FAQ - Loading and converting DAZ Studio materials

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FAQ - Loading and converting DAZ Studio materials

Postby linvanchene » Sat Aug 09, 2014 11:29 am

linvanchene Sat Aug 09, 2014 11:29 am
When loading and converting DAZ Studio materials into the OctaneRender plugin for DS you are facing two options:

- Either you let the plugin load all materials and convert them automatically.

In that case you risk that more textures are loaded than VRAM space is available.

or

- You manually manage which materials are loaded.

In that case you may need to invest more time for manual selections but have better control over which textures are loaded and updated.

- - -

Which setting is controlling if DAZ Studio materials are loaded automatically and converted to OctaneRender materials?


In the OctaneRender plugin for DS Preferences Tab you find the option

"Automatic material updates after content loads"

If you remove this checkmark only the geometry and no textures are loaded when you open the OCDS viewport.

- When you open the OCDS viewport all the geometry will be displayed in a default gray material.
- This also means that whenever you change DAZ Studio materials those texture changes will not automatically be updated in the OCDS viewport. :!:
- If you change DAZ Studio materials while working on the scene you will need to reload them manually each time with any method explained below.

Automatic material updates after content loads - deactivated only loads geometry.jpg



Why would you want to deactivate the automatic loading and converting of DAZ Studio Materials?

Especially if you are working on an older workstation with a GPU that has only 1 or 2 GB of VRAM you will notice that many scenes will be larger than your VRAM.

If the scene is larger then your VRAM it can happen that the plugin

- is stuck in an infinite loading loop.
- materials are loaded and converted randomly with some surfaces remaining untextured.
- the diffuse channel may be converted from the colored type "image" to "floatimage" which will transform all textures into grayscale to save VRAM space.

By deactivating "Automatic material updates after content loads" you load only the geometry of the scene.
You can now use a manual workflow to better control which textures are loaded in which quality.

The basic idea is to load only those textures that are actually visible in the viewport.

There is not much point in loading any textures that are not visible in the final render.
If you are using reflective surfaces you may also want to load those surfaces that show up in the reflections.

- - -

Use the tool "Select DAZ Surfaces & Octane Materials" in the OCDS viewport to select any untextured surface.

If you deactivated "Automatic material updates after content loads" when you open up the OCDS viewport for the first time only the geometry will be loaded.

In the OCDS viewport the third icon of the left switches to the tool

"Select DAZ Surfaces & Octane Materials"

With that tool active you can click on any surface in the OCDS viewport.
In the OctaneRender plugin material tab the surface you clicked will be selected.

Select DAZ Surfaces & Octane Materials.jpg


If you are opening the OCDS viewport for the first time on a new scene the surface names will be written in orange.
This means that no materials are yet assigned to that surface.



In the OCDS material tab right click on any surface and select "Create as new material - Auto Material" to reload the DS materials for that surface.

To manually load any DAZ materials of a surface and convert them into OctaneRender materials all you have to do is to right click on the surface and select

"Create as new material - Auto Material".

Right click - Create as new material - Auto Material.jpg


What does the automatic conversion from DAZ Studio to OctaneRender materials do?

The OctaneRender plugin will automatically load and convert any standard DS materials.
In most cases the plugin is able to detect if the DS material is a matte material and convert it to a OctaneRender "Diffuse" material or if it is a reflective material and convert it to a OctaneRender "Glossy" material.

If you quickly want to convert a "Diffuse" material to a "Glossy" material you can do that in the Node Graph Editor (NGE) by simply changing the type from "Diffuse" to "Glossy". Most maps will stay in the same slots but you will get the additional options that are exclusive to "Glossy" materials.

Because the native DAZ Studio render engine 3Delight uses a different node system than OctaneRender not all shaders can be converted. Any 3Delight exclusive shader setups will in most cases be converted to a much simpler basic material setup.

Especially Shaders with Subsurface Scattering (SSS) will most likely be transformed into a "Diffuse" material.
You will have to do additonal work to transform them manually into an OctaneRender "Specular" material with SSS.

- - -

If the conversion is successful you can immediately see the change in the OctaneRender for DS plugin viewport.

Auto material loaded for Stairs2.jpg


The surface Stairs2 is written in white in the Materials Tab Scene surface list to indicate that a material is now assigned to that surface.
Grass and StonesSmall are still written in orange because those surfaces have not yet an OctaneRender material assigned to them.


Use CTRL and SHIFT in combination with mouse clicks to select multiple surfaces at the same time to load them together.

As in most software you can use CTRL and SHIFT in combination with mouse clicks to make selections.

"Holding CTRL + left mouse button click" will add multiple surfaces to the current selection with each click. Click on the same surface again while holding CTRL to remove a surface from the selection.
"Holding SHIFT + left mouse click" will add all surfaces to the selection between the first and the last surface you clicked.
You can combine both methods to quickly create the selection of surfaces you want.

After you have selected those surfaces you want you can right click on the current selection and choose

"Create as new Material - Auto material"

use SHIFT and CTRL to select multiple surfaces and right click.jpg


All surfaces that are in your current selection are marked in orange with black writing.

- - -
Last edited by linvanchene on Sat Aug 09, 2014 11:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: FAQ - Loading and converting DAZ Studio materials

Postby linvanchene » Sat Aug 09, 2014 11:29 am

linvanchene Sat Aug 09, 2014 11:29 am
Use "Missing - Create as Auto Materials" to quickly load and convert all missing materials

In some cases you still may want to have a quick way to load all remaining DS materials for the surfaces that were not yet converted into OctaneRender materials.

In the OCDS material tab you can find the button

"Missing - Create as Auto Materials"

Clicking this button will load any DS materials on all surfaces that still have no material assigned and convert them into OctaneRender materials.

Missing - Create as auto materials.jpg


Be carefull using this option if you have not much VRAM left.

If you have enough VRAM available your scene should be textured completly with all DS materials loaded and converted into OctaneRender materials.

While the plugin does a great job converting the materials and providing a reasonable default setting you may still be able to improve the result by experimenting with the values of bump, normal, displacement.
For "Glossy" materials experiment with specular and roughness settings.
Try adding some SSS to some volumes.

Use the OCDS System tab to get information about available VRAM space

In general while loading textures it may help to have a quick look at the available VRAM space in the OCDS system tab.

check the OCDS system tab to see how much VRAM is used by the scene.jpg



In the OCDS textures tab you can resize any textures to 1/2, 1/3, or 1/4 of their original size.

One of the most overlooked features may be to actually lower the size of the textures directly inside the OCDS texture tab. The feature may be hidden away on first glance.

Clicking on the first column "resize" in the OCDS textures tab will open a pulldown menu.
The texture can be resized to 1/2, 1/3 or 1/4 and will take less space in the VRAM.
The original texture size is not lost and can be quickly restored by selecting the default size of 1 again.

Use the resize function on the OCDS textures tab to lower the amount of VRAM used.jpg


Try to resize those textures of objects in the background.
In many cases 1/4 is enough.
Especially if you are rendering scenes with a low depth of field there is not much point of having detailed textures on the blurred objects.

- - -
- - -

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Re: FAQ - Loading and converting DAZ Studio materials

Postby wendyluvscatz » Sat Sep 06, 2014 11:06 am

wendyluvscatz Sat Sep 06, 2014 11:06 am
Thanks for this
I bought Octane for DS today and was first thing I noticed, the textures too much
I get the same issue with iClone and have to reduce them
8-)
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Re: FAQ - Loading and converting DAZ Studio materials

Postby Spectralis » Sat Sep 06, 2014 5:16 pm

Spectralis Sat Sep 06, 2014 5:16 pm
wendyluvscatz wrote:Thanks for this
I bought Octane for DS today and was first thing I noticed, the textures too much
I get the same issue with iClone and have to reduce them
8-)


Congrats on joining our fold! This is a great forum and linvanchene (and others) have posted some really helpful information and tutorials which have helped me a lot to understand different aspects of the plugin.
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Re: FAQ - Loading and converting DAZ Studio materials

Postby Veneris » Sun Nov 09, 2014 6:39 am

Veneris Sun Nov 09, 2014 6:39 am
Thanks, I needed to know this. This is not in the manual.
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Re: FAQ - Loading and converting DAZ Studio materials

Postby Spectralis » Sun Nov 23, 2014 9:25 pm

Spectralis Sun Nov 23, 2014 9:25 pm
I'm having problems with loading scenes I created on my old PC on my new PC. The "automatic material updates after content loads" is switched "OFF" on the new PC but the scene loads with all of its materials.

I really don't want this to happen and it never happened on the old PC. Every time I loaded a scene I was working on I had to manually auto load the materials which suited me fine. Now they load automatically.

I have DAZ 4.7 and OR 1.2 on both machines witrh duplicate content folders.

Do I need to switch off "Load Octane materials from .duf user presets" as well?
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Re: FAQ - Loading and converting DAZ Studio materials

Postby sikotik13 » Sun Nov 23, 2014 9:39 pm

sikotik13 Sun Nov 23, 2014 9:39 pm
Assuming you don't have the icons on your main bar, you can go to Render>OctaneRender Materials and set that to manual. Should load only the geometry. If you do have the icons, just click the Octane one with auto or .duf over it until it says man. if that doesn't work, I'm not sure what's wrong, since that's how I troubleshoot mats that causes crashes, and it always functions correctly for me, regardless of what the system tab says.

Edit: I clearly don't pay enough attention to the preferences tab, as all that changes is also unchecking the box for "Load Octane materials from .duf user presets." Apparently, this setting loads mats saved with the .duf, even if auto loading is off. I presume this means that auto is only for conversion of mats, and doesn't apply to saved mats. Sorry if you already tried this and I missed it.
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Re: FAQ - Loading and converting DAZ Studio materials

Postby linvanchene » Mon Nov 24, 2014 10:06 pm

linvanchene Mon Nov 24, 2014 10:06 pm
edited and removed by user
Last edited by linvanchene on Thu Dec 11, 2014 11:58 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Re: FAQ - Loading and converting DAZ Studio materials

Postby sikotik13 » Mon Nov 24, 2014 10:36 pm

sikotik13 Mon Nov 24, 2014 10:36 pm
As I explained in the edit on that post, it's just a less buried toggle for the options in the preference tab, specifically, it unchecks the "load materials from .duf files" and unchecks the auto generate/convert materials boxes. If unchecking those boxes manually is not fixing your error, the equivalent to a shortcut to perform that same operation will likely do you no good.
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Re: FAQ - Loading and converting DAZ Studio materials

Postby linvanchene » Mon Nov 24, 2014 10:43 pm

linvanchene Mon Nov 24, 2014 10:43 pm
The material conversion states AUTO, DUF, MAN

AUTO

"Automatic material updates when content loads" - ON
"Load OctaneRender materials from .duf user presets" - ON


AUTO.jpg


This is a useful setting if you do want to fully rely on the material auto conversion of the plugin and have enough VRAM to handle even large scenes.
In auto mode any Iray or 3Delight DAZ Studio materials are converted the moment you load a new object into the scene.



- - -
DUF

"Automatic material updates when content loads" - OFF
"Load OctaneRender materials from .duf user presets" - ON

DUF.jpg


This setting is useful if you have limited VRAM and want to only load the geometry of new objects added to the scene.
The basic idea is to manually load the materials of one scene object after the other with the help of the tools described on the first page of this thread.

Scenes with objects that already have OctaneRender materials set up do load with the materials.



- - -

MAN

"Automatic material updates when content loads" - OFF
"Load OctaneRender materials from .duf user presets" - ON


MAN.jpg


This setting is useful when you want to make sure that all objects that are loaded will only include the geometry even if you created some custom OctaneRender materials before.
There is no automatic loading and converting of materials at all.

When loading scene objects that already had some OctaneRender materials set up the materials will not be loaded.

- - -

3 Ways to toggle between AUTO, DUF, MAN

There currently are three ways to toggle between the three states AUTO, DUF, MAN

- In the OctaneRender plugin for DAZ Studio preferences tab you can add and remove checkmarks for "Automatic material updates when content loads" and "Load OctaneRender materials from .duf user presets" manually.

- In the DAZ Studio user interface tool bar the current state should be displayed as a button that switches between the three stages when clicked.

AUTO mode.jpg

DUF mode.jpg

MAN mode.jpg


The button is only displayed when the tool bar "Viewport tools" is toggled on for the current activity in the "Customize DAZ Studio" window. F3.
compare:
viewtopic.php?f=44&t=54959&p=280836#p280836

- In the DAZ Studio user interface "Render" main menu the option to switch between the three states can be found as action called "OctaneRender materials".

-
OctaneRender materials switch.jpg


- - -
Last edited by linvanchene on Wed Jun 29, 2016 5:28 am, edited 8 times in total.
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