OctaneRender for DAZ Studio 2021.1.5 - 70 [OBSOLETE] Tweet

[toby_a]

[*]Better layer(s) support. Being able to add more than one layer, like dirt, blood, grease, sweat etc, to skin and clothing for example would be great.

Right, I see that the nodegraph editor basically has no support for layers. I've made a note to look into this.

[*]Being able to make materials that support UDIM would be nice too, specifically skin materials as Genesis figures have used UDIM for years now.

Just to make sure I'm understanding what you want here - you'd like to have a single Octane material (which would use UDIM textures) for the skin of a figure rather than having one for arms, one for legs, one for face, etc.?

These two are at the top of my wish list as well. Even just a temporary solution of hard-coding the existing materials to have 4 layer slots (or some other arbitrary number) instead of just 1 would be a huge help if implementing the layered material properly requires significant re-architecture of the plugin.

Thanks, that's a good idea. The maximum number of layers is 8, so maybe I can just add 8 empty layer pins. I'll check to make sure there are no unfortunate side effects of doing this.

And not to speak for SiliconAya but I believe you understood their request about UDIM correctly. Given the majority of us Daz artists are doing character artwork of some type and skin is notoriously difficult in 3D art in general, a lot of us spend a large amount of time just tweaking the skin materials. In Daz Studio, you can select multiple materials at once on the Surfaces pane and edit them all at the same time. If we had something like that in the plugin that would also solve this problem, but I imagine implementing UDIM is probably easier than adding a multi-edit function for materials.

Thanks for this. UDIM/Image Tiles is on the roadmap, and I'm thinking about how to improve this workflow.

[toby_a]

[*]A properly working Gradient/ramp node would be nice, although it's been mentioned before that it probably isn't possible in Daz Studio.[/list]

Do you mean support for the Gradient generator and Gradient map nodes? Or something else?

The "Gradient Map" node, currently we have a "Color Gradient" node, but that only supports a start and end colour.

Got it. The "Color Gradient" node is actually the same as "Gradient map" in standalone. What's missing is the ability to add extra control points. I'll make a note about fixing this specifically.

While I'm on a wish list, being able to use random walk and displacement together would be nice, as currently using displacement in a material that uses random walk results in the material tinting red. For example, if I add a displacement map to my random walk based skin material that adds wrinkles to the bottom of G8Fs feet, so they're not just flat, the entire leg surface/material tints red.

Are you able to share an example material, maybe in a simple scene, that shows this issue?

I've attached a super simple scene with a test displacement texture, you'll probably have to relink the texture in the arms material as I just chucked it in the zip.
The scene contains G8F with a basic flat colour random walk universal material applied and a copy of that material with the displacement added applied to the arms. In this case the arms are darker looking, but depending on the skin textures used it often looks both darker and red tinted.

Things I've noticed:
- I exported it as a orbx and opened it in standalone and the issue persists their, so maybe it's more of a Octane issue than a plugin issue.
- In the "texture displacement" node, the "level of detail" settings changes how strong the effect is, with smaller resolutions being stronger.

Thank you for the sample. I can reproduce this issue in standalone as well. I'll follow up internally to see if this is a bug or expected. Vertex displacement is generally preferred over texture displacement if you're able to use it, and, as @huakiami points out, doesn't have this issue.

[MyRho]

Hi, Toby.

Sorry - but that happened to ALL old scenes I tried to open.
And same happened whenever I wanted to start a new scene.
Loaded a standard G8F/M into the xcene, didn't change anything, started octane, an.... "building geometry".
After goiung back to the old version all is working fine.

MyRho

Installed it and tested it using some old scenes or loading a new one.

"Building geometry" - that's all.
Won't render any scene here.

GTX 3060/Win 10 Pro, newest drivers

Going back to the old version.

Yes, can confirm the same crash with old scenes, gone back to the earlier version and all works fine with old scenes.

Hi @MyRho and @RGUS, thank you for trying it out and reporting this problem. Are you able to share a scene that doesn't work in the new version? The scenes I've tried seem to work OK. Feel free to DM me if you don't want to share publicly.

Thanks,
Toby.

[toby_a]

Hi, Toby.

Sorry - but that happened to ALL old scenes I tried to open.
And same happened whenever I wanted to start a new scene.
Loaded a standard G8F/M into the xcene, didn't change anything, started octane, an.... "building geometry".
After goiung back to the old version all is working fine.

Oh, that is strange. Have you tried deleting the C:\Users\[username]\OctaneRender\Data\OctaneRender_settings.oczdb file?

[toby_a]

I've released a new version that fixes a crash during startup that some users were seeing: viewtopic.php?f=44&t=80196.

[toby_a]

I've attached a super simple scene with a test displacement texture, you'll probably have to relink the texture in the arms material as I just chucked it in the zip.
The scene contains G8F with a basic flat colour random walk universal material applied and a copy of that material with the displacement added applied to the arms. In this case the arms are darker looking, but depending on the skin textures used it often looks both darker and red tinted.

Things I've noticed:
- I exported it as a orbx and opened it in standalone and the issue persists their, so maybe it's more of a Octane issue than a plugin issue.
- In the "texture displacement" node, the "level of detail" settings changes how strong the effect is, with smaller resolutions being stronger.

Thank you for the sample. I can reproduce this issue in standalone as well. I'll follow up internally to see if this is a bug or expected. Vertex displacement is generally preferred over texture displacement if you're able to use it, and, as @huakiami points out, doesn't have this issue.

Just to let you know, this interaction between Random walk and Texture displacement is a known issue with OctaneRender core and there is no workaround other than using Vertex displacement or a Scattering medium (or manually adjusting the colours so that they match, I guess). We haven't yet determined whether this is a bug that can be fixed or if it's inherent in the implementation of the Random walk medium, but there's nothing the Daz plugin can do about it either way.

Sorry about that!

[SiliconAya]

That's disappointing, but considering it had been around for so long not unexpected.

Unfortunately, so far from my quick test, vertex displacement just isn't usable, I ran out of VRAM (the mesh got unloaded from VRAM, moved to OoC memory and RTX was disabled) before I got a good enough quality looking displacement due to the amount of subdivision needed to get smoothish looking result. I also found you have to apply vertex displacement to the full figure rather than just say the arms, as you get both displacement level seams (as in different hight levels) and the rest of the G8 figure went semi-transparent when I apply subdivision via vertex displacement node just on the arms.

I'll have to do some further testing with other displacement maps and see what the results are like.