OctaneRender for Carrara 2.23.0077 [Preview]

[Sighman]

WARNING: This version has had limited testing. Use at your own risk!

Changes in 2.23.0078

• Added random UV mapping option.

Changes in 2.23.0077

• Adjusted default hair thicknesses.
• Added hair thickness preference settings so you can change the default hair thickness to suit your needs.

Changes in 2.23.0076

• Fixed crash when modelling hair with the Octane Viewport open. (Found the actual cause of the crash so this should be working now.)

Changes in 2.23.0075

• Attempt to fix crash when modelling hair with the Octane Viewport open.

Changes in 2.23.0074

• Added UV Mapped hair support. Hair can now be uv mapped based on the position of the hair on the source object of the hair model. This should allow you to add stripes to your tigers and punk to your hair. Use the Octane Hair effect to enable and disable UV mapping.
• Modified the auto-generated shaders with (I hope) better mappings for Shininess and Highlights.

Changes in 2.23.0073

• Fixed hair thickness. Hair thickness should now be working properly and is calculated using both the base hair thickness of the hair instance and the root and tip percentages in the Carrara hair shader.

Changes in 2.23.0072

• Integrated with Octane SDK 2.23.2
• Added Octane Node Editor support.
• Added Carrara Hair support.

Quick Notes:
To use the node editor pick an instance in the Instances list or pick a shader in the Shaders list. Then use the menu: Edit->Octane Commands->Edit Material in Node Editor.

Hair (and about time too). Carrara hair is now rendered in Octane using the Octane hair system. Note that this is a work in progress. There is an Octane Hair effect that allows you to edit the Octane material used by the plugin if you are not happy with the auto-generated one as well as an option to enable UV mapping on the hair. Do not replace the Carrara Hair Shader with an Octane Shader because it will break the hair rendering.

If you do create an Octane shader using the Octane Hair effect then there are a couple of things not working. The shader is not tied to an instance so if you run the menu command: Remove Unused Shaders then it will delete the Octane hair shaders. To work around this create a hidden object in the scene and assign the shader to it. The second problem is that if you rename the Octane hair shader then it will become disconnected and you will need to reassign it to the hair.

To get hair to work I had to use the same geometry used by the Carrara viewport. This means that what you see in the Carrara view port is what you see rendered. Many hair models do not display all the hairs in the viewport by default so you need to enable 'Show and Calculate Generated Hairs' and set the 'Display Percentage' to 100%.

As usual, please let me know if you find any other issues.

ATTENTION: This version is based on Octane 2.23. That means you need to update your NVIDIA graphics drivers to at least version 344.x

Happy Rendering...

Download Links:
OctaneRender for Carrara (64-bit) 2.23.0078
OctaneRender for Carrara (32-bit) 2.23.0078

[Sighman]

A couple of (badly) rendered hair models...

Skye Hair

Paige Hair

[SciFiFunk]

Thanks for your continuing work on this plugin.

[PhilW]

Carrara Hair!!! That is so exciting - downloading now and I will let you know how it goes.

[Mythmaker]

OMG!!!!!! This makes totally made my day/ week/month!!!!

I know this is still a preview version but very big breakthrough, this one. Thanks thanks thanks so much Sighman!

Willing guinea beta tester here... Downloading now, will feedback later....

[PhilW]

The good (huge!) news is it works for hair - it also doesn't seem to take up an unreasonable amount of memory, which is good. I couldn't find a way to adjust the hair thickness, is this something that is coming, as we need it (unless I am missing something). Also I noticed that if the render window is open when opening the node editor, I couldn't then move or resize the render window. But just to get hair rendering in Octane is hugely exciting!

[Tugpsx]

Awesome news, thanks for updates. Definitely have a few things to test this on. Keep up the great work.

[Sighman]

The plugin does not use the hair thickness settings from the shader yet. It is automatically set to go from 100% to 1% over the length of the hair. You should be able to adjust the base thickness on the hair model though. There is a drop down (thin,medium,large) and a scale adjustment.

The node editor, unfortunately, is a modal dialog (it locks all other windows). It uses a built in function in the Octane API so there is not much I can do about that. Not a big problem if you have multiple monitors but it can be a pain on a single monitor.

[PhilW]

Thanks for the response, and OK regarding the node editor. On the thickness issue, I am not seeing any difference with changing the thin/medium/thick and scaling. Would it be possible to add the root and tip thickness control to the Effects tab that you already have (if you can't get it to automatically reflect the Carrara settings)?

[PhilW]

A couple of better images with Carrara hair rendered in Octane. These use an edited version of Paige Hair.