Handling of Emission in Octane Tweet

[llennoco22]

I was wondering if any changes could/ should be made to how Octane handles emission on materials.

This starts with lights. Why is this tied to a emitting from a diffuse BRDF? Currently the default light material material binds to not only a diffuse BRDF but one with a white(ish) colour. This Simply causes needless extra noise as light is capable of emitting from your light bouncing from your scene, to your light and back again. This is easily demonstrable by adding a light a plane and viewing how much extra noise there is vs when the diffuse is completely black (or view indirect pass). While probably not affecting most scenes it can worsen noise in some scenarios without users realizing and shouldn't really happen to begin with. While the easiest solution to suggest is to set this to black by default, I think it would be much better to have an emissive-only material or an emissive input on a null material since that is an existing node.

The second part of this is to do with not all BRDFs having emission inputs. This can be annoying since you have to fall back on universal material when a simpler material shader would often suffice but simply lack an emission input. The same thing happens with layered materials, you cant have emission as a layer. You have to have emission in the base material (and only if its diffuse or universal) then mask your emission into the layer opacity of every layer above it or mix a diffuse material on top of everything just for emission. If you had an additive emissive layer material it would solve all these issues as it could just be added to the layered material slot of any material that lacked emission and it could easily be added at the end of a layered material stack.

Sorry if it came across as a bit of a rant but I do think it's a part of Octane usability that could very simply be improved. With an emission only material and accompanying layered material you could cut out needless diffuse BSDF's on lights ect and make the usability of shader networks much more flexible when emission is needed.

[elsksa]

Hi,
Not much of a rant when it is an argumented feedback to improve Octane.
+1