General Octane & Maya integration queries

[magicU]

Hi, I have some questions about Octane in general, as well as the Maya plugin. Apologies if these have been answered in old posts, I couldn't tell if any developments had been made in these areas..

1-Am I right in understanding that Octane does not output separate passes for compositing - spec/occlusion/diffuse - that sort of thing? Is this part of future plans?
2-Is there some sort of "use background"/matte material available (is it being planned?)
3-I've been testing out the 3dsmax plugin & I couldn't figure out how to create a "flat shader" (eg a Surface shader, in Maya), is this even possible with Octane? Maybe there's a way to give objects an "ignore nice lighting" flag or something like that? Again this would be for id-pass compositing purposes..
4-With the Maya plugin, are render layers supported - and if so, does that include material layer overrides? (at least I could make some sort of my own "passes" quickly in this way)

Many thanks

[TBFX]

Hi magicU,

I'm only a registered user so cannot speak for what the developers may have planned in the future but I'll answer your queries about Maya integration as it stands at present with the Octane for Maya integrated plugin.

1-Am I right in understanding that Octane does not output separate passes for compositing - spec/occlusion/diffuse - that sort of thing? Is this part of future plans?

It doesn't support passes like diffuse and specular but it does have a range of other passes you can render in the deep channel kernel (it's called info channel kernel in the Maya plugin) these do have to be rendered seperately though.
These are:
Geometry normals
Shading normals
Position (world space)
z_depth (camera space)
material ID
texture co-ordinates

2-Is there some sort of "use background"/matte material available (is it being planned?)

No there is nothing like this at present though I have heard talk on the forum that a shadow catching material is planned. Although rendering CG for integration into live plates using an un-biased renderer like Octane presents some unique challenges and I'm still thinking through exactly what the best way to do it would be. When I come up with something I'll be sure to suggest it to the Octane team but in the mean time some form of shadow catcher wouldn't go amiss.

3-I've been testing out the 3dsmax plugin & I couldn't figure out how to create a "flat shader" (eg a Surface shader, in Maya), is this even possible with Octane? Maybe there's a way to give objects an "ignore nice lighting" flag or something like that? Again this would be for id-pass compositing purposes..

No there is no flat shader and in an un-biased physically accurate renderer I'm not even sure it's possible or desirable. You can get your ID pass out of the deep channel kernel though.

4-With the Maya plugin, are render layers supported - and if so, does that include material layer overrides? (at least I could make some sort of my own "passes" quickly in this way)

This one I don't know as I never use render layers but I know the developer of the Maya plugin is doing a great job of tring to keep as much Maya functionality available when using the plugin so if it's at all possible I'm sure it will happen at some point if it hasn't already. Though I don't think they'd be much use for Octane itself but as you say you could spit out other passes in other renderers in one go from the same scene.

Hope this helps. I will say that I'm loving using Octane in Maya an though it's still got a little way to go I've already done 2 commercial VFX jobs with it and am just starting to work on the VFX for my own short film using it and with it's incredibly efficient implementation of instancing is going to allow me to render a couple of full CG environments with tens of thousands of hi resolution trees plus grass and other geometry in less than 3 GB of Vram and on one workstation (4xGTX580's) There isn't another renderer alive that can do that.

T.

[JimStar]

4-With the Maya plugin, are render layers supported - and if so, does that include material layer overrides? (at least I could make some sort of my own "passes" quickly in this way)

Thanks to TBFX, he explained all things well.
I'll just add about layers:

Yes, render layers are supported (they have been implemented from the beginning), I just did not hear about someone who is using the "material layer overrides", so I don't have the feedback from users about how stable it works. But I just checked one more time on a simple scene - all works OK with material layer overrides. Moreover, Octane settings have its own additional checkbox "Render in gray material" - to just quickly override all materials of scene in all layers with gray diffuse...
If you plan to "hard-use" this feature and will get some troubles with it - I think I just will be able to fix most issues quickly, just your feedback will be needed..

[magicU]

BIG THANKS for both of your replies! I'd completely missed the "info" mode!
I dug around the 3ds max demo a bit more and found it working exactly as I expected!! (I assume maya & max have the same amount of functionality?)
Hopefully the shadow catcher gets sorted out...And perhaps there'd be a way to specify exact colours for the material ids?
Will be purchasing as soon as my new machine arrives next month!

[JimStar]

I assume maya & max have the same amount of functionality?

I'm not sure, as these are too distinct systems (from the point of view of their APIs), and they are written by programmers with different access to Octane sources... And even 3D-artists are used to work in these systems different ways - so they may ask to implement some different things in each of these two systems...
So, if you want to work with Maya plugin and has some exact requirements - you better ask here, or just wait for Maya's plugin demo version...

[magicU]

That makes sense -I don't suppose there's an ETA on a Maya demo? Oh - and unfortunately the machine I'll be getting has Kepler cards in it, I hope there's a Kepler friendly build for Maya users?
What is the support like for maya procedural textures/utility nodes - such as the Ramp, noise or something like Sampler Info?

The only solid requests I'd make right now are - ability to specify/override material id colours - this would make isolating object mattes much faster (just using 100% rgb values, with multiple layers).

[JimStar]

I hope there's a Kepler friendly build for Maya users?

Yes.

What is the support like for maya procedural textures/utility nodes - such as the Ramp, noise or something like Sampler Info?

If you use unbiased GPU render - forget about using of non-Octane shaders developed for CPU-calculations. These just can't be used, as they have absolutely another algorythms and input parameters semantics. All you can do with non-Octane shaders - convert them to Octane shaders (plugin has the simple converter inside), otherwise they will be rendered just as default "gray diffuse".

[magicU]

Hi Jimstar - what is the particle instancing support like with the Maya plugin?

[JimStar]

Maya plugin supports particles and instances.