OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 2.58k [OBSOLETE]

[JimStar]

Refractive Software®/Otoy® is proud to announce the availability of a new version of OctaneRender™ for Maya®
The world's fastest and most feature-rich unbiased render engine that integrates completely into Autodesk® Maya®.


Maya® Version Requirements

This release will work with Maya® Versions 2011, 2012 and 2013 / 32-bit & 64-bit on MS Windows operating systems.

Notes regarding features/functionality

OctaneRender™ for Maya® implements almost full functionality of OctaneRender™ standalone inside Maya®. Materials from the Live DB are currently not available.

COMPATIBILITY AND OCTANERENDER STANDALONE REQUIREMENT

To run OctaneRender™ for Maya®, you need to also have an activated OctaneRender™ Standalone copy activated on the machine you wish to install the plugin onto.
You cannot purchase and use only the Maya plugin and use it without also owning an activated copy of OctaneRender™ Standalone on your machine.


HOW TO PURCHASE LICENSES

Go to our online shop here: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/shop/

If you do not own an OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition License yet:
You can purchase both the OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition and the OctaneRender™ for Maya® Edition as a reduced price bundle, purchase the bundle priced at 179€

If you already own one or more OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition licenses you want to pair the plugin with:
Purchase an "OctaneRender™ for Maya® Beta License" priced at 99€

You can also purchase a 3, 5 or 10 pack of OctaneRender™ for Maya® licenses,
just like OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition packs.


OCTANELIVE

Just like OctaneRender™ Standalone, the Maya® plugin product also needs an additional OctaneLive license and be activated on a machine.
This has to be done in the plugin interface panel in Maya, and is covered in the included PDF manual.
It can only be done after an OctaneRender™ Standalone license is already activated on the machine in question.


BUG FIXES SINCE LAST RELEASE:

• Fixed LiveDB UI bug.
• Raised UI-control precision of default "in place" Octane FloatTexture Node that is set to not connected Roughness attribute.
• Raised UI-control precision of value of Octane FloatTexture Node.
• File dialog now respects global setting "OS native" or "Maya default".
• Fixed the bug when in nodes loaded from LiveDB, the attribute having "in place" RGBSpectrumTexture value was showed in Attribute Editor as FloatTexture slider UI control.
• Improved reliability of downloading LiveDB swatches.
• Minor LiveDB operation improvements...

NEW FEATURES SINCE LAST RELEASE:

• Added progress bar to LiveDB, it shows the swatches refreshing status.

DOWNLOAD

Next version HERE.


Yours,
The OctaneRender™ Team.

[Hatak]

You did not get the new SDK for 3.00 yet? (: Thanks (:

[Karba]

You did not get the new SDK for 3.00 yet? (: Thanks (:

It is not stable enough yet.

[Slimshader]

Thanks for the attribute precision UI changes!

[jmfowler]

thanks Jimstar doing well!!

[RickToxik]

Yes thank you JimStar. Honnestly, I really see a bright future for Octane in Maya. The software rocks. I have an old Quadro FX graphic card so it can sometimes be not as fast as I'd like, but the quality of the image in Octane is for me unsurpassed by mental ray and VRay, the other renderers I've tried. At least in a "push-button-render" perspective. I still have crashes from time to times in maya (LiveDB seems more stable but crashed again earlier, it might be in my configuration after all.. sorry :S ). But very useable. Nothing like the dudes in the older thread complained about. I love Octane and I'm working with it for a project right now. I have problems with high poly count though.

A small technical question: when you apply only a color in the diffuse channel of a material instead of a picture, is it not in the right gamma? The color is multiplied by a gamma of 1,1,1 (right?) - not the 2,2 as for the image textures. So is there a way to apply a gamma to my colors without changing all the other settings in the scene?

[JimStar]

I still have crashes from time to times in maya (LiveDB seems more stable but crashed again earlier, it might be in my configuration after all..

Please, post here the dumps of all crashes you get, it will help to fix them all quickly... As I see, at the time you are only one who has them, so, your bugreports are very important to save the world.
The .dmp files are stored by Maya in "c:\Users\<User>\AppData\Local\Temp\*.dmp" and "c:\Users\<User>\AppData\Local\Temp\*.log".

I have problems with high poly count though.

What for problems, can you describe please?..

A small technical question: when you apply only a color in the diffuse channel of a material instead of a picture, is it not in the right gamma? The color is multiplied by a gamma of 1,1,1 (right?) - not the 2,2 as for the image textures.

I already wrote somewhere - all values that you enter to Octane Nodes are loaded to Octane engine "as is", without modification (image textures too). So, e.g. if you have the RGBSpectrumTexture with values R:0.5 G:0.5 B:0.5 - this texture is loaded to Octane engine exactly with these values, without additional gamma correction (I have the gamma correction of the resulting image in the code, but it is stubbed to 1.0 at the time)...
And I already asked somewhere: is it needed in some usecases for Maya artists to have that gamma correction before loading to engine or not? I think that no values changing is needed if you load it directly to Octane engine and use the Octane engine's settings for gamma... But I may be wrong, if you have another thoughts about it - post it here.
One more thing about gamma-correction at the engine loading stage: not all Octane Nodes gamma may be corrected at the plugins side (e.g. procedural textures are in most cases just special parameters to engine, not the colors itself that may be gamma-corrected at the plugins side)... So, I think it is more logical to correct the gamma of resulting image, but as I wrote above - it is stubbed at the time as I don't know if it is needed by Maya artists...

[Refracty]

Good Release - Well done.

I have 2 little suggestions:

1. Setting the default sun position to 1,1,1 so that there is a shadow visible (otherwise the sun shines from top and the user might not understand it and wonders where the shadow is)
2. If you use LD materials and you have no projectfolder named "sourceimages" the textures are not saved. So it would be useful to have a folder created automatically then.

[JimStar]

1. Setting the default sun position to 1,1,1 so that there is a shadow visible (otherwise the sun shines from top and the user might not understand it and wonders where the shadow is)

I'd like to hear the others opinion about it too - should I do it? Will it be good for all?..

2. If you use LD materials and you have no projectfolder named "sourceimages" the textures are not saved. So it would be useful to have a folder created automatically then.

Yep! I will fix it in next version.

[RickToxik]

Here is another bunch of .dmp's from yesterday, with the description of what I was doing when it crashed:
http://www.invisiomedia.com/Clients/Oct ... ender.html

As for the gamma, it was my error, the rest of the material was not updating properly and I thought my color swatches were in the wrong gamma space. I think the way Octane deals with gamma is superior to other renderers as it is now.

My problem with high polycounts was more a problem with many textures I think. I had a scene that was crashing as soon as I opened it. I figured out that it was crashing at the same time maya was opening the hypershade, I had many materials (maybe 25-30?). I re-imported the .mb in a new scene without the hypershade and it worked. I overwrote on this scene unfortunatly, so i can't give you the report or the scene itself.

The sun position is ok for me like it is now... With an angle I would not really mind neither, but I think I'd prefer as it is now.

Keep on the good work. I think I'll update my graphic card soon (I am pretty sure that would help avoid many crashes too). I think i don't have the latest drivers on my graphic card, due to AVID restricted compatibility with quadro fx drivers. Just thought about that....