This is my first post here, and I'm jumping straight into this topic. Please excuse me for not reading a lot of other posts here, and if this has already been covered.
I purchased Octane a couple of days ago and it seems like an interesting piece of software, I'm quite intrigued by the quality of the images. But I found this use of aperture, ISO and shutter speed to be very confusing and inconsistent.
Inside the Mesh Preview Imager part of the software, you have several values that directly relate to things that a photographer know about, such as ISO, exposure and fstop - even the different film presets for emulating stock (which I would say is pretty hard core, even). At the same time the camera is built up from more arbitrary values that doesn't relate to photography at all. That I find highly inconsistent. I haven't done any animation in Octane, but the exposure, fstop and ISO seems to do the exactly same thing in still images - to provide some kind of gain function over the image.
People using Octane render will most likely have come from other 3D packages, with renderers such as Mental Ray, V-Ray and Maxwell. All of these have physical cameras, and I think most users would expect - for example - the f-stop value to work with the focus.
My point is, this will confuse users coming from other packages. And I think you should choose:
a) Stick with mathematical values, but make them easy to understand and not arbitraty. For example, the focus should have understandable values for focus distance and region of sharpness.
b) Go with the physical camera properties, which for some people might be hard to understand, but will be much more valuable to learn. And which migrating users will be able to use immediately. Fstop and exposure time should be properties of the camera, and not of the Imager.
c) Or provide an option to choose between the two, with the physical camera and mathematical camera being interchangeable.
Sorry to be verbose about it. But the camera is one of the most important things about a renderer (together with lighting). Having a camera that is easy to understand and use is vital to controlling the image process. I hope I didn't sound too rough, but I seriously think improving this would be very beneficial to Octane
