Help with Alembic camera and scene (again...)

[Rikk The Gaijin]

I've exported an environment scene with a moving camera from Maya.
In Octane, the camera moves, but the environment appears super small. In the Alembic option I've tried to change the scale, but nothing changes because the scaling affects the camera as well, so everything is scaled up, including the camera... It seems the scale of the camera and the scale of the environment are different, but in Octane I cannot set them apart.
If I import the scene as OBJ, and only the camera as Alembic, it works fine, but I need to import all in one file, for practical reasons, so any Idea of why this happens?

[Rikk The Gaijin]

One more question, is there a reason why we cannot access the camera settings of the Alembic camera? What if I want to tweak it in Octane?

[kavorka]

I am able to change the HDRI, if that is what you mean. You need to select the render target, go to environment and expand it.

[Rikk The Gaijin]

I am able to change the HDRI, if that is what you mean. You need to select the render target, go to environment and expand it.

No, the HDRI is a parameter of the environment, not the camera. I want to be able to edit the imported camera like I do with any other camera in Octane, so why it that not possible?

[roeland]

I want to be able to edit the imported camera like I do with any other camera in Octane, so why it that not possible?

Because the camera is loaded from the Alembic file, and Octane won't modify the Alembic file. What we can do is add a function to convert the Alembic camera to a regular camera node, but then the camera won't be updated if you change the Alembic file with your 3D modelling application.

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Roeland

[Rikk The Gaijin]

I want to be able to edit the imported camera like I do with any other camera in Octane, so why it that not possible?

Because the camera is loaded from the Alembic file, and Octane won't modify the Alembic file. What we can do is add a function to convert the Alembic camera to a regular camera node, but then the camera won't be updated if you change the Alembic file with your 3D modelling application.

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Roeland

But how so? Octane is obviously reading the camera parameters, so why not just expose them to the user?

[TBFX]

But how so? Octane is obviously reading the camera parameters, so why not just expose them to the user?

Because Alembic is a cache, designed to bake an animation for export to external renderers or speed up interactivity in lighting or other post animation processes. They would need to convert (copy) the camera in the alembic cache to a new octane camera as the one in the alembic file is baked with those settings and cannot ever do anything else without regenerating the alembic cache in the host application.

T.

[Rikk The Gaijin]

Thank you for the reply TBFX, that kinda sucks, but even if the camera itself it's not modifiable, would't be possible to put "a layer" of control on top of it?

[glimpse]

Thank you for the reply TBFX, that kinda sucks, but even if the camera itself it's not modifiable, would't be possible to put "a layer" of control on top of it?

or maybe take coordinates from camera in alemic & plug them them to Octane Camera to link movement while leaving every other parameter to be tweaked in Octane..

[abstrax]

What exactly do you want to control? The camera should be controlled in the host app, before it's exported. All parameters that are not provided by the Alembic file are available as input pins, so you can set them up yourself. Everything else is provided as animated data and as soon as you change the time, the animated data will overwrite your changes.

Octane doesn't have any capabilities to create animations (with the exception of Lua, but that wouldn't be very useful here), so you have to create them in your host app. I hope that makes it a bit clearer, why things are how they are.