I Hope This Is The Right Place To Ask...

[sikotik13]

At the risk of sounding stupid or something:
Am I missing something, or is there no way to transfer the settings from the DS plugin to the standalone?
Example, I have set up a scene exactly as I want it in DS. Camera, lights, environment, materials, everything.
I was mostly just wanting to do a simple turntable animation in Octane Standalone of the scene, since DS cameras hate me.

Is it silly of me to have somehow expected there was some sort of option to add this information one way or another to export?
I have no idea exactly how the magic was worked to get the plugin done so well within DS, but it seems logical that if you can add the Octane info into Daz, ther should be a way to export it alongside the info for Daz... or perhaps create some form of .ocs compatible something, or at least some way to transfer the settings without having to open Daz and try to manually change each thing in Octane.

If I have overlooked this (which I am very prone to do, I'll fully admit), someone please educate me.

If it's not there, is there a particular reason why it has been omitted?

Thanks for reading

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[sikotik13]

Thanks for the information, reading now.

As to your question, I'm not sure I necessarily understand your intent?
For me, I would just like basically the ability to take what I see in the OctaneRender viewport and transfer that to the standalone without redoing nearly all of it.
For example, to make it look right, I often have to adjust the OctaneRender camera settings. Clearly, by definition, these only control the Octane camera, I would like that to export somehow, since the info is theoretically only valid for a camera set up for Octane anyway. Thus, it seems redundant to have to re-set up said camera in Octane standalone, to me. Same goes for the Octane mats that vanish when exported. Why would there not be an option to move what essentially has to be all the elements of an .ocs injected into a .duf, over to the program that all of those parameters were originally programmed in, in the first place? Again, I may be missing some crucial detail of the degree of complexity involved, but if the camera settings had to be converted and added to Daz Studio... it seems to follow, they are settings converted from Octane, and should be easily un-converted back to original.

Whether that be as a separate file (like .ORBX appears intended to do), or just the option to save the settings I see set up within the plugin as .duf and/or a separate, standalone-ready .ocs, is fine with me really. Just seems like I have to be missing something that makes doing so nearly impossible for the lack of this option not to have been brought up before.

[t_3]

Whether that be as a separate file (like .ORBX appears intended to do), or just the option to save the settings I see set up within the plugin as .duf and/or a separate, standalone-ready .ocs, is fine with me really. Just seems like I have to be missing something that makes doing so nearly impossible for the lack of this option not to have been brought up before.

the old - past orbx - octane save format would have required to reference geometry files - in case of ds this would have not been possible without also explicitly writing out all the geometry data (at a particular frame nbr) independently from octane. apart from that the format was never meant to exchange whole scenes between completely different host formats. so otoy needed to develop something new, that is able to embed everything (from animation to geometry), no matter how complex it is. and not only allowing to exchange data between one of the plugins and the standalone but also inbetween plugins for different hosts...

[sikotik13]

Thanks t_3. So the orbx files are in fact intended to contain the geometry as well, that's good to know. I guess then, my question is more of, if I am exporting the geometry for import to the standalone now, why there wasn't a way to save all the Octane specific mats and settings to apply to the geometry that Octane would have upon import? In theory, that was the only info you said was missing.

Again, just curious if it was impossible, or just never came up before. I do love the plugin, and look forward to the next version, just like to know the why behind things.

[t_3]

Thanks t_3. So the orbx files are in fact intended to contain the geometry as well, that's good to know. I guess then, my question is more of, if I am exporting the geometry for import to the standalone now, why there wasn't a way to save all the Octane specific mats and settings to apply to the geometry that Octane would have upon import? In theory, that was the only info you said was missing.

Again, just curious if it was impossible, or just never came up before. I do love the plugin, and look forward to the next version, just like to know the why behind things.

no, it of course wasn't impossible to do; it would only have meant that every plugin would have to implement it's own geometry exporter, still without being compatible to each other; or in other words it wouldn't have been very efficient to go this route, just to drop all that a few months later in favor of a new compatible exchange format.

the demand was there since the first plugins came out, just there was some basics work to get done at first, in particular the node system rewrite in octane (which needed several months of work) - only on this foundation it was possible to build up other features like alembic import/export, animation possibilities and also scene and material data exchange via the new orbx format...

[sikotik13]

If this seems contentious, it's not intended, I am working towards a software engineering degree and trying to learn from examples I can relate to.

I'm not quite understanding the need for a geometry exporter, since one can export the geometry by the program itself. I.e. I can export the obj of the scene file for import via Daz Studio. For the plugin to save the material and camera settings, it would need a separate geometry other than that one? I'm not saying as in an all in one file, just a way to apply those Octane settings to an obj scene once I imported it into the standalone.

I understand the problem is being solved with orbx, I'm just curious about the problem itself with respect to how it is currently not handled. Its solely for my curiosity, and if you don't want to go further, you don't have to. I'm just not seeing the problem you are defining as the reason for not doing it.

[t_3]

I'm just not seeing the problem you are defining as the reason for not doing it.

because you don't know what's going on behind the scenes - what a user usually doesn't need or even want to know and if i have done my job halfways right also not should know just from using the plugin.

anyway: for example daz studio: it only exports a monolithic object file, based on how it sees the scene. this isn't congruent with how the plugin prepares/reinterprets a scene for octane in order to a) provide certain type of functionality (like realtime object translation without geometry rebuilding) and b) to allow super-fast rebuilds when needed. in order to do this, the plugin needs to split up (simply put) the geometry into countless pieces, recalculate transformations, build a new internal structure of mesh and and transformation nodes, maintain material indexes independently from studio (and steadily map any changes back and forth).

using instances and/or geo grafts adds yet another level of complexity = reorganizing the geometry data between studio and octane.

so the single .obj file that ds exports in no way matches the actual scene setup that the plugin creates from the raw vertices.

btw, there are more reasons an export with previous versions - even if using saved .obj files would have been possible - would most probably have ended up in tears; simply just because the standalone node display - meant to work with single or a low number of objects - had some limitations and wasn't capable to cope up with the enormous amount of nodes that a plugin may internally create. to give you an example how this could have looked like in the standalone:

some extreme example, but still easily to get; can't remember the exact number - must be in the range of 30k nodes...

[t_3]

The question remains:

Does DS offer all the features to make this work with the plugin?

nearly had overseen this

fortunately, this doesn't depend on ds; everything that the plugin builds for octane can be exported; in other words there are no direct dependencies between the scene data in studio and the scene data in octane; the job of the plugin is to transfer any change at any time into the octane domain, and as soon it renders there it can be exported in the same state...

[sikotik13]

Ah, thanks. My curiosity is now satisfied. I know most users shouldn't want to know, but I'm not most users, and I figured jumping into to trying to reverse engineer Studio, Octane,and a plugin might be a little out of my depth, hence why I said you didn't have to answer. I very much appreciate you doing so, and in depth greater than I expected, so again: thank you.