OcDS 2.1 PRE RELEASE 3rd

[kraken]

I'm thinking of installing this update but wondered if it's pretty stable for animation yet?

It depends if the features you want are worth the instability. I found that keyframes unexpectedly populated during a scrub. If you don't save
the file you can reload it later to make changes by selectively clicking on that keyframe (don't use the time scrubber). Once you open the viewport, it never will close and will not let Daz close without going through task manager to kill the process. This makes it difficult to save the changes you do want, so you have to save it before opening the viewport (or trying to close the window).

Some camera/object angles rotate 180* from + to - for no reason so you have to check each keyframe if you notice them spinning wildly.

I "Had" to use it because I needed to export the camera.abc files and open them in Octane SA so that I could render some scatter file environments that I then used as a backdrop in AE along with the .png animation that I created with OcDS (mostly from version 1.2, but a handful from v2.1 did work once the geometry issues were solved).

The focus is very painful (even on 1.2). It seems you have to set the aperture to 0.00 for most of the shots (which makes everything in focus). Like I mentioned, most of my scenes were already rendered with v1.2, so making the backgrounds worked out for me as I needed everything in focus.
Someone mentioned there is a camera/motion blur setting, which I haven't seen or found, but would love to use it.

If your workflow involves using camera.abc files, you have to delete all object (except one that is in the scene most of the time) and all other cameras. I usually set up a scene with multiple cameras so that I can have a selection of nice views, but these tend to clash and cause the exporter to honor only one camera (which will most certainly not be the one you want). I'm sure this will get solved over time and there could be another work around that is currently unknown.

I'm using Win7-64. I also upgraded to Daz 4.7, which seem to work nicely (so far). Although some of the features are relabeled or moved.

[jimgale]

that would be my #1 request too: focus
then animation cancellation

[Spectralis]

I'm thinking of installing this update but wondered if it's pretty stable for animation yet?

It depends if the features you want are worth the instability. I found that keyframes unexpectedly populated during a scrub. If you don't save
the file you can reload it later to make changes by selectively clicking on that keyframe (don't use the time scrubber). Once you open the viewport, it never will close and will not let Daz close without going through task manager to kill the process. This makes it difficult to save the changes you do want, so you have to save it before opening the viewport (or trying to close the window).

Some camera/object angles rotate 180* from + to - for no reason so you have to check each keyframe if you notice them spinning wildly.

I "Had" to use it because I needed to export the camera.abc files and open them in Octane SA so that I could render some scatter file environments that I then used as a backdrop in AE along with the .png animation that I created with OcDS (mostly from version 1.2, but a handful from v2.1 did work once the geometry issues were solved).

The focus is very painful (even on 1.2). It seems you have to set the aperture to 0.00 for most of the shots (which makes everything in focus). Like I mentioned, most of my scenes were already rendered with v1.2, so making the backgrounds worked out for me as I needed everything in focus.
Someone mentioned there is a camera/motion blur setting, which I haven't seen or found, but would love to use it.

If your workflow involves using camera.abc files, you have to delete all object (except one that is in the scene most of the time) and all other cameras. I usually set up a scene with multiple cameras so that I can have a selection of nice views, but these tend to clash and cause the exporter to honor only one camera (which will most certainly not be the one you want). I'm sure this will get solved over time and there could be another work around that is currently unknown.

I'm using Win7-64. I also upgraded to Daz 4.7, which seem to work nicely (so far). Although some of the features are relabeled or moved.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that the focus issue is very problematic. I have to keep everything in focus by setting aperture to 0 because I can't rely on the OR camera to keep what I want in focus otherwise. Based on your experience is the latest release better than 1.2 for animation?

My experience with 1.2 is that it randomly drops clothing and other props worn by a figure which means I have to check every frame after rendering and then re-render the bad ones. This makes the plugin worse than useless. I've tried every fix suggested on this forum but 1.2 still won't render the whole animation correctly. Has 2.1 fixed this problem?

[SimonWM]

I have two problems:

1-I'm not able to get animations renders past my first frame.
How to setup animations? I hit "Start Animation" and the plugin goes advancing the frames and I can see my animation moving in the DS viewport but the Octanerender viewport doesn't updates. The cancel button in the OcDs viewport window doesn't responds either. In fact it got stuck even after finishing going thru all the animation and rendering 60 frames with the same image: the first frame.

2-I had to close DAZ Studio, reopen the scene to find a white character that doesn't wants to take the textures I exported as .ocs.
I exported my scene to preserve all my texture customization for my character but the materials won't import back. I get a white figure with only color in the lips and ears. When I try to import my materials from my ocs file I get the multiple errors shown in the attached picture.

[AtticusBones]

Latest update is much more stable, but two major issues remain atm:

1. Materials still load automatically regardless of checkbox.
2. Rendering continues even when viewport is closed.

Shame i'll have to return to 1.2 (again) till we get fix on both of these.

[Spectralis]

Hopefully one day we'll get a plugin that can actually animate correctly. So far it's only been good for stills. Version 2.1 has to crack all these animation problems otherwise I'll have to find an alternative to OR.

[TRRazor]

Any updates on when templating in the nodegraph editor will work correctly without making the plug-in crash?
Would really appreciate this feature finally being implemented correctly as this is essentially the only thing that's still keeping us from releasing our shaders for DAZ Studio.

Thanks for any heads-up.

[garand3d]

Hmm it got pretty quiet all of a sudden... I'd take it it's because the 3rd pre-release is pretty stable now aside from several minor if somewhat negligible annoyances?

I still haven't touched the plugin yet though, I learned from earlier posts that there are glaring problems with camera focus and whatnot, most serious being with animation layers and keyframes. I hope t_3 is working on fixing these right now as I am one of those users who need the animation to work properly for a film project. - and while we're on that subject, can anyone confirm if the camera/motion blur works?

I'm going to wait until the public release of DS4.7 before testing this 3rd pre-release. Hopefully though, by then the problems with animation will have been fixed in a new update.

Kudos to t_3 for the apparently awesome updates.

[Spectralis]

Hmm it got pretty quiet all of a sudden... I'd take it it's because the 3rd pre-release is pretty stable now aside from several minor if somewhat negligible annoyances?

I still haven't touched the plugin yet though, I learned from earlier posts that there are glaring problems with camera focus and whatnot, most serious being with animation layers and keyframes. I hope t_3 is working on fixing these right now as I am one of those users who need the animation to work properly for a film project. - and while we're on that subject, can anyone confirm if the camera/motion blur works?

I'm going to wait until the public release of DS4.7 before testing this 3rd pre-release. Hopefully though, by then the problems with animation will have been fixed in a new update.

Kudos to t_3 for the apparently awesome updates.

I'm also eagerly awaiting the plugin to be stable for animation. There seem to be problems with the rendering not starting properly as well as the camera issues. I really hope these problems will be addressed soon because animation in 1.2 has significant problems that were never fixed. An uncompleted 2.1 would be incredibly frustrating.

[kraken]

Hmm it got pretty quiet all of a sudden... I'd take it it's because the 3rd pre-release is pretty stable now aside from several minor if somewhat negligible annoyances?

I still haven't touched the plugin yet though, I learned from earlier posts that there are glaring problems with camera focus and whatnot, most serious being with animation layers and keyframes. I hope t_3 is working on fixing these right now as I am one of those users who need the animation to work properly for a film project. - and while we're on that subject, can anyone confirm if the camera/motion blur works?

I'm going to wait until the public release of DS4.7 before testing this 3rd pre-release. Hopefully though, by then the problems with animation will have been fixed in a new update.

Kudos to t_3 for the apparently awesome updates.

I wouldn't say its "stable", but definitely "usable". I made a list of problems, but didn't want to be redundant with so many others pointing out the same thing. The focus problem is intermittent. Some cameras function properly with DOF and other advanced features, others get stuck in an "out of focus" mode.

1-I'm not able to get animations renders past my first frame.
How to setup animations? I hit "Start Animation" and the plugin goes advancing the frames and I can see my animation moving in the DS viewport but the Octanerender viewport doesn't updates. The cancel button in the OcDs viewport window doesn't responds either. In fact it got stuck even after finishing going thru all the animation and rendering 60 frames with the same image: the first frame.

Before animating, check to see if your scene renders in the viewport. If its out of focus, try to fix it with the "octane camera" setting in Daz. If you can't fix it or setting aperture to "0" is unacceptable, then delete the camera then create a new camera. Sometime the new camera will work as you want. Regardless, you can't animate until your camera is working. Make sure it works at all keyframes. Some keyframes are focused on the wrong thing. Auto focus often works (on the viewport) you can set your keyframe and select the object to focus on in the viewport...(when its working).

I haven't tried the motion blur, but remember trying Daz's Alembic Exporter and noticed that Octane rendered the motion blur very nicely. I've also used the alembic exporter in this new version, but hadn't noticed if the blur was working as my scene didn't require it. DS4.7 seems to work very nicely. Gave it a typical exercise and it performed perfectly...no complaints.

The NGE works good but not perfect. The snags occur when you create a diffused material and then decide to change it to specular...instant crash. So create the material as needed without changing it to a different type OR add a mix material and combine it with a specular (I've made some complex materials with NGE where as before I couldn't). The material manager is confusing and temperamental it seems to select more objects than you want. If this happens go to the bottom of the hierarchy and slowly drag the material up the list (this seems to work for me). Using the online db is also a source of frustration, sometime the materials cause a crash, sometimes they don't...could be a connection issue.

I was also getting some sporadic flares with 1.2, that I think went away with this version.

Probably not the right place to post this, but here is my first video created using Daz3D and Octane. The workflow was a bit different. I used 1.2 to generate most of the subject matter (only the last 20 seconds using 2.1 because it that when I installed it). I used 2.1 to do all of the backgrounds because its alembic exporter was working good enough to export the camera into a scene I generated in Octane SA using scatter files of light emitting stars and asteroids with a fractal sky background. I had hundreds of asteroids, but my camera was facing away from most of them as I forgot to set the origin of the scatter file to the camera location...my bad. The point is if you want it to work, you can strong arm it to work with a bunch of cartwheels and backflips.