Lights won't transfer to render Tweet

[Lightray]

I have some models of interiors, that have lighting settings. When rendered in Octane, the lighting does not transfer over to the set. Is this normal?
How do I get lights to show up in the set, if they are poser lights? The model is dark and the only way to get light into the model is to remove the roof from the model parts listing.

[face_off]

Hi Lightray

You can either set the Poser material ambient_value of the set geometry lights to > 1, in which case they will import into your Octane scene as emitters - or you can import them as you are and manually convert the materials to emitters. The former is probably easier. An ambient_value around 5 is a good starting point. If you have already loaded the Poser scene into the Octane plugin, remember to re-import all the materials (right click option in the Material Tab).

Hope that helps.

Paul

[Lightray]

I was able to import the Poser lights as emitters, which seems to work fine. However, as the rendering gets half way through, (360/677) the Nvidia card crashes. What should I do? Buy a another GTX260 or better card and add it to the system or get a higher end card like a GTX 650. Would that stop the problem? The error message is "Video card driver failed", which makes no sense since I just updated the video driver to the latest version when I installed Octane. I'm at a loss to figure this out.

[face_off]

"Video card driver failed"

That sounds like a Windows error - I suggest initially trying the regedit change suggested in the first post of this thread. When you run the plugin, go to the Cuda Devices tab, and pls let me know what compute model your card is displaying (I've seen reports of old compute model 1 cards having issues with Octane, but 2.1 onwards should be fine). You can also check the cuda.log file in your Poser temp folder to see if the Octane engine received an error.

The GTX260 seems to be roughly the same spec as my 550Ti (192 cores) - however it's a few generations older - so you wouldn't get another. The generation 500 cards (if you can still get them) or generation 600 cards (ie. GTX 660 onwards) are the recommended performance cards.

Hope that helps.

Paul

[Lightray]

Hummm!.... My CUDA compute model is 1.3, so I guess that's the problem?
I suppose I may have to update to a new card then.

[face_off]

Hummm!.... My CUDA compute model is 1.3, so I guess that's the problem?

That is probably the issue. Check the cuda.log anyway, and also make the regedit chance - you never know - they may help.

Paul

[Erick]

Not wanting to start a new topic, so I'll ask here, since my Q is about lights, too.

In Poser, we have the "Spot Lights". With these lights, we can adjust things like "Angle End" and/or "Angle Start".
Is there a way, to do this in Octane, or via the Plug-In, as well?
Specifically asked, can I adjust or control the angle of the light cone, of an emitter (or an emitter, made from the Poser lights, via the provided script), just like a spot light can do? So that I can kind of "aim" at a certain point of an object or in a set up, instead of lighting up the whole scene.

[Lightray]

I'm new to the CGI world, and far from knowledgeable in the subject, but I got comfortable with the way Poser works pretty quickly when I started with it two years ago. When I saw Octane for Poser, I thought it was a perfect marriage. However, like any marriage, it always seems like a good idea at first, until you start living with it. I'm not as excited about it as I was a week ago.

I have issues with the way the lighting works in Octane. I'm not satisfied with the limits of the lighting. Making the lighting profile transfer from Poser to Octane in realtime would be a HUGE boost for this plug in. Lighting models in the plug in leaves me with a headache. Perhaps this is an issue you should address for the updated versions. Lighting a scene in Poser and having the ability to see the lighting effect on the object in realtime in the plug in window, would allow much more flexibility in the workflow. Making emitters out of the Poser lights is less than ideal. The Poser lighting info doesn't transfer, so you need to make the adjustments manually in the plug in, which is just more steps in the process and doesn't give the same results. Color, intensity, and shadows would be good, if they transferred to Octane from Poser directly.

I have been working with this software for over a week now, and I've just upgraded my video card to a GTX650Ti and it improved performance a great deal. But I still have issues with the look of the renders in Octane not looking as good as Keyshot 3.0 renders, which I also use and it does basically the same realtime rendering but it has a very easy interface and the renders look fantastic. However, it's animation interface is not worth the hassle. If I had a software with the animation rendering capability of Octane, and the easy interface of Keyshot, I would be more than pleased.

I find the Octane Render interface to be confusing and less than comfortable.

[face_off]

In response to the above 2 comments....where in Poser we are used to adding and tweaking lights imitate real life lighting, in Octane it's the opposite - just use the real lights! Think like a photographer, not a 3g person.

An outdoor scene will potentially use the sunlight lighting (in the environment node) and won't need any Poser lights.

An indoor scene can be lit purely from a imagemap (again, plugin into the environment node). This requires no Poser lights or emitters.

An indoor scene can also be lit from the geometry that represents the lights (ie. candle flames, lightglobes, etc). These will generally not be Poser lights - they will be props in the scene.

However, if you are setting up a photographers type lighting set (ie. for a full body or portrait render), you will have the same lighting the photographers - for example a large reflector either side of the camera plus a fill light off to the left or right. These would all be emitter geometry (so you the script to generate these from the lights, or use the standard "one sided square" prop from the Poser primitives.

[face_off]

An example of an outdoor scene lit via the sunlight system.