Experiences with the C4D Demo

[DinoMuhic]

My experience in C4D in general is pretty good (MAXON Beta Tester for C4D) so getting around the UI was not a problem.

While octane proved to be extremely fast in most scenes it was lacking in others. All together it was a good experience and I'm really thinking about getting it for me personally.

Now to my main points where octane needs improvement:

Disclaimer: I was working on 2.16.x and above lately

- Animating the opacity in the object tag was not working how I thought it would. Objects which were supposed to fade out plopped out when looked at through a reflection.

- Much worse: the objectID colors were changing throughout the rendering. When an object was animated to 0 opacity all others changed their ID color. A no go!

- Fake shadows needs a better explanation when it is supposed to be used and when not. The new comparison image from the comparison pdf would be very good to put into the main documentation.

- I don't find the workflow for displacement/SSS very intuitive. In the displacement channel in the material you have one texture input field. You can't put anything else in there than the octane displacement shader. So why isn't it there already? The input field is really irritating.

- Understanding how to control SSS is really hard, documentation doesn't make it simpler. Its not intuitive at all and needs huge workflow improvements. In Arnold its just one slider you have to drag, thats it. Can't get simpler.

- in the diffuse channel you can't put in a c4d layer shader into the texture field. If you do, it stays black. Same in many other channels. But in some it works. Irritating. Tested on 2.16.x the last time. Hope it was improved.

- it makes a huge difference if you load in an hdr image into the hdr environment using octane's own image texture field or if you use cinema's image input field. The gamma is different!

- The helpfile is really bad. Being used to the great helpfile in c4d made me not like the Octane documentation in C4D. Its outdated, a lot of stuff is missing, it sometimes uses the standalone version for Screenshots... I could go on. It really needs an update. Again the new comparison spreadsheet is a nice step forward and needs to be intergrated into the official documentation.

- Some defaults are weird. I would cut down the samples in pathtracing to 1600-5000 for example.

- The export to viewer button sometimes just refuses to work and is not exporting. I had to close the viewer and the dialog and open both again to make it work. Much better though in 2.2+

- if you copy a hdr environment from one c4d file to another and the image is missing in the second file, the image input field inside the hdr tag switches back to cinema's own image Input field making you think it's the same but due to different gamma values it is not.

- There is no way to exclude objects from certain lights so they are not affected by the light at all.

- The demo is too much restricted. Comparing it with Arnold's new C4D plugin C4DtoA it totally lacks in features. The demo from Arnold Renderer ONLY has a static watermark. You can even render it on your render nodes. No resolution restrictions either. Its great if you want to try it out and see how good it scales in your network and render nodes.

In octane on the other hand your hands are totally tied.
No network render
No LiveDB access
Save options disabled (no way to export an ORBX for OctaneVR)
Resolution restricted to 1024*576
Flickering/Moving watermark
Only demo forum access
Even render to Picture Viewer is disabled.

If you want to compare it with other renderers you really can't.

To end with something positive again I want to hank aoktar for the great development he does for us C4D users. He is really kind and communicates/helps a lot in the forums. I hope he can squash those bugs out and continue with the great development!

Cheers

[aoktar]

Thanks. These are interesting to me. Others are not possible to change in plugins. They are some fundamental request for Octane Renderer.

- Much worse: the objectID colors were changing throughout the rendering. When an object was animated to 0 opacity all others changed their ID color. A no go!

Use render layer IDs. They are constant.

- in the diffuse channel you can't put in a c4d layer shader into the texture field. If you do, it stays black. Same in many other channels. But in some it works. Irritating. Tested on 2.16.x the last time. Hope it was improved.

We run the convertion out of vpost, so i'm not sure that's fixable for "Layer" shader with complex content. Cpu renderers can run the c4d shaders while calculating the render but we can't due gpu programming.

- it makes a huge difference if you load in an hdr image into the hdr environment using octane's own image texture field or if you use cinema's image input field. The gamma is different!

Yes, there is no parameter to adjust gamma of hdr in C4D Bitmaps. That's not way to use it, see imagetexture.

- The helpfile is really bad. Being used to the great helpfile in c4d made me not like the Octane documentation in C4D. Its outdated, a lot of stuff is missing, it sometimes uses the standalone version for Screenshots... I could go on. It really needs an update. Again the new comparison spreadsheet is a nice step forward and needs to be intergrated into the official documentation.

Yes, it's because of unstopping developments. But interactive help window is more up-to-date.

- Some defaults are weird. I would cut down the samples in pathtracing to 1600-5000 for example.

That's defaults of Standalone. I don't want to change these.

- The export to viewer button sometimes just refuses to work and is not exporting. I had to close the viewer and the dialog and open both again to make it work. Much better though in 2.2+

Yes sure. See latest as 2.23.2.

- if you copy a hdr environment from one c4d file to another and the image is missing in the second file, the image input field inside the hdr tag switches back to cinema's own image Input field making you think it's the same but due to different gamma values it is not.

I'm not sure what you mean, but see again the latest version.

[ten]

Some good points Dino especially about how restrictive the demo is.

Worth checking these out if you have not already - http://inlifethrill.com/category-training/

Some indepth octane for c4d tutorials put together by another forum user, Dobs with Ahmets help I believe. Really helped explain some areas of octanec4d to me.

Whist Arnold is fanstatic and integrates very well with c4d its a dog trying to get high res noise free images with decent render times I have found. It really needs a render farm to make best use of it, especially for animation (I still love using it though!) Octane with a couple of decent GPUs in a single machine you can get pretty good results with quick render times.

Im looking forward to seeing what Octane 3.0 brings for c4d, although I also heard Arnold are working on a GPU version to so thats pretty exciting!

ten

[insertcoin]

- The demo is too much restricted. Comparing it with Arnold's new C4D plugin C4DtoA it totally lacks in features. The demo from Arnold Renderer ONLY has a static watermark. You can even render it on your render nodes. No resolution restrictions either. Its great if you want to try it out and see how good it scales in your network and render nodes.

In octane on the other hand your hands are totally tied.
No network render
No LiveDB access
Save options disabled (no way to export an ORBX for OctaneVR)
Resolution restricted to 1024*576
Flickering/Moving watermark
Only demo forum access
Even render to Picture Viewer is disabled.

If you want to compare it with other renderers you really can't.

To end with something positive again I want to hank aoktar for the great development he does for us C4D users. He is really kind and communicates/helps a lot in the forums. I hope he can squash those bugs out and continue with the great development!

Cheers

I Totally agree !! please give people the better possibility of test octane. Your demo version need to be more permissive...

[Yambo]

Very good points. It's really important that they will be reviewed by Octane team also beside Ahmet.

[Micha3D]

In octane on the other hand your hands are totally tied.
No network render
No LiveDB access
Save options disabled (no way to export an ORBX for OctaneVR)
Resolution restricted to 1024*576
Flickering/Moving watermark
Only demo forum access
Even render to Picture Viewer is disabled.

If you want to compare it with other renderers you really can't.

+1

A set of demo material should be there at least. I don't understand the limited output size, the watermark should be enough limitation. I would like to make a Full HD animation render test ... .

[insertcoin]

In octane on the other hand your hands are totally tied.
No network render
No LiveDB access
Save options disabled (no way to export an ORBX for OctaneVR)
Resolution restricted to 1024*576
Flickering/Moving watermark
Only demo forum access
Even render to Picture Viewer is disabled.

If you want to compare it with other renderers you really can't.

+1


A set of demo material should be there at least. I don't understand the limited output size, the watermark should be enough limitation. I would like to make a Full HD animation render test ... .

+1