OctaneRender for DAZ Studio 2020.2-17.61 [OBSOLETE] Tweet

[BK]

This is the recommended thread for downloading, and posting any questions, suggestions or support queries for OctaneRender for DAZ Studio - TEST (ie. pre-release) and STABLE releases.

SOLUTIONS TO COMMON ISSUES

1) Make sure your NVIDIA drivers are up to date.

2) Make sure you are running the latest version of the OctaneRender for DAZStudio plugin.

3) If you experience a DAZStudio crash - deleting C:\Users\[username]\OctaneRender\Data\OctaneRender_settings.oczdb may resolve the issue.
This also resolves the "COULD NOT INITIALISE IN-MEMORY DB!" error on startup and a number of other issues.

4) If the Save button is disabled when using the Final button - disable the Final button and in Render settings select the SuperScope (2:1) Size / aspect ratio and drag the Viewport height or width until you reach required resolution.

5) If rendering an animation fails after 11 frames - make sure the DAZStudio viewport is visible when you render the animation.

6) If Octane materials are not loading when you load a previously saved scene - tick Preferences->Load OctaneRender materials from .duf user presets. If ticking this option does not stick between DAZStudio restarts, delete OctaneRender_settings.oczdb as per NOTE 3 above.

7) If you get a "Could not save a frame for X times!" - please refer to the thread at https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=66258 for potential solutions.

8) If you get a "Bogus Scene Path" error - this is due to having an apostrophe in the filepath of a texturemap (so store your textures in foldernames which do not have apostrophes).

9) Octane panel title bar is off the screen and cannot be closed - click anywhere on the Octane panel and then press Alt-F4.

10) Rendering animation results in the scene emitter intensities changing - this is because rendering animations is done in "Final" mode, where meshes are merged. To resolve this, UNTICK the Preferences->Use Combined Mesh, or ENABLE the Surface Brightness pin on each of the emission materials in the scene.

11) Denoiser is not working - make sure you have a graphics card selected for Denoising in the System tab->Open Device Settings window, and that you are using the Path Tracing kernel.

12) Render artifacts near eyebrows - this is due to the eyebrow geometry going inside the head mesh surface. So morph, move or scale the eyebrows so they do not intersect with the head mesh.

13) Octane panes do not appear on the screen (ie. they open off the screen) - Main Menu Bar->Window->Workspace->Select Layout->Accept (you might choose a different layout to the current layout to make this work).


KNOWN ISSUES AWAITING RESOLUTION

1) DAZStudio strand hair is not currently supported by the plugin. Some users have been able to get it to render using a workaround, detailed at https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=71635.

2) The Denoised Beauty pass cannot be saved when rendering an animation.

3) Multi-layer render passes cannot be saved when rendering an animation

4) Crash when opening the Viewport with loading scenes into the Octane 2020.1 version of the plugin. This is being investigated by OTOY.
The workaround is to open the Viewport on an empty scene and then load the older scene.

5) Visible Environment, Customer LUT, Panoramic camera and OSL nodes are not currently supported.

6) Reloading a scene and then opening the Viewport will not start the render. To get around this, click Pause and then Continue.

7) Smart Unfold is current disabled in the plugin, and will be re-enabled once the issues around this function are resolved.

8) The plugin will not currently Import Materials from ORBX files where there are multiple materials in the ORBX file.

9) Templating is not currently working for specular and roughness maps from Iray materials.

10) UDIM Tiles are not currently supported.

11) Instancing of Grouped items is not currently working correctly.

DAZ Studio Version
DAZ Studio 4.8 or later on Window Vista, 7, 8 or 10 64bit

To use this version, you need a GPU of compute model 3.0 or higher. Support for Fermi GPUs (like GTX 4xx and 5xx) has been dropped.
Also, make sure you use an Nvidia Studio driver of version 451.xx or higher.

Network Rendering

For Network Rendering, you must use the OctaneRender Enterprise Node release from the Octane Standalone forums/download page which matches the exact Octane version of the plugin you are using. This version matches OctaneRender Enterprise 2020.2 Node builds.

Support Issues
If you have a support issue, pls provide the following information:
- Operating System (ie. Win XP, Vista, 7, 8)
- Amount of RAM
- Graphics Card(s) - model (ie. GTX 580, 3GB)
- Nvidia driver version
- DAZ Studio version
- OctaneRender for DAZ Studio version (ie. 2.24.2.1)

- The most important part of resolving a problem is being able to reproduce that problem. So pls provide as much detail as possible in order for me to do this, and if the problem is specific to the scene, send me the scene.

Download Links

For users with an Enterprise subscription license

- OctaneRender for DAZ Studio 2020.2-17.61

For users with a Studio subscription license

- OctaneRender for DAZ Studio 2020.2-17.61

For users with a Prime/Free Tier license

- OctaneRender for DAZ Studio 2020.2-17.61

OctaneRender for DAZ Studio 2020.2-17.60 [ test ]

- Fixed Octane Plug-In is Massively Slowing Down Daz Studio
(viewtopic.php?f=44&t=75086&p=386586#p386586)
please feel free to report if there are any side effects





Happy rendering
Your OTOY team

[huakiami]

Thanks BK, this is awesome. Did some initial testing and can confirm I'm no longer seeing any slowdown when posing/working with items that have rigid follow nodes. Will test more throughout the week but so far so good!

[OneManVN]

I would also like to confirm this is a success and say thank you. This particular bug, glitch whatever it was (cancer in my case) had been plaguing my work for almost two years. It has been a constant source of anger and frustration on a daily basis. I use the plugin for work daily, 7 days a week. So, imagine dealing with this on every single scene that has no less than 5 characters and up to 15 of them at times. All of them need some adjustments before rendering. I'm grateful for the stress-free experience. I hope you continue to improve the plug-in and perhaps throw in some new features, eventually!

[Sorel]

I can also confirm items with rigid follow nodes are no longer taking forever to pose when octane is enabled. Thank you so much for this update! I have many outfits I can use again.

[BK]

hi everyone,

thanks, heaps Sorel for helping replicate the issue and our Octane Daz's dev for fixing this long-time bug.
Truly happy to hear everyone's feedback!

We are now working on debugging the path issue (viewtopic.php?f=145&t=78519)

Issue 1,2 and 4 looks like features. Does anyone remember if they even worked in one of our early builds? Please let us know

1. Strand based hair with or without dforce
The inability to use many latest hair products or LAMH for animals is really annoying
2. Templating
This is the most time consuming task, particularly with complex shaders. I would also add to this feature the ability to select a specific texture of the DAZ shader, and to be able to use colors in templates too.
3. ORBX import with multiple materials
4. Instancing

cheers

[MFindt]

Hello,

Thank you for the further development and bugfixing of the plugin. That makes courage for the future.

The point 1. Strand Based Hair is so far only usable via a workaround and that works only to 10% for me.
If Strand Based Hair works, that would be a real milestone. In the meantime, I can no longer use 50% of the hair.

I can't say much about the other points, I don't have any problems with them at the moment.

Thank you and Greetings,
Michael

[huakiami]

Hi BK,

1) Strand based hair never worked properly with the Octane plugin. This is a (relatively) new feature of DazStudio, released around June of 2019. There is currently no reliable workaround to render strand based hair in Octane.

2) The templating system allows users to have RGB, RGBA and Float image nodes pull directly from the images assigned to the Daz surface. That base functionality is and always has been working. The problem is that there seems to be a hard-coded list of Daz surface parameters that you can choose to assign the image from (see screenshot below), and that list does not include a large majority of the parameters from the Iray Uber Shader (which is the most common shader used on Daz products for the last 4-5 years). I was not around for the early days of the Daz Octane plugin, but my suspicion is that this feature was implemented when 3Delight was the primary Daz render engine and never updated after they added Iray, so most of the parameters in the list are now obsolete.

In my opinion fixing this to at least include the Iray surface parameters is a bug and should be a higher priority to fix (especially if it's as simple as just updating the seemingly hard-coded list...). Additions to the templating system like being able to template the color I agree is more of a feature request.

4) The plugin converts Daz instances to Octane scatter nodes. Overall, this is working very well and I use instancing frequently in my work, but it does have some issues - mainly when instancing parented figures and/or props.

The image below shows an example of this. I have a Genesis 8 figure with a gun parented to her right hand (the one standing on the green square). I then created 10 instances of her. The character instanced properly, but the gun she was holding did not - all 10 instances of the gun are in the exact same position randomly suspended in mid air off to the right. You can workaround this by un-parenting the gun from the character and instancing it separately, but this isn't an ideal workflow because if I decide later to change the pose or move her arms in any way, the gun will no longer move with her hand.

I can provide a scene file if that would be helpful as well, but I would say #1 and #2 issues are higher priority than this, as instancing/scattering is working very well outside of parented items.

Thanks

[sudisk]

Hello,

First thank you for fixing the Follow Rigid Node issue, as I had to undress almost all my characters before working on a pose.

#1 is definitely a deal breaker for me, as it is the only issue that prevents me to use many recent DAZ hairs and to use features like LAMH for beasts.

#2 and #3 are QoL issues mainly, but can improve workflow efficiency a lot.

#4 is a relatively minor issue that impacts animations and "final" renders.

I would add that I can confirm that the crash with the image browser is still present in this build (https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=145&t=78594)

[SiliconAya]

Thanks for the fix!


1. Strand based hair with or without dforce
Support for strand based hair was never added to the plugin and has never worked, there was a workaround, but that hasn't worked for me for a while. Not a big issues for me as strand based hair is still in the minority of new hair released and only a fraction of that looks good anyway and overall is makes up a small portion of the hair out there. However, the amount of it is growing relativity rapidly, so the longer it isn't support the more of an issue it becomes.

2. Templating
As huakiami guessed, the templating system pre-dates Iray being added to DazStudio and thus doesn't support any of the Iray shaders.

3. ORBX import with multiple materials
Never used the feature so I can't comment.

4. Instancing
Instancing mostly works, but does break under certain conditions as others have explained. I've also found that it can break in certain environments and has to be redone, Stonemasons Urban Future 7 is one such environment, part of what was instanced was off to the side by a few metres from the rest and I had to redo it all.


The plugin hasn't had any new features other than a few new Octane nodes added to it since it was released in 2014, so if a DazStudio feature is newer than that (big ones being anything Iray/Nvidia related), it's probably doesn't work with the plugin.

Personally I'd also like to see some of the newer Octane features work as well, like proper Octane material layering support (specifically the layered material, composite material and layer group nodes), UDIM support and even a proper Gradient node support.

[OneManVN]

Strand-based hair is a major issue for me personally. I had to rethink and rework two different characters that were set with some of the latest DAZ hairstyles in mind. But, when it didn't work in Octane, I had to give up on that hair and go for something simpler, instead.
It ruined what I had in mind as a creator. The point being, this would be a huge step towards making the plug-in worth every penny spent on the yearly sub, for me personally. As for when it ever worked, I can't say. All I do know is that some types of hair, work, while others do not. The hair that made me redo my work with something that was not strand-based hair, was called "Roxi hair for genesis 8" This, however, is just one example. The other that worked easily enough (with the workaround), in many cases, was called... "dForce Side Layered Messy Hair"

Perhaps there is something in one of the working hairstyles that might be of help to you BK. I would once again like to say thank you and remind you that even something that might seem small to you guys, can be a tremendous help to creators, like myself.

Just the recent fix gave me back 30%! of my time, that was being spent cursing at the screen and pacing while my cursor kept spinning as soon as I tried to move an arm or a leg on-screen (Posing characters in big scenes was a nightmare).