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Sighman wrote:I was wondering if you are doing anything special to keep the texture counts under control? I notice you loaded the Streats of Asia 2 scene and in my testing using the export/import into Octane standalone there are more textures than Octane supports. I had to use the texture atlas to combine textures and generate a new UV set. What did you do to get the scene to fit?

Also, are you supporting the new instancing capabilities of DS4.5?

Also, are you storing all the octane material settings/node graph in the scene file (.daz/.duf)?

Oh man, I am so excited about this right now...

there are indeed some things that the plugin does, to utilize the available vram as good as possible, while also respecting texture limits; like preferring the octane "image" type for smaller images even if they are b/w (like for bumpmaps), or keeping only a single instance and type for each image, since mats often use the diffuse map for bump also (what of course wastes vram and maxes out the "floatimage" limit also).

one thing to note is, that octane itself "unites" texture maps; you can use the same image in as much different pin nodes you like - as long as you use the same node type (e.g. image/floatimage), it'll require the needed vram only once.

if you take streets of asia 2 for example, you'll find a whopping total of 243 materials in the surfaces tab, but in fact theses are only 62 different shaders, using a total of "only" 90 textures; means you can still render this without dropping maps out, and using a decent film size, the scene uses less than 400 megabytes vram - if the map assignment is optimized. of course a painful task if done by hand, but the plugin will do that for you

about ds4.5 instancing: since the new octane engine supports instancing, this will happen, but definitely not in v1.0

last but not least yes, all octane data is stored within the scene. the saved data is also interchangeable between ds versions, as long as studio itself can read the file...

I really can't wait for this, I picked up the standalone beta and a new video card in anticipation of the Daz plugin.

some output tests;
stonemason's "dark side of the city" plus the daz elephant;
loaded, rendered with defaults and pmc, 1.5mins total (loading, clicking the button, waiting & watching

again stonemason and a bunch of his city ruins,
material defaults, as created by the plugin, plus some imager settings; 1.5min render time with pmc:


ps: done with 2x gtx 580

some numbers about the city ruins images:

• 204 daz materials,
• a total of 148 textures
• used 230 times

after conversion & optimization:

• the number of textures was reduced to the maximum of 96
• and these were used 116 times
• within 129 created octane materials

vram usage was a little above 300mb...

very exciting stuff thanks for sharing the info. it seems like the plugin is handling the materials very well.

larsmidnatt wrote:very exciting stuff thanks for sharing the info. it seems like the plugin is handling the materials very well.

... well it does, what is possible. this will serve at least as a good starting point and free you of a lot cumbersome preparing tasks. but the mats are still very basic, compared to what you can achieve by tweaking them manually afterwards.

but it should be way more fun exploring octane's possibilities, if you don't need to start from zero

Looking forward to the release.

t_3 wrote:... well it does, what is possible. this will serve at least as a good starting point and free you of a lot cumbersome preparing tasks. but the mats are still very basic, compared to what you can achieve by tweaking them manually afterwards.

but it should be way more fun exploring octane's possibilities, if you don't need to start from zero

I hear ya, tweaking is the fun part. Prep is tedious. The way I see the sample renders suggest that in some cases the less important elements of the scene might be able to be left alone completely depending on the focus of the render. So you can spend time on the important stuff Can't wait.

daz plugin sounds great

t_3 wrote:some numbers about the city ruins images:

after conversion & optimization:

• the number of textures was reduced to the maximum of 96
• and these were used 116 times
• within 129 created octane materials

one question though re above
even after conversion you've got 96 textures which means it's over the 64 textures limit, so I assume that's image and float images so you've maxed out the 64/32 limit

which is nice if you just want to render an environment, but what if you want to add a figure, god forbid multiple figures with clothes? which is usually the case with daz scenes of course.
That's the issue I always run into.

petermax wrote:which is nice if you just want to render an environment, but what if you want to add a figure, god forbid multiple figures with clothes? which is usually the case with daz scenes of course.
That's the issue I always run into.

your guess ist of course right, 96 meant 64 images + 32 floatimages.

clearly the plugin can not work miracles (currently) if you run into the limits, you need to do something based on your knowledge of the scene, and what you want to achieve. since i have done a lot daz to octane exports myself, i'm pretty aware of all the problems you may encounter, while building complex scenes; so i just tried to build the plugin in a way it'll help minimizing time-consuming steps preparing materials.

what can you do:

• you can re-run the conversion - it'll always keep an up-to-date prioritized list of textures and will create new materials based on this list
• if you haven't tweaked your materials yet, you're perfectly fine, as it will generate just a complete new set
• if you want to keep some tweaked mats, you may do the conversion
  ... for some selected mats only,
  ... for for all that are currently missing
  note: even if you convert all mats anew, the current mats are not overwritten, just unlinked
• and since you can pick maps directly from the daz textures list, it'll be still fast if you do manually assign them
• also the main "material room" - where you link/unlink mats to mesh node pins - is built in a way, that you can connect groups of pins to single octane mats with a few clicks (e.g. much faster than in the standalone)
• furthermore, if you look at the material nodegraph editor, you will also have a list af all already created octane nodes, so you can re-use image texture nodes just by dragging them into a new material
• another little helper is a function to replace only the maps of an octane mat, against some newly applied in daz studio
• the last hopefully helpful thing is an overview tab, where you see all currently used maps, and how and where they are applied

i like to add, that material creation is of course the key for good looking renders, and since this is a most complex task, it'll always need a human brain to be done well - the plugin can only help to accomplish this with fewer clicks (and time) like needed i.e. with an export into the standalone.

btw, in future versions of octane, there might be the possibility to balance the limit between images/floatimages (lets say 48:48), and with kepler and cuda 5 the limits may also be raised (but still not completely taken off).

based on the success of the plugin, there might also be future enhancements, like on-the-fly resizing and automatic texture maps; so let's hope it'll sell well