OctaneRender® for Poser beta - build 1.02s [OBSOLETE] Tweet

[face_off]

Hi Ken

A V4 figure with a hair prop and some cloths on my system is only around 15 grayscale slots, so I wonder if you are using some specific which is using up all the slots? I also use a turbulence node instead of bump map on my skin materials, so the requirement drops.

SUGGESTION 1: Octane plugin should have an option to convert selected "floatimage" into an "image" node whenever possible to save grayscale slots. I have only 32 slots, and other users with lesser cards might have even less.

Good suggestion. I'll include this in the next release. Also, no card has less than 32 grayscale slots. ALL pre-600 series cards have 32 grayscale slots.

SUGGESTION 2: When a material node that uses a texture map is changed to another node type that also requires a texture map, the current one should be automatically reused. In my attempts, I am asked to go hunt for whatever texture map was there before from a long list or from disk.

At the moment - if you change a "glossy" to a "diffuse", the texturemap names are retained. However you are correct, changing a "floatimage" to an "image" does not retain the maps (and it should). I will fix this in the next version.

Paul

[Ken1171]

A V4 figure with a hair prop and some cloths on my system is only around 15 grayscale slots, so I wonder if you are using some specific which is using up all the slots? I also use a turbulence node instead of bump map on my skin materials, so the requirement drops.

My guess is that this clothing has 5 pieces of garments, each with at least 2 transmaps and respective bump maps, plus a hair with at least 4 transmaps, and the V4 skin shader with specular + bump maps. This makes for a whole bunch of grayscale maps, all connected to "floatimage" nodes. In my attempts to replace some bump maps with procedural Octane maps, I tried to use the "marble" node with little success. I will follow your advice and try "turbulence" instead, except for lip bump because that one cannot be just random.

Today I made another render, and I am finding it hard to choose what the "eye surface" and "cornea" material should be. I noticed that in Octane, you cannot make a material reflective if the opacity is set to zero, and if it's not zero it ends up making the eyes look dark. Firefly is biased, so there was no problem making a material create reflection and highlights even when it's 100% transparent, but how do we do this in an unbiased renderer like Octane? If it's transparent, the eyes have no highlights. If it's not, they get entirely black with reflections and highlights. Any ideas on how to add eye reflections and highlights without turning them black?

[face_off]

My guess is that this clothing has 5 pieces of garments, each with at least 2 transmaps and respective bump maps, plus a hair with at least 4 transmaps, and the V4 skin shader with specular + bump maps. This makes for a whole bunch of grayscale maps, all connected to "floatimage" nodes. In my attempts to replace some bump maps with procedural Octane maps, I tried to use the "marble" node with little success. I will follow your advice and try "turbulence" instead, except for lip bump because that one cannot be just random.

OK - that's a lot of maps! 20 alone for the clothing. Your options are 1) Using a more economical clothing figure, or 2) strip out the clothing bump maps that are not needed (can the trans and bump maps be shared?), or 3) Get a 600 series card. Unless you are doing close-ups, you are unlikely to see the bump map detail. I looked through your Devianart site - and most of your render where full body shots, where the clothing bump make little difference to the rendered outcome. Also, using clothing with transmaps is never going to give a top quality result. Holes in clothing should be achieved with geometry rather than transmaps if you are looking for commercial quality rendering.

The general rule is....minimise the maps on the clothing, and then save the Octane nodes back to the Poser material, so that when you next use it you don't have to go through that process again.

I have just fixed the bug where changing the floatimage node to an image node lost the texturemap name - so that should help you a little.

For a turbulence bump, you'll need a high scale (it was 6 months ago, by from memory it might have been around 30). You'll need to tweak the power too.

Today I made another render, and I am finding it hard to choose what the "eye surface" and "cornea" material should be. I noticed that in Octane, you cannot make a material reflective if the opacity is set to zero, and if it's not zero it ends up making the eyes look dark. Firefly is biased, so there was no problem making a material create reflection and highlights even when it's 100% transparent, but how do we do this in an unbiased renderer like Octane? If it's transparent, the eyes have no highlights. If it's not, they get entirely black with reflections and highlights. Any ideas on how to add eye reflections and highlights without turning them black?

Check this thread for eye info and hints...http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=28280.

Paul

[Ken1171]

Get a 600 series card.

I always wanted to ask this to someone who actually has a GTX680: early reviews claimed the CUDA performance was poor comparing to the GTX580, no matter if the prior had doubled or tripled the number of stream processors. Has that improved in any way? Last time I checked, nVidia was promising it would "eventually" improve with better drivers, but when will "eventually" be?

The general rule is....minimise the maps on the clothing, and then save the Octane nodes back to the Poser material, so that when you next use it you don't have to go through that process again.

Yeah, that much is clear to me by now. It hasn't been 6 months since I bought the GTX580, so I can't afford another video card anytime soon...

I have just fixed the bug where changing the floatimage node to an image node lost the texturemap name - so that should help you a little.

Awesome news! When will it be available?

For a turbulence bump, you'll need a high scale (it was 6 months ago, by from memory it might have been around 30). You'll need to tweak the power too.

Alright, I will check the other thread about eye surface too. Seems like that has been a common issue with unbiased rendering because Poser techniques won't work here.

[face_off]

New version posted. Pls see http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=29286.

[Ken1171]

Even though my plugin registration is no longer being deleted, I am still having that error when I start Poser after a Windows file clean-up sweep.

==================================================================
An errror occurred importing addon OctaneRender for Poser :
ERROR: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: u'C:\\Users\\Ken\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\Poser Pro\\9\\octaneplugin.log'
==================================================================

Looks like the plugin is still trying to access the "octaneplugin.log" file when it starts up, and also when I am editing materials in Octane. Several times when I was editing materials, I've got the message above. If I ignore the messages and keep working on the materials, at some point Poser itself will crash and I loose everything I didn't save.

Since the log file has been deleted by Windows (it's in a TEMP folder), the plugin fails to load when I run Poser. Restarting Poser seems to fix the start-up problem, but I still get errors when editing materials.

[face_off]

Hi Ken

This looks like a Poser bug - since the Windows cleanup should not be deleting files form the Poser temp folder.

The easy solution is to go into Poser -> Edit -> General Preferences -> Misc and change the Poser temp folder to be somewhere that Windows is not going to delete files from.

Paul