OctaneRender for LightWave Initial Overview

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Re: OctaneRender for LightWave Initial Overview

Postby Alesk » Sun Dec 02, 2012 11:58 pm

Alesk Sun Dec 02, 2012 11:58 pm
Hi,

This is really great stuff ! I can't wait to test it !

By the way, the lightwave baking camera is a crap, if you have to do something like that, make your own please ;)
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Re: OctaneRender for LightWave Initial Overview

Postby Weezer » Tue Dec 04, 2012 1:19 pm

Weezer Tue Dec 04, 2012 1:19 pm
New Octane owner here, looking forward to the LW plug-in. I'm on Mac, so if you need beta testing, just let me know. Congrats to Otoy and Juanjgon for his exceptional work. Keep it up!
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Re: OctaneRender for LightWave Initial Overview

Postby juanjgon » Tue Dec 04, 2012 3:08 pm

juanjgon Tue Dec 04, 2012 3:08 pm
The Octane medium nodes working inside LW :)

-Juanjo
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Re: OctaneRender for LightWave Initial Overview

Postby Sanxer » Wed Dec 05, 2012 12:44 pm

Sanxer Wed Dec 05, 2012 12:44 pm
@juanjgon Great work so far. It's coming out great, I think I will buy this in the near future, maybe on February/March.
By the way I have some suggestions on improving this Lightwave integration.

From what I've seen from your videos, you are currently implementing all the rendering and material features of Octane inside the node shader tree, you are somewhat mirroring the standalone Octane inside Lightwave creating nodes that represent each part of it, but integration with old nodes is somewhat missing.
Trust me, a perfect mirror of the Octane features is critical because it would make possible to build(later on) a perfect converter of any material library that will be created by users for the standalone Octane Renderer, and convert this to Lightwave material presets, enhancing workflow.

But there is a point to be taken into great consideration and that is with the current implementation we loose all the power of procedural texturing creation.
And this should be avoided also to make possible to convert old lightwave scenes into new Octane renderable ones.

Let's take Octane Texture Image for example adding an input node named Color would create a bridge between old scenes and the new Octane workflow.
I know that this somewhat creates a dependence on the LW nodes which are calculated by CPU and not the way Octane does(with CUDA), this would be a burden for the IPR renderer itself because for every frame(or Octane pass, this I don't know) it should wait for the CPU to calculate the node, this could be fine for some textures but it could be not for others, ie:. Occlusion shaders...etc..

This could be implemented like this (Simply adding the Color input inside the Octane Node) or
This could be done (as the only way or as an alternative) by creating a conversion node, that actually bakes in memory/or to a file(temporary or not) and output an Image and a UVMap out of the color and texture informations.

Some stuff to notice:
Lighwave internally works with a gamma of 1.0 which is fine for all the 2d procedurals it creates, an exception should be made for downloaded textures which should be DeGammaed if used together procedurals to get consistent results(which is expected to render inside a physical rendering engine, still this should be only considered only a workflow issue for artists). So there is no need to take Gamma into any account in the conversion node, if there is a layer with a 2.2 Gamma texture, that should be a problem of the Artist to degamma it before mixing with other procedurals, anyway.
The texture space definition should be easily converted to an UVMap, if it's not an UVMap already.
Tiling informations should be converted too.
The node should have a Bitmap texture resolution inside, for a perfect conversion.

The conversion should happen per frame because it is important for animated textures and textures that work in 3d and World Coordinates.

Nodes that contain multiple texture layers(with different texture spaces) should be somewhat disassebled into another Conversion Mixer Node, that in the end goes back to one texture for the Octane Texture Image node.

This would improve the range of usage of the plugin itself and would make a lot of people using DPKit, iFW and other procedural packs very happy.
I think you already thought of this stuff, these are just basic ideas on the matter, probably you can create even a better implementation.
IMHO this request has a huge importance to the LW community, I would have not asked this if it wouldn't have been like so.

Hope you will think about it as soon you solve your development priority issues.

Thanks.
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Re: OctaneRender for LightWave Initial Overview

Postby juanjgon » Wed Dec 05, 2012 10:27 pm

juanjgon Wed Dec 05, 2012 10:27 pm
Sanxer,

Octane render is a GPU render engine, it is impossible to use any kind of CPU LW nodes while rendering a Octane scene. Other external CPU render engines (or hibrid ones) can evaluate LW nodes at render time, and using bridge sheders, past it's shading data to the external engine ... I have this kind of bridge shader working with other CPU engines, and they works fine, but Octane can't use this kind of bridge shaders first because it can't wait for CPU nodes evaluation, or share data with them, and second because actually Octane doesn't have a shaders API to allow write custom shaders of any type.

In resume, the only way to make LW nodes (procedurals, shaders, image nodes, layers nodes, materials, etc.) work at render time inside Octane is to write GPU clones of this nodes ... something really hard without shaders API, original LW nodes source code and the need to translate this code to CUDA.

Anyway perhaps some LW nodes, for example LW texture layers, can be supported after translate them to a custom Octane node trees, this is something I am going to see for the future.

Octane is not a fast GPU clone of the LW render engine, it is not like FPrime ... it is a new engine that needs that user setup the scenes (lights, shaders, etc.) to use it with it's own shader nodes and light sources.

About gamma, in this first stage I am going to use the Octane gamma settings for rendering. Octane has a powerful tone mapper for output images and support gamma correction in image nodes. LW must set to linear color space to work with Octane.

-Juanjo
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Re: OctaneRender for LightWave Initial Overview

Postby vipvip » Thu Dec 06, 2012 9:32 am

vipvip Thu Dec 06, 2012 9:32 am
just fantastic !
Do you have a date for buying it ?
i was wondering: do you wait for LW 11.5 realease out to make the plugins available ? ( in this case, it would be sweet if you gave us the date for the "so-awaited" lw 11.5 himself ;) )
One technical question: do you gather that the object/deformation motion blur will be enabled with this plugin ? ( i'm afraid not ....)
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Re: OctaneRender for LightWave Initial Overview

Postby Sanxer » Thu Dec 06, 2012 10:30 am

Sanxer Thu Dec 06, 2012 10:30 am
juanjgon wrote:Sanxer,

Octane render is a GPU render engine, it is impossible to use any kind of CPU LW nodes while rendering a Octane scene. Other external CPU render engines (or hibrid ones) can evaluate LW nodes at render time, and using bridge sheders, past it's shading data to the external engine ... I have this kind of bridge shader working with other CPU engines, and they works fine, but Octane can't use this kind of bridge shaders first because it can't wait for CPU nodes evaluation, or share data with them, and second because actually Octane doesn't have a shaders API to allow write custom shaders of any type.

-Juanjo


Thanks for making this alot more clear, it's important to know this. Then hope alot of CUDA shaders come out so to make Octane competitive in the procedural department as well.

Keep up the good work.
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Re: OctaneRender for LightWave Initial Overview

Postby juanjgon » Fri Dec 07, 2012 12:09 am

juanjgon Fri Dec 07, 2012 12:09 am
The dream for all users like myself with very tight deadlines, and one of the strong features of a unbiased rendering. Octane for Lightwave can render scenes with a time limit ... user can set the render time for each frame inside an animation, or even can set the render time using a envelope. Users can also abort the current rendering frame and continue to next one saving current image.

-Juanjo
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Re: OctaneRender for LightWave Initial Overview

Postby jbavar » Fri Dec 07, 2012 6:05 am

jbavar Fri Dec 07, 2012 6:05 am
I am a beta tester for LW 11.5 and I have been following juanjgon's work for quite some time. I also registered for the Octane beta about a year ago. I love its look and to my eye is the most photo-real engine I've seen. I am very, very excited to see this port. Please let us know when you need beta testers. I would be very willing to help out.
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Re: OctaneRender for LightWave Initial Overview

Postby Alesk » Fri Dec 07, 2012 6:46 pm

Alesk Fri Dec 07, 2012 6:46 pm
Hi,

It could be also useful to allow to specify a total render time, and let the program refine each frame in multiple iterations, until this time is up.
This way, all frames would have the same quality... but it would need to cache on disk the current computing state of each frame to be able to resume it on each iteration.

Do you think this is possible ?
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