Setting Aperture and Focus from Alembic File?

[seltzdesign]

Hello everyone.

I have recently started doing some major Octane Rendering again now that version 2.04 is out (and awesome).

I am using Maya to export an Alembic File of a scene with animation. I have created Octane Cameras using the Octane Maya Plugin (also V2.04). There I have a camera and camera Target. Both of them have translation animated.

When I import the Alembic in the Standalone I have all the cameras there.

In Maya I have the target nicely placed exactly where I want the focus.

So now my questions:

1) how can I set the aperture? Even if in alembic options in octane, when I enable camera inputs, there is one for each setting EXCEPT Aperture. I guess it almost makes sense, because it could be animated. But if it is not animated, why cant I change it?

2) Is the camera target always the point where it focuses on? If so how can I focus on a part of the image that is not in the center of the frame?

3) How come when I have the camera target nicely at where I want the focus in maya, then in the standalone the focus is not at the same position (off by quite a lot).

Maybe I am missing something, but somehow I cant get my head around how focusing works in the standalone with camera animations from an alembic file.

I would just render using the Maya plugin, but rendering animations is so painfully slow compared to doing it with alembic in the standalone. In maya I had 2 minutes for each frame - in the standalone it was between 3 seconds and 1:30 minutes per frame (there is geometry gradually building up, so it was quick at the start and then got longer towards the end - in the end it was almost 8 hours faster for 1000 frames).

Thanks for any help.

Best, Armin.

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[seltzdesign]

Hello @linvanchene,

thanks for your in-depth answer. That all makes sense and I am not surprised that it is like that. I thought Alembic had finally solved that problem.

In light of how the Octane Standalone works, this is a real shame. I so much prefer working in the standalone than the plugin.

I did just try to use the .orbx scene export. When I open the file it asks me for an .obj that it hasn't exported and is not animated. The Octane Alembic Export doesn't work at all. It generates a file that is less than 1KB, whereas the Alembic Export of Maya creates a 15 MB file.

So basically no way other than what I have been doing. I actually love how alembic works, but yeah the camera thing is ridiculous. How do the big studios do this? I guess nobody is rendering animations in the standalone. Or maybe the plugin for other 3D software actually works as expected or doesn't take that much longer to render than the standalone.

Its such a shame, because everything is working perfectly EXCEPT the focus, which is off and makes it totally useless. In the mean time I guess I have to render with 0 Aperture and add DoF afterwards, but that is hardly a solution - especially without being able to set the Aperture in an Alembic scene camera, which is once again ridiculous.

So in the end I understand that cameras might be different in different software, BUT I am not using standard Maya Cameras in my scene, but "Octane Cameras" created by the plugin. Maybe the built in Alembic Exporter in Maya is actually exporting the Octane Camera wrong. I will try quickly what happens when I replace it with a "Maya Camera".

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[seltzdesign]

Yeah I am really wondering about that too. I have posted a similar question in the plugin forum and might post one more specifically about focus distance. Surely that is one of the major things to get right. Lets see what they say.

Yeah I am not sure I "get" the new .orbx format yet either.

In Maya there is actually 2 export options, one called "Octane Render Scene" and one called "Octane Render Alembic". The first exports and .orbx file, with all the nodes already setup, but it seems this is only for still scenes, as it uses a Geometry Mesh and not Geometry Scene. The second exports an .abc file, which doesnt seem to do anything at all so far.

Basically I would love to just be able to export as an animated scene, where everything works as expected.

It seems to me animation in Octane Standalone is still somewhat beta. It would add a lot of complexity though to add keyframing capabilities inside Octane Standalone, but hopefully it will come.

Either that, or the plugins will one day be as fast as the standalone and offer the same usability. I think I will get the Cinema4D plugin, which seems a bit further along than the maya one. At least Alembic works well between different 3D Software.

[seltzdesign]

Ok so I did a few more tests.

For one I realised that the focus distance can be set in Maya, you just can't see it in the viewport. So I set and keyframed the distance manually and everything is looking correct in the IPR renderer in Maya.

When I export the alembic file and import in the standalone, focus is off (everything is a blur) and the aperture isn't correct either, but you cant see what it is set to, which would be really helpful (feature request!!).

So the questions remains if a) it actually exports the focus distance and aperture correctly in the alembic file, which I cant check or b) the standalone is interpreting the values in the alembic file wrongly.

Has anyone got this to work?

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[seltzdesign]

@linvanchene

Thanks for your help in trying to figure this out. Interesting that you can set values that havent been exported in the alembic file. Like I said in the ones I am exporting from maya I cannot set aperture or focal length in the standalone, even when focal length wasn't animated at all.

I think the standalone has limitations that are totally fine. Once you start having keyframing and all that, it becomes something different and gets a whole additional layer of complexity.

The ONLY reason this is even a limitation in my case is because:

a) the alembic doesnt contain the right focal length or the standalone interprets it wrongly - otherwise the alembic works perfectly, because I can do everything in the plugin version like you say.. adjust, readjust, etc. but then just export to render, which is only because of point:

b) rendering an animation in the standalone is orders of magnitude faster than in the plugin version for no apparent reason, at least for me and the scene I am using.


Could one of the Devs please try to give an explaination!?

[Davve]

I'm having the exact same problem.

Just love using the standalone for look dev and as a tool for collecting all my assets that comes from different software into the same scene.
But the one thing that breaks this workflow for me is the inability for the camera to match up from Maya.

I've also tried all the different export options, orbx, pipline cache, octane alembec both as a selection and as a whole scene.

The one plugin that I would like to try is http://exocortex.com/products/crate alembic exporter, but my trial has expired.

So if there is someone that would like to do some testing with exocortex to see if the focal depth translates over from Maya to Octane standalone it would be awesome.

Also make sure when you do this type of testing that you use the same scene units in all applications.

[gardeler]

I use this every day, and it works for me. (there are room for improvements, but more about that later.)

This is my workflow:

I use maya 2014, one node maya cameras. (but the others should work too, but I have not tried them)

Like you, I place a locator where I want the focus. I use the "distance tool" to create a locator for the focus point, and another parented under the camera shape. Now maya will tell you the distance between those two locators. Connect the distance tool's distance output, into the "focus distance" input on your camera. (it is under "depth of field".) Now you have auto focus! So if you have animated objects and cameras, you just need to parent or animate you focus point, and your focus is set automatically. BUT if you want this to behave correct in the alembic file, you first need to bake the keys.

Now you are ready for export. Make sure you have selected the top node of the camera. If you don't, then you won't get those translations in your alembic. With the top node selected, just select "pipeline cache > export selected to alembic."

Import it through the "scene" node in OR stand alone. I always load my camera as it's own file. That way I don't need to export everything every time I need to do an update. I actually do one export per asset, but that is up to you.

If your camera has too much DOF you can fix it in two ways:
- If your scene is built i real world measurements and you just want less blur, turn up the Fstop slider on your camera in maya, then export it again until you get the result you like.

-If scale is off anyway, or your DOF is massive, you can change the scale on ALL your alembic nodes to bigger scale, including the camera. (like from centimeters to meters.) The scene will look the same, but Octane will return less blur with same settings, if I remember correct.

This should be everything you need to know to get everything to work properly. Hope it helps!

Now, for some suggested improvements to the developers:)

-It would be a huge time saver to have a aperture multiplier for alembic cameras. And now that you cannot reload a alembic file anymore causes a large numbers of camera versions. I assume this would not be too difficult to implement?

-The translation node does not work on alembic camera nodes. If I need to scale the scene, or move it in octane, everthing works, except the camera. Can this be fixed? Or is there a workaround for this?

Thanks and happy rendering!