Best workflow for Max -> Octane Standalone with materials?

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thenomad
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Hiya!

I'm just wondering what the best way to get materials across from 3DSMax to Octane Standalone is, assuming that you're exporting an Alembic animation?

Render times are about 8x faster in Standalone for what I'm doing, hence the pipeline, but I can't see an obvious way to get materials across without painstakingly recreating each one.
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Karba
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thenomad wrote: Render times are about 8x faster in Standalone...
...than what?
thenomad
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Joined: Tue Sep 10, 2013 5:50 pm

... than in Max.

To be fair, I'm on a non-standard use case here. Currently I'm getting render times of around 4 sec a frame in Max, and 0.5 sec a frame or less in Octane Standalone. I suspect if you're into minutes or hours per frame, the render times converge.
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Karba
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thenomad wrote:... than in Max.

To be fair, I'm on a non-standard use case here. Currently I'm getting render times of around 4 sec a frame in Max, and 0.5 sec a frame or less in Octane Standalone. I suspect if you're into minutes or hours per frame, the render times converge.
Are you using Octane frame buffer or standard 3dsmax one to render and measure the time?
Could you show your both renders from 3dsmax and standalone?
thenomad
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I think I'm using the standard Max framebuffer - how would I change them over?

I just did a controlled test of a scene set up the same way in Max and Octane, same model, same lighting, etc, and the results were a bit less dramatic than I've previously seen, but still pretty significant:

49 sec for Octane, 170 sec for Max to render 128 frames with one model and one light.

I've attached comparison shots.
OctaneVsMax.jpg
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Karba
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thenomad wrote:I think I'm using the standard Max framebuffer - how would I change them over?

I just did a controlled test of a scene set up the same way in Max and Octane, same model, same lighting, etc, and the results were a bit less dramatic than I've previously seen, but still pretty significant:

49 sec for Octane, 170 sec for Max to render 128 frames with one model and one light.

I've attached comparison shots.
OctaneVsMax.jpg
Materials don't look the same. I see glossy reflection in max version and don't in standalone.
3dsmax frame buffer is not so fast to render 2 frames per second. So if you need to render lowpoly model in the middle of nowhere, standalone probably will be better.
thenomad
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Joined: Tue Sep 10, 2013 5:50 pm

Which brings me back to the original question - what's the best way to get materials from Max to Octane if I'm doing an Alembic import into Octane?
thenomad
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Posts: 29
Joined: Tue Sep 10, 2013 5:50 pm

I guess from the lack of response here that there isn't currently a solid Max -> Standalone workflow for materials on animated Alembic exports?

Given that Standalone has its scripting support, my assumption is that a separate OBJ export of the various models, then a script to copy material settings from an OBJ to the Alembic models in Standalone might be the best way. Unless I hear otherwise, I'll get working on that!
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