OctaneRender for Carrara 2.06.0051 [Test]

[Sighman]

The obvious solution is to convince OTOY that nested instances should be supported. Even one level of nesting would solve the problem. The reason they don't support it is that it slows down the render. And you know how loud everyone screams when you loose even 1% of the performance. I would say that that should be a decision made by the user. If the user wants to use nested instances to save memory then they need to understand that there will be a render time performance hit.

As far as determining the memory needed to load a scene it is all a question of math. In Country Lane a fir tree has 8945 leaves. Each leaf has 2400 triangles and the trunk/branches/twigs has 500000 triangles. At worst case each triangle requires 256 or so bytes of GPU memory. If you flatten this tree that would cost

500000 + (2400 * 8945) = 22 Million triangles or ~5.6 GB of memory.

If you scatter the leaves then each scatter costs 48 bytes so the same tree would cost

500000 + 2400 = 502400 triangles * 256 = 128 MB of memory plus
8945 * 48 = 429 KB for the scatter.

for a total cost of ~129 MB of GPU memory.

It's hard to come up with exact numbers because triangles share vertices and I have no idea what optimizations are done during the compile phase.

I plan on adding diagnostics into the plugin that will report on mesh sizes and estimated scatter costs for information and sanity checks. Maybe then I can prevent a tree from being loaded into Octane if it is too big.

[SciFiFunk]

An excellent reply, thanks for the lowdown.

Ok so on one hand we wait for OTOY (however I too am one that demands performance - that's it's chief selling point - unbiased FAST!).

One the other some kind of throttling option would give us users control should a scene fall over. I'm understanding that we have this via flattening - the memory saving is incredible.

How feasible is a "flatten all" rendering option? Could it know all the trees in a scene? Could the out of memory error be intercepted and this tried in the background with a warning message or have I just proposed a ton of work?

Just thinking out loud. If some kind of option/automated option were in there this issue would rarely pop up in the forums. I suppose to keep some kind of perspective the Howie Scenes can only be a fragment of the models/scenes sold on DAZ, so almost certainly other items would be more pressing imho.

If I were allowed to day dream for a moment (these are not fixes just requests), I'd love to see the best bits of the DAZ plugin included in the Carrara plugin. For example seeing the octane materials displayed not a facsimile, would be great for quick material substitution.

[Spectralis]

Is this a possible add on to the Carrara plugin for instancing?

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=41373

[orion_uk]

Wow, blink for five mins and miss so much!

Great work Sighman, thank you for the latest batch of additions which included my 'reset render target settings' feature

Having been very busy I have missed out on quite a lot but am catching up on things right now. Is there any further news you can give me regarding animated PNG sequences (or other sequence formats supported by Carrara as default) being an option please Sighman?

Being able to use them in your plugin would be great for many people all round. As things stand, you can use animated PNG and AVI (etc) files as a texture map within the shader room..

import anim seq..

While the shader view of the animated seq does not update during scrub of the timeline (but is with the shader room preview), the changes do take effect in the final render using carraras renderer.

I can set up an Octane shader to work the same way but your plugin (AFAIK) has not been written in a way as to aknowledge changes in image frame numbers and update the LRVP/shader to show the next image in the sequence when scrubbing in the Carrara timeline.

Would you mind considering this at some point please?

[Sighman]

Is this a possible add on to the Carrara plugin for instancing?

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=41373

That is a cool tool. Unfortunately, there is no way to enter in a scatter list into the plugin ATM.

I could add a scatter property to the Octane Object effect but that would be something you would only see in the ORVP and Carrara would have no idea it was there.

The best way to do this would be to write a new replicator plugin for Carrara that uses the same technique. That way Carrara Native and the Octane plugin would benefit. That, of course, is outside the scope of my plugin.

[Sighman]

Is there any further news you can give me regarding animated PNG sequences (or other sequence formats supported by Carrara as default) being an option please Sighman?

I looked into this last night and I now know how to get a frame out of the sequence. The problem I currently have is that I don't know which frame to get. The frame rate of the video can be different than the frame rate of the animation and I need Carrara to tell me which movie frame should be shown for the current animation frame. I'm still investigating so don't give up hope yet.

[Sighman]

An excellent reply, thanks for the lowdown.

Ok so on one hand we wait for OTOY (however I too am one that demands performance - that's it's chief selling point - unbiased FAST!).

One the other some kind of throttling option would give us users control should a scene fall over. I'm understanding that we have this via flattening - the memory saving is incredible.

How feasible is a "flatten all" rendering option? Could it know all the trees in a scene? Could the out of memory error be intercepted and this tried in the background with a warning message or have I just proposed a ton of work?

Just thinking out loud. If some kind of option/automated option were in there this issue would rarely pop up in the forums. I suppose to keep some kind of perspective the Howie Scenes can only be a fragment of the models/scenes sold on DAZ, so almost certainly other items would be more pressing imho.

For the WOW factor, HF scenes are pretty important. If I could say that I could support any HF scene (or PhilW btw) that would be a big feather in my cap and would help convince people to buy in. However, there are a few factors to consider and, in the some cases, a lot of effort to put in. I think it would be better to come up with a 'how to' section that describes how to fit a HF scene into the Plugin.

I will also try and come up with smarter 'flatten' decision logic. For example, trees that have a reasonable leaf * scatter count should not be flattened. Trees that are too big to 'flatten' should not crash the scene.

If I were allowed to day dream for a moment (these are not fixes just requests), I'd love to see the best bits of the DAZ plugin included in the Carrara plugin. For example seeing the octane materials displayed not a facsimile, would be great for quick material substitution.

Where do you want to see octane materials displayed? Do you mean like a material preview in the material room or are you talking about LiveDB?

[orion_uk]

Is there any further news you can give me regarding animated PNG sequences (or other sequence formats supported by Carrara as default) being an option please Sighman?

I looked into this last night and I now know how to get a frame out of the sequence. The problem I currently have is that I don't know which frame to get. The frame rate of the video can be different than the frame rate of the animation and I need Carrara to tell me which movie frame should be shown for the current animation frame. I'm still investigating so don't give up hope yet.

Sighman, I am grateful that you have even gotten round to looking at this what with all the other stuff you have going on! Thank you. I know its in safe hands so will sit back and await further news (hopefully reporting success) in the future. Once again, many thanks for taking a look

[SciFiFunk]

Sighman.

Re: Howie scenes, that sounds like a sensible way to proceed for now.

Materials preview. Yes I am talking about how we see the Live DB in Carrara. The Daz plugin for example shows the previews just as if you were in the standalone.

I am glad to say that I'm leaving the modelling alone for a while now, most of it is done. The next animation on my list is the Ennis House video. This is already animated so it's just a lighting and rendering job - a great test of replication too.

This brings me back to an old question. atm the Octane rendering settings are saved out separately. It would certainly help workflow (reduce chance of my error) to have these settings in the scene. Is this a large fix?

[Sighman]

Sighman.

Re: Howie scenes, that sounds like a sensible way to proceed for now.

Materials preview. Yes I am talking about how we see the Live DB in Carrara. The Daz plugin for example shows the previews just as if you were in the standalone.

I wish I could associate different images with the downloaded shaders but there is nothing in the Carrara API that lets me do that.

I am glad to say that I'm leaving the modelling alone for a while now, most of it is done. The next animation on my list is the Ennis House video. This is already animated so it's just a lighting and rendering job - a great test of replication too.

This brings me back to an old question. atm the Octane rendering settings are saved out separately. It would certainly help workflow (reduce chance of my error) to have these settings in the scene. Is this a large fix?

I'm waiting for the next version of Octane to become public because they are adding a bunch of new stuff and I want to make sure I capture all of it. I'm sure there will be revisions down the line but right now it is a question of timing...