When loading and converting DAZ Studio materials into the OctaneRender plugin for DS you are facing two options:
- Either you let the plugin load all materials and convert them automatically.
In that case you risk that more textures are loaded than VRAM space is available.
or
- You manually manage which materials are loaded.
In that case you may need to invest more time for manual selections but have better control over which textures are loaded and updated.
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Which setting is controlling if DAZ Studio materials are loaded automatically and converted to OctaneRender materials?
In the OctaneRender plugin for DS Preferences Tab you find the option
"Automatic material updates after content loads"
If you remove this checkmark only the geometry and no textures are loaded when you open the OCDS viewport.
- When you open the OCDS viewport all the geometry will be displayed in a default gray material.
- This also means that whenever you change DAZ Studio materials those texture changes will not automatically be updated in the OCDS viewport.
- If you change DAZ Studio materials while working on the scene you will need to reload them manually each time with any method explained below.
Why would you want to deactivate the automatic loading and converting of DAZ Studio Materials?
Especially if you are working on an older workstation with a GPU that has only 1 or 2 GB of VRAM you will notice that many scenes will be larger than your VRAM.
If the scene is larger then your VRAM it can happen that the plugin
- is stuck in an infinite loading loop.
- materials are loaded and converted randomly with some surfaces remaining untextured.
- the diffuse channel may be converted from the colored type "image" to "floatimage" which will transform all textures into grayscale to save VRAM space.
By deactivating "Automatic material updates after content loads" you load only the geometry of the scene.
You can now use a manual workflow to better control which textures are loaded in which quality.
The basic idea is to load only those textures that are actually visible in the viewport.
There is not much point in loading any textures that are not visible in the final render.
If you are using reflective surfaces you may also want to load those surfaces that show up in the reflections.
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Use the tool "Select DAZ Surfaces & Octane Materials" in the OCDS viewport to select any untextured surface.
If you deactivated "Automatic material updates after content loads" when you open up the OCDS viewport for the first time only the geometry will be loaded.
In the OCDS viewport the third icon of the left switches to the tool
"Select DAZ Surfaces & Octane Materials"
With that tool active you can click on any surface in the OCDS viewport.
In the OctaneRender plugin material tab the surface you clicked will be selected.
If you are opening the OCDS viewport for the first time on a new scene the surface names will be written in orange.
This means that no materials are yet assigned to that surface.
In the OCDS material tab right click on any surface and select "Create as new material - Auto Material" to reload the DS materials for that surface.
To manually load any DAZ materials of a surface and convert them into OctaneRender materials all you have to do is to right click on the surface and select
"Create as new material - Auto Material".
What does the automatic conversion from DAZ Studio to OctaneRender materials do?
The OctaneRender plugin will automatically load and convert any standard DS materials.
In most cases the plugin is able to detect if the DS material is a matte material and convert it to a OctaneRender "Diffuse" material or if it is a reflective material and convert it to a OctaneRender "Glossy" material.
If you quickly want to convert a "Diffuse" material to a "Glossy" material you can do that in the Node Graph Editor (NGE) by simply changing the type from "Diffuse" to "Glossy". Most maps will stay in the same slots but you will get the additional options that are exclusive to "Glossy" materials.
Because the native DAZ Studio render engine 3Delight uses a different node system than OctaneRender not all shaders can be converted. Any 3Delight exclusive shader setups will in most cases be converted to a much simpler basic material setup.
Especially Shaders with Subsurface Scattering (SSS) will most likely be transformed into a "Diffuse" material.
You will have to do additonal work to transform them manually into an OctaneRender "Specular" material with SSS.
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If the conversion is successful you can immediately see the change in the OctaneRender for DS plugin viewport.
The surface Stairs2 is written in white in the Materials Tab Scene surface list to indicate that a material is now assigned to that surface.
Grass and StonesSmall are still written in orange because those surfaces have not yet an OctaneRender material assigned to them.
Use CTRL and SHIFT in combination with mouse clicks to select multiple surfaces at the same time to load them together.
As in most software you can use CTRL and SHIFT in combination with mouse clicks to make selections.
"Holding CTRL + left mouse button click" will add multiple surfaces to the current selection with each click. Click on the same surface again while holding CTRL to remove a surface from the selection.
"Holding SHIFT + left mouse click" will add all surfaces to the selection between the first and the last surface you clicked.
You can combine both methods to quickly create the selection of surfaces you want.
After you have selected those surfaces you want you can right click on the current selection and choose
"Create as new Material - Auto material"
All surfaces that are in your current selection are marked in orange with black writing.
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