Octane improvements nice to haves / really key features

[teknofreek]

I couldn't see a "wishlist", so I thought I'd post this....
One of the big things I see in my (limited) use of Octane, is the crash factor..
It may be something directly related to me and what I'm trying to do, dunno, or maybe a heap of users suffer? whatever.. The gist of this thread is to get some wishlist things happening.

Given my issue.. I know that maybe running out of GPU mem etc.. can give some fails... but when optimising a scene, how the heck do you know that it will crash if you dont see the GPU memory useage BEFORE you "kick it in the guts".
Currently I can load a scene and only after clicking on the mesh node and waiting a fair while, will it either work or fail. If it works, well, you see the mem useage, if it fails (or going to fail) you see jack.... Is there some way that the GPU resources for the scene can be shown on loadup, ie when the mesh node comes up, thus showing the user "oh Sh..t" it's too big for my card mem..
I've tried checking the mtl file and the obj file, but for me it doesn't seem to be a reliable indicator of a "fail", whereas, if you saw that your GPU mem was maxed out, well, I guess you gotta cut the texture/geom sizes etc.. in the scene, or get a bigger/better card.

ps, if there's a way of reading the mtl and getting a good idea on what was too big for a given.. well I'd like to know..

Cheers!
TF

[teknofreek]

Oops!

Just saw the feature suggestion post..
Pls merge this with that post.. or whatever..

[radiance]

Hi,

Octane already gives dialogs if you try to push to mush data in your memory.
You will get error dialogs saying you don't have enough video memory for the action in questions.

Crashes are due to other issues, either driver related, or bugs that we need to be able to reproduce to fix.

Radiance

[teknofreek]

Thanks Radiance, I thought I saw somewhere that there was a feature that reported if you were overloading your mem, but if that's the case, then nothing that I've loaded, or tried so far is over my card/resources mem etc, I've never seen any message or indicator that I'm close to, or exceeding the 896 MB Gddr3 mem I currently have. The only thing I can say definetly is I've had files using around 400MB (card mem) load and work and some that I feel are quite a bit smaller fail.. Perhaps poly wise they may be more complex, but at this stage, I have no direct info that I can see from Octane to assist further.
From my viewpoint, I would always think and probably justifiably that the smaller file (that is obj and tex wise..) will load and be sucessful, whereas on a really complex file, I hold my breath and cross a few fingers..

Most of the larger stuff I'm talking about here is "poser", Stonemason content to be specific, that I've exported as obj with the mtl file and tex maps from my layout software.
At this stage tho... I guess you've answered my "feature req" that is there should be/is a warning dialog for this kind of error.
I'll look and see if there's a more appropriate post/topic to add to regards my intermittent crash issues.
Cheers!
TF

[radiance]

have you applied the registry fix here : http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... f=21&t=824

?

Radiance

[teknofreek]

Yes, I did apply the reg tweak,
TdrDdiDelay 600
TdrDelay 600
TdrLevel 0 (All input in hex..?)

I haven't seen any change in performance, or "crash resistance", generally the things that stop Octane before still do.. I will add though, I've been working on a scene thats fairly hefty texture wise (only two model meshes) and I've had Octane quite happily rendering at 4096x2048 with 700+MB of GPU mem.
Using pathtracing, or direct lighting, daylight seems to be no issues..
Anyway will keep at it and if I find anything useful will let you know.
TF

[ROUBAL]

Most of the larger stuff I'm talking about here is "poser", Stonemason content to be specific, that I've exported as obj with the mtl file and tex maps from my layout software.

I have Poser 7.0, that I had purchased in the hope that it would help me to go faster in production some time ago... I have used it very few and I have almost never been able to make something good with it, but it's an other story : What I want to point out is that meshes exported in obj from Poser contain a huge number of double vertices, due to the multi-area structure of Poser models.

These exported meshes have to be cleaned in depth to avoid artifacts at rendering, and maybe they can create conflicts in Octane. It is just an idea, but it may be a clue.

[teknofreek]

Don't know what happened there.. tried to submit my edit and had to login again, so post failed.
I use Daz Studio 3 adv to obj out my "poser" stuff. Normally I use Carrara 7.2 pro but it doesn't do a good obj export.
I seem to find that if the obj generates more than 80, or so, tex based mat nodes on input to Octane, it is prone to fail.. even if the actual amount of actual texture maps accumulated in the obj subfolder is less.. ie multiple variations based on one map.
I've had crashes with scenes that definetly only have 48 tex maps, physically in the aggregated obj folder. On input, the nodes in the node inspector are counted at approx 93 and it fails.
Unfortunately, the mesh node goes full screen, so can't verify if there's more out of screen..
But really, once I get some concrete data I will actually do a more appropriate post..

[ROUBAL]

I think that you will have the same problems with Daz and Poser. I always wondered who could use these softwares. In my opinion they only exist to allow selling models, because it is very difficult to create models usables for them, and their render engine is not very good (You have to purchase Carrara to render in better quality).

I think that they are not really suitable to export models for Octane. If you try, do your experiments on static objects like furnitures, houses or cars, but not human models, because I fear that you will encounter the same stucture problems with multiple vertices at the same locations.

As Carrara is made to use Daz models, try to export them in obj from Carrara (if it is possible). You may have a better compatibility with other softwares than exporting directly from Daz.

[teknofreek]

Roubal, thanks for the replies.
I would use Carrara, as I normally do, but the obj export does not correctly reference the kd textures in the models. For some reason it will not reference a kd (diffuse) map in the mtl file even if its present, and at the moment I'm getting weird results with not having the shader domains recognised as separate groups in the final obj, therefore cannot even do a manual texture application in Octane. ie it only results in one material node for the imported mesh.
A q.. what do you use for obj export?
Initially I was going to ungrade to modo, but as far as I could tell it also did not do a "full obj export", it seemed to only generate an obj based on simple materials not assigned textural materials. (one amongst a few areas I had problems with..)