User manual

[boeing727223]

Hello t_3

Just bought the DAZ/Octane plugin and I am extremely impressed! One stupid question though, when I open the user manual on the links page on the Octane Live tab - the user manual only really contains information on the revisions etc. and not a feature by feature how to. Some of the things I would like to do:

Use my already made custom skin SSS material .ocm files (or recreate the material in the plugin)
Animation download to AVI

The plugin seems intuitive enough, but would like a bit more information on how to create and assign group materials and create an animation (instead of a folder containing a .jpg or .png for each frame)

Thanks

[t_3]

much to my regret (or shame), the "manual" is still a stub (to say it with wikipedia).

regarding .ocm import: unfortunately this is still not available from the octane api; i mean even with the latest update not currently being officially available in my plugin. so the only way currently is to wait for this feature (for me too). note: if it still isn't available when i'm ready with my big overhaul, i might add a quick feature to import a .ocs scene, to extract mats from it; should be possible without all that much work. still you need to wait for me then

regarding group materials; or may we say "grouping"? you can link any single octane material to any number of daz surfaces. you can select several daz surfacs and drag them to one oc mat, or vice versa - if you have more questions about how this works, feel free to ask. note: you can think of "an octane material" like of a macro node in the standalone - it's not quite the same in technical terms, also the octane api currently doesn't have input nodes, but apart from that it works just the same.

regarding animations: frame-by-frame output currently is the only option, and most probably it will stay as such. the problem in writing into video containers is, that you will usually loose all the frames already rendered when somethings goes wrong; say in the unlikely case of a crash. also appending or replacing bad frames is much more complicated (on the programmers side).

happen to know (free) virtual dub? it's as easy as dropping the first frame on it and output any format which you have an encoder for, just with a few clicks; and you can still keep the frames as "raw"/hq version. plus any video editor (vegas, premiere, after fx, ...) works much smoother and faster with single frames (at least when using .jpg - what is usually preferred anyway).

... finally thanks for the compliments - think of them when you start shouting for the eagerly awaited next update

[boeing727223]

Excellent information t_3 - I will ponder all you said and do some playing around today. I re-built the skin shader and now I believe I can just copy and past it and just change the diffuse and normal maps for each different part of the figure.

Will also give VirtualDub a try and keep you posted.

Thanks for making this vital plugin for DAZ Studio!

[boeing727223]

Hi t_3, when I save and close a scene in DAZ how do I get the Octane plugin to remember my settings?

Thanks

[t_3]

Hi t_3, when I save and close a scene in DAZ how do I get the Octane plugin to remember my settings?

Thanks

are you still using the (initial) version provided with the installer? since it had issues with saving the scene data - if so, you'll want to update to this version: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=33059

if not, i need a little more information...

[boeing727223]

Man you are quick! I updated to the latest version.....and all saved sorry about that.