for the surface of water.

Anyways I think I found a temporary solution. If you go down to the extra Attributes drop down in an octane shader in Maya, if you click frozen it stops stuffing up your maya time slider and lets you continue with your animated life.
I am not sure why this works as the texture still visually changes in the viewport however the 60000000000x slowness of your scene falls away. I am going to test this on another scene quickly just to make sure it is actually working.