a case study

[cyprine]

greetings fellows octanians !
i have so many questions i didnt know where to start so... i made a picture:


ok, now:
+ the sky is blue... bland dull blue - i used the environment skylight from octane. But i want to have some clouds, or say a mountain view or a cityscape. Can i used a skydome without it interfering with the environement light ? Should i use the skydome's texture as a HDRI ? an Emiter ?
+ the ground is rough. I used a Baba Yagas ground, tried to tweak its bump but its still looking awfull here. Is it possible to instanciate a grass prop with Daz plug in ?
+ Her skin looks redish - i've tried to cook a sss from various sources, trying to understand the concepts behind mix textures, absorption & scaterring... as the settings are now, if the light'd be behing the model, her arms would look like your fingers in the front of a torchligh, redish transluscency; i guess its got to do with the scale.
+ Poor cats fur... any tips ?

also very Daz:
+ Saving a material preset with daz doesnt seem to retain octane's information while saving a scene or a set does; am i doing it wrong ?
+ Ive saved presets with octane, even figured out the template thing but *my presets* gets crowded - is there a way to sort them out ? make folders ?

and probably a lot more
edit, looks like the image doesnt show up, too big ? linkage provided (image is on DeviantArt)

[sikotik13]

1. Nice render
2. Yes, as long as the prop is a geometric object, you can instance it (the issue until 2.0 is things like curves as hair i.e. LAMH or Garibaldi). Instancing works fine.
3. 3dMania posted up a .duf with a good start point for a skin template. Can't remember the thread, but it's in here somewhere. Download the .duf, load it in daz, template the two image paramaters (for diffuse and bump, there's also a post by t_3 detailing how to do this linked in the same thread), and save as preset. Voila! (This is what I use, as it's easy to tweak the template to suit, if needed. Primarily, it's adjusting the color of saturation to compliment your intended skin tone. I'll post up a screenie if needed.)
4. I think there has been discussion about skydome/hdri stuff. More Octane in general, not plugin specific, since it's an Octane issue. Personally, I've just loaded an image as hdri, then tweaked gamma and power until it "looked right" to me. You can also adjust the color, if that's all you need. The sunsets are quite pretty, though I also wish there was cloud generation of some sort.
5. Octane 2.0 is supposed to have support for it's own curves as hair instancing, which would help the poor kitty. In the mean time, using a displacement map for the bump and cranking setting can sometimes help for anything but a profile view of hair/fur. Try it out, may suit your needs.

For Daz:
1. Anything that saves a .duf saves the Octane materials. Subsets and sets both save in this format. I don't believe anything else does. Subsets are usually what I use until I'm compiling a scene (i.e I'll make characters, save them with mats as subsets, then load them all into the scene I set up with mats pre-applied and save the whole thing as a scene).
2. I'm unaware of any organization options for Presets, but honestly, you shouldn't need that many, especially if you're templating. I have one for skin (see above), one for cloth, one for leather, one for rubber, one for corneas, one for teeth, one for smooth metal, one for rough metal, maybe one or two emitter bases... and pretty much modify anything else from LiveDB or those presets to suit. You only need one of each properly set up to tweak as needed. I also rename them to make the order more logical. I'm at a total of I think 15 presets, and plan on removing some more that are redundant.

[cyprine]

thanks for yr answer Sikotik !

version 2

i dared not play with instancing yet but will probably be in a 3rd version; i 1st have to read agin on the subject & play test it.