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NEW : Preview of OctaneRender 1.5

PostPosted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 3:34 am
by RayTracey
Howdy folks!

It's been quite a while since our last release, but as abstrax elaborately explained in this development update, Octane had to be completely taken apart to its elementary building blocks and carefully reassembled piece by piece - which turned out to be a humongous amount of work - to accommodate some very powerful new features that will make Octane slicker than ever and extremely attractive for animation rendering.

One of these brand spanking new features is support for the Alembic file format which is coming in OctaneRender 1.5. Alembic is rapidly becoming the standard in the vfx industry to efficiently store a baked representation of animated scene data (i.e. animated vertex positions and animated transforms that result from an arbitrarily complex animation and simulation process). With Octane 1.5, it will be possible to render an animation that was exported from your favourite modeling app to the Alembic format with the Octane standalone version or send it off to the cloud for blazingly fast rendering with Octane Cloud edition.

One of the more fundamental changes in Octane 1.5 is the addition of the concept of time represented in the UI by a time slider and shutter time attribute, which allow you to scrub through an animation in real-time with motion blur (only camera motion blur in Octane 1.5):

alembic_test2.png
alembic_cam_moblur.png


In the following video (rendered in real-time on 4x GTX 680), we've imported a camera path that was originally created in Maya and exported to Alembic format. We can preview the animation in real-time and alter the shutter speed, resulting in more or less camera motion blur. (the animation scrubbing is actually much smoother in real life (~25 fps) than what you see in the video because of full screen capturing).




More previews to come soon, so stay seated/tuned... (moving/deformable meshes and primary visibility are next)

Cheers!

The OctaneRender team

Re: NEW : Preview of OctaneRender 1.5 Alembic file support

PostPosted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 3:44 am
by ch0pper
I think I may have wet my self :D

Re: NEW : Preview of OctaneRender 1.5 Alembic file support

PostPosted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 3:46 am
by FrankPooleFloating
Wow RT!!.. very cool! :lol:

Will there be an animation render target that will save out sequence frames (png, exr etc)?

Re: NEW : Preview of OctaneRender 1.5 Alembic file support

PostPosted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 5:05 am
by RayTracey
FrankPooleFloating wrote:Wow RT!!.. very cool! :lol:

Will there be an animation render target that will save out sequence frames (png, exr etc)?


Thanks! The new scripting feature that is also coming in Octane 1.5 will allow you to render and save image sequences and specify every parameter per frame of the animation such as the amount of samples per pixel, sun position, DOF, post processing fx, white balance, ... You could also render for example only each 3rd frame for fast previews. With scripting the possibilities are virtually endless, it's very powerful.

Re: NEW : Preview of OctaneRender 1.5 Alembic file support

PostPosted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 6:01 am
by pixelrush
Cool!
Would it be possible to leverage this to enter a series of way points for a fly-through camera path (smooth curve)? Sort of like using 'empties' in Blender or perhaps like 'instances' in Octane....ie a null point able to be moved/edited and then scrubbed through to verify the intent. I guess I mean is it likely Octane will have some basic animation capability within it? I think this capabilty was hypothesised back when @radiance was around.

Re: NEW : Preview of OctaneRender 1.5 Alembic file support

PostPosted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 6:34 am
by RayTracey
pixelrush wrote:Cool!
Would it be possible to leverage this to enter a series of way points for a fly-through camera path (smooth curve)? Sort of like using 'empties' in Blender or perhaps like 'instances' in Octane....ie a null point able to be moved/edited and then scrubbed through to verify the intent. I guess I mean is it likely Octane will have some basic animation capability within it? I think this capabilty was hypothesised back when @radiance was around.


Yes, it's possible through scripting. You can either feed the script a camera position/angle for each frame or write a function that smoothly interpolates between a few viewpoints/angles. You can also move objects along a scripted path (I've tried it and it works great, it's crazy what's possible with scripting). In the unlikely event that you don't want to learn Lua scripting, we will provide a few sample scripts that you can muck around with and extend to your liking.

Re: NEW : Preview of OctaneRender 1.5 Alembic file support

PostPosted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 7:13 am
by ch0pper
ok just a quick question if you could answer this for me

Hypothetically if I have an entire scene that say in 3-D studio Max with octane plug-in

Could I export that entire scene to say cinema 4D.

And it would export all the cameras all the lighting all the objects all the shaders.

etc?

(Yes I do understand this is just for the stand-alone version at this time but I would expect this to be exported out into the plug-ins at some point)

Re: NEW : Preview of OctaneRender 1.5 Alembic file support

PostPosted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 8:03 am
by pixelrush
> yes its possible

well I guess I am going to be learning Lua then... :D

keep up the good work guys. looking forward to Otoy's xmas present.... :)

Re: NEW : Preview of OctaneRender 1.5 Alembic file support

PostPosted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:13 am
by PolderAnimation
I am not sure if I understand correctly but is it also possible to scrub through animated vertex positions and animated transforms?
Or is only camera animation supported at the moment? Thnx for the update guy's!

Re: NEW : Preview of OctaneRender 1.5 Alembic file support

PostPosted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 10:00 am
by m.arc.in
Really impressive!

I'm afraid that the preparation of the script will be too difficult.
Will there be a tutorial? Step by step showing how to do all this?