Thanks for the quick reply, Paul! Let me clarify the questions below:
1. Is there a way to save the entire Octane-converted scene to disk? This is something I could do with the PoseLux plugin. It would help me to do 2 things: edit the scene in Octane StandAlone and also reload the scene later to render. I noticed Octane has its own file format, but the plugin doesn't export to that (or I couldn't figure out how).
Saving to OCS is not currently supported, and not currently possible to implement in any of the plugins. What are you trying to do in Standalone that you cannot do in the plugin? The plugin should support all Standalone functions and renders at the same speed. Saving the Poser scene will save all Octane settings for that scene and they will reload when you reload the Poser scene (for rendering later).
Alright, so Poser somehow "knows" the material node changes I did in the Octane plugin, and saves them whenever I save the Poser scene to PZ3? I noticed this didn't happen when I saved the PZ3 and later loaded it again, and changes I did in the hair specularity nodes in the plugin were all lost. Do I have to do things in a certain order? Also, are materials modified in the plugin lost if I didn't save the PZ3 *before* closing the plugin? Maybe that's what happened here.
The reason why I sometimes close the plugin is because it causes my video card's fan (EVGA GTX580 3GB) to accelerate just for being opened (no rendering going on). The video card heats up and becomes quite noisy, so I have to close the plugin just to silence it. Is there a way to avoid causing the video card to accelerate just because the plugin in opened? The fan goes from 28% to 50% whenever I start the plugin. Perhaps that could be avoided in the next update, if all possible?
2. How do I export ALL scene materials at once? In a scene with 20 objects, do I have to save materials separately for each 1-by-1? It takes me a long time to export all the materials this way, and then import them back later. In a way this question is related to the previous, since saving the entire scene would probably also save the materials.
You can save all materials back to the Poser Materials (saves the Octane nodes into the Poser Material) using the "Save all Materials for this Figure/Prop as Poser Materials". You can then save that figure or figure as a Poser MAT POSE for easy reload and reuse in another scene. And again, saving the Poser scene saves all the Octane materials in the pz3 file. You cannot "export" all materials at once, since exporting requires a filename to be entered for each material.
Does that mean that "Save all Materials for this Figure/Prop as Poser Materials" will change the actual materials in the current Poser scene, or would it create a MAT pose in the runtime? If the first, then do I have to manually do this for all materials if I want them to be saved with the PZ3? As you can see, I am not sure when (or if) the current scene materials are updated from the plugin.
3. What is the proper way to control specularity on a skin shader node?
Do you mean the sss shader from my blog, or the default skin conversion shader from the plugin? If the later, to brighten the specular, increase the color in the "specular" pin color (it is a very dark, blue tinted color). To make skin more oily, reduce the roughness (to 0.2-0.3). For the blog shader, the previous step apply to the "material2" of the material mix - since that controls the specular reflections.
I mean the converted materials imported from the current Poser scene into the plugin. I clean up all the skin materials in Poser so that I end up with only texture maps plugged to the diffuse, bump and specular nodes. I noticed the specular nodes are usually lost in the plugin conversion, becoming "color" nodes - which is not what I wanted because specularity becomes global to the surfaces instead of being controlled by the specular maps. What do I have to do to preserve the specular maps? I tried making their values higher than the diffuse, but they still get replaced by "color" nodes.
4. Can Environment lighting model alone produce specular highlights on the scene? I know this won't work in Poser because HDRI is implemented as a diffuse-only light, so no specular component exists unless we add a specular light into the scene. How does this work here?
Yes, the environment map will produce specular highlights. Using a HDR image will produce spectacular highlights!
Awesome! So this is now just a matter of figuring out how to get the poser materials with specular maps converted correctly as mentioned above. ^^