OctaneRender™ for LightWave™ 2.0 DAILY BUILD

[atnreg]

Juanjo, I have a feature request for you that may be difficult or even impossible even for you

The problem is: plants only have single polygon thick leaves (which is good for lower polygon count) and when the transparency makes the real leaf shape there is the problem that even by making the leaf thick with modeler thicken, the result in render is hollow, only top and bottom polygons are visible but there is nothing between them.

Now I ask, can you make Octane LW plugin to fix or trick this?
What I mean is that now if I use displacement for single polygon thick leaf, it works but of course the leaf is unnaturally thin.
It would be absolutely amazing if you could make another setting in displacement, 'polygon/displacement thickness' or something like that. It only would make the edge of the polygon visible, so making it thick. Displacement then would work as usual, affecting that edge as well but keeping it at set thickness.
Of course the thickness would be nice to be adjustable by LW procedural or something but even that simple thickness for polygon displacement would be great.

This may be impossible but as you have made the displacement independent of any LW polygon subpatches, I thought you might manage to figure out how to do even this

Please ask for more explanation if this was confusing, it is clear in my head but difficult to explain as text

Thanks!

[BorisGoreta]

I have a request too. Some scenes with lots of instances of "heavier" objects have long updating scene in GPU phase, when rendering sequences sometimes this phase is as long as rendering phase. (30 seconds each ) This is a waste of time in animations where only camera is moving and instances are always the same. There should be some kind of a switch which would tell Octane to process instances only once at the beginning and update only camera on all subsequent frames.

[geo_n]

+1 to boris request. Preprocess of instances is very long,

[juanjgon]

Juanjo, I have a feature request for you that may be difficult or even impossible even for you

The problem is: plants only have single polygon thick leaves (which is good for lower polygon count) and when the transparency makes the real leaf shape there is the problem that even by making the leaf thick with modeler thicken, the result in render is hollow, only top and bottom polygons are visible but there is nothing between them.

Now I ask, can you make Octane LW plugin to fix or trick this?
What I mean is that now if I use displacement for single polygon thick leaf, it works but of course the leaf is unnaturally thin.
It would be absolutely amazing if you could make another setting in displacement, 'polygon/displacement thickness' or something like that. It only would make the edge of the polygon visible, so making it thick. Displacement then would work as usual, affecting that edge as well but keeping it at set thickness.
Of course the thickness would be nice to be adjustable by LW procedural or something but even that simple thickness for polygon displacement would be great.

This may be impossible but as you have made the displacement independent of any LW polygon subpatches, I thought you might manage to figure out how to do even this

Please ask for more explanation if this was confusing, it is clear in my head but difficult to explain as text

Thanks!

I am not sure if I am understanding your issue. Can you post a sample image with the effect you are looking for?

-Juanjo

[atnreg]

I am not sure if I am understanding your issue. Can you post a sample image with the effect you are looking for?

-Juanjo

Yes of course, sorry for not doing it in the first place

The problem can be seen in this image (the whole scene with all bitmaps is attached as well):

The leaves are from Dandelion plant I made in PlantFactory and they have proper UV maps.
The leaf in the back is single polygon thick, the front leaf has been thickened (too much for clarity of the problem) in Modeler. The objects themselves are bended rectangular shapes. The nodal material has color(with alpha), transparency (to clip the actual leaf shape) and bump maps and bump is used as Octane displacement and it is working fine as can be seen Using separate transparency or alpha embedded in color map makes no difference.

The problem in LW is that when image is used as transparency, the object is clipped nicely but the edges are hollow. So even if the object itself is 3D object with thickness, the transparency clipping causes the edge to disappear. There is no way (that I know) in LW to fix this problem other than model the leaf as object but it would make the polygon count to go crazy for even a normal household plant.
Of course for a tree that is not needed as it is not usually used as close-up but for example animation that moves the camera through the tree leaves would need that too.

So, my idea is:
Octane displacement would have another setting, Thickness, that would adjust the thickness of the displaced surface. So, to get the thickened leaf you only need single-polygon thick leaf but set the Octane displacement thickness to say 0.5mm.
That would do one of the following:
1) make the displacement go to 0-height on the outline of the clipped object by transparency map, so making the edge visible and thick like a mountain with flat bottom (that would be the original object polygon surface
2) make the displacement extruded so that it would make it thick instead of only displacing the infinitely thin surface
3) any other way, just so that the rendered leaf would look thick

That might be possible as there is no need to create extra geometry, just make the displacement repeat itself at given distance (Thickness) with edges visible or make the clip edges to go 0-height in displacement (then using double-sided polys it would be possible to make the other side to be displaced as well). The color of the edges could be the ones at the point where the object is clipped or even just one settable color or optionally either.

Do you think this could be possible in Octane plugin? I thought it might as already now the displacement does not need LW polygons to make excellent job so you must already now 'create' the geometry on the fly

If that is possible, then there is of course further need to make the edge round etc. but even just sharp visible edge would be absolutely amazing.

This would be huge feature to get Octane even more popular as this problem has been in LW forever and it seems Newtek is never going to change it.

So, please tell me you can do that

And of course, if there is some other way in Octane or LW to make this, please anybody feel free to tell us!

Thanks!

Antti

[geo_n]

And of course, if there is some other way in Octane or LW to make this, please anybody feel free to tell us!

Thanks!

Antti

To make thickness from 2d displacment maps? Not in any poly based app afaik. With voxels its possible in 3dcoat to extrude thickness from images and have a manifold closed mesh.
Maybe this request can be done by render booleans. But I've never heard booleans to make leaves yet. That would be interesting.

[MrFurious]

Juanjo is it possible to make it so that unseen items do not interfere with surface picking via IPR? for example I often have wall sections invisible to camera (for cheating impossible camera angles with interior shots)So these invisible wall sections often are the closest item to the camera, but when set to invisible it makes surface picking impossible, as it obscures every other surfrace from IPR, even though it's 'invisible'

[hdace]

I have a request too. Some scenes with lots of instances of "heavier" objects have long updating scene in GPU phase, when rendering sequences sometimes this phase is as long as rendering phase. (30 seconds each ) This is a waste of time in animations where only camera is moving and instances are always the same. There should be some kind of a switch which would tell Octane to process instances only once at the beginning and update only camera on all subsequent frames.

I too am a little frustrated with this. I'm working with a scene very heavy with "heavy" instanced objects (a garden with lots of plants, and thousands of trees, etc.). GPU updating takes a very long time, not just during rendering, but I have to wait ten minutes after the scene is loaded to start work because Octane is busy using the CPU at 100-400% (Mac style).

There must be a way to optimize this process. It would appear that the updating process actually reloads the textures from the beginning each time. Can't you adjust the programming so changes or updates only "edit" the data, rather than reloading it? Of course, I don't really know what's going on, that's just the way it looks. But doing something about this would really improve my work efficiency.

Also, I'm using the LW native instancing method. Is there a different instancing method that works better with GPU updating?

Thanks, Hal

[juanjgon]

I too am a little frustrated with this. I'm working with a scene very heavy with "heavy" instanced objects (a garden with lots of plants, and thousands of trees, etc.). GPU updating takes a very long time, not just during rendering, but I have to wait ten minutes after the scene is loaded to start work because Octane is busy using the CPU at 100-400% (Mac style).

There must be a way to optimize this process. It would appear that the updating process actually reloads the textures from the beginning each time. Can't you adjust the programming so changes or updates only "edit" the data, rather than reloading it? Of course, I don't really know what's going on, that's just the way it looks. But doing something about this would really improve my work efficiency.

The scene compilation time for the first render of a scene is something out of my control, you have the same behavior in Standalone. Octane needs to build the scene acceleration structures and so on, and with a lot of instances this time can be really high.

I am going to review the plugin update code to try to avoid the full recompilation of the scene if it is not needed, in the IPR or in the "update scene" mode rendering. I am not sure what is possible, but I am sure that there is room to improve it.

-Juanjo

[juanjgon]

Juanjo is it possible to make it so that unseen items do not interfere with surface picking via IPR? for example I often have wall sections invisible to camera (for cheating impossible camera angles with interior shots)So these invisible wall sections often are the closest item to the camera, but when set to invisible it makes surface picking impossible, as it obscures every other surfrace from IPR, even though it's 'invisible'

Yes, the plugin can avoid the objects unseen by camera in the picking process. I will add this feature for the next release.

-Juanjo