Manual improvements

[voon]

Out of curiosity: Is the manual also being improved? I mean not just updated with newest features ... but older stuff improved.

An example:

Parallelism (parallelism)
This is used to reduce the number of samples that are investigated
in parallel to make caustics appear earlier at the expense of some
performance.

Honestly, as a non-programmer with little knowledge on rendering engines, this tells me not much. Which numbers are good? Is lower or higher making the caustics earlier? How much of aperformance hit are we talking here? Will they look exactly the same, just appear eralier?

It's like if someone asked what a wheel is, and the explanation is "It is a round shaped thingy, that is used for stuff. It can do stuff faster or slower".

It would be nice, if such things were explained a bit more and made newbie and non-technical friendly.

[riggles]

Agreed, the manual needs a lot more meat on the bones. Some aspects of Octane are barely touched on. I only saw that the Aperture control is actually the opening radius measured in centimeters after looking thru the LUA API browser list. The manual just say a low value has wide DoF and a high value has narrow DoF, nothing on how it's measured or how to use it for matching camera f-stops. The section on using medium nodes mentions that the absorption and scatter textures are multiplied by the scale value in passing and that's it. It doesn't talk about what those scale values mean, whether they connect to real world distances, or anything that tells you how to actually use that control. And lots more images illustrating how a control effects the material/scene are needed.

They need a guy dedicated to documentation.

[ROUBAL]

For my own, I asked several times questions about the use of input output nodes, and got no explanation. The nodes are not enough explained in depth, and not all nodes are described.

[Rikk The Gaijin]

+1

[shadowline]

+1

[FooZe]

...
Which numbers are good? Is lower or higher making the caustics earlier? How much of a performance hit are we talking here? Will they look exactly the same, just appear eralier?

1) It's generally the case that lower will make them appear earlier. It's more like how much time is spent finding new rays that produce caustics.
How usefull this is, is very scene dependent. I think it's one of those settings where you sould give it a go for scenes with a lot of caustics and see if it helps or not.

2) This will be scene dependent and it's easy to see the performance hit by just changing it. Usually dropping from 4 to 1 is quite a big hit. But the idea is that the megasamples per second drops, but hopefully it finds more caustic rays/paths and therefore ultimately gives a better result for caustics.

3) Generally yes, they will look the same, they should just be more prominent earlier (not necessarily time-wise but samples per pixel wise).

Thanks
Chris.

[momade]

I would agree on a more user / newbie friendly manual and a deeper explanation of the different settigns.
Yet: Thanks for the response on the parallelism explantion. It helped to understan an other detail of the engine.