OctaneRender™ for Blender 2.24.2 - 9.8 Win [OBSOLETE]

[JimStar]

OctaneRender™ for Blender plugin. Windows x64 version.


The bundle consists from two parts:
1. OctaneRender™ Server
2. Blender - OctaneRender™ edition.

The first part (server) should be run on the same computer as the second one. To stop the server - just right-click its icon in the tray.
After the server is run - you can start rendering (or open a rendered view) from inside Blender. Before the very first rendering you should fill in the server address (only 127.0.0.1 at the time), login and password (your license key info) to activate the server. After the first rendering the server will remember this activation info, and you will not need to enter it again.

You should use only OctaneRender materials inside Blender scenes - the plugin knows nothing about Blender specific materials and textures (about any Blender nodes, generally speaking).


FIXES AND NEW FEATURES SINCE LAST RELEASE

• Added "Output" section to node editor menu in textures mode.
• Fixed the LiveDB crash bug (caused by image textures having no filename set in Octane Live database in some materials).
• Removed the "Tonemapped HDR" setting because there were no use for it (Blender image editor has linear colors input), it just misled some users.
• Fixed a memory leak: if you had a lot of global meshes in scene, animation of a long sequences ate the memory. (Thanks simdal).
• Fixed a bug: a modified image textures file re-uploading to the server failed.
• Fixed a bug: "global" meshes were present in first frame only during "Camera only" or "Movable proxies" animation rendering.
• Minor fixes and improvements...

After starting OctaneServer it will take some time before the LiveDB tree and LiveDB material previews will be available from Blender - as OctaneServer caches the LiveDB data from remote server right after starting. But only the materials groups tree will be re-cached every time after server start, LiveDB material preview images will be cached only once - so only the very first OctaneServer start will need some more time before LiveDB tree will be available in Blender.


DOWNLOAD (both distributives must be reinstalled, they depend on each other)

Blender Octane Edition - 9.8 (2.76) (67.3MB autoinstaller file)
Octane Server - 2.24.2 - 9.8 (10.8MB autoinstaller file)

DEMO is available. Use the same Octane edition of Blender for DEMO version of OctaneServer.

Octane Server DEMO - 2.23.4 - 9.8 (10.0MB autoinstaller file)

For network slave and daemon please download standalone installer here:
viewtopic.php?f=24&t=50498


Please, if you decided to report a bug:

- Don't post here the reports about how Octane engine works - use the Octane Standalone forum sections for that.
- Give a meaningful description about what you think is wrong and how to reproduce it (in addition to screenshots if any). I can't solve the "one screenshot" rebuses without any meaningful description...
- If you use Google-translator to post here - check please what you got before posting it, and edit it before posting. Ask your friends to check it if you don't speak English.
- If you like to discuss something about the plugin - create a separate thread, don't flood in these testing threads please.

Any meaningless or rebus-like "reports" here will be deleted, just to keep the testing threads clean - because these threads are directly used as the source for fixing and improving the plugin.

[Marten74]

I was thinking it was early christmas. My euforia unfortunately took a dive when getting same error message regarding textures and server at my first render test. Path tracing seems to be more sensitive than Direct light for some reason. Direct light can give me one or two renders before I have to restart blender and hope for some more. If I´m lucky, preview rendering can work for a while longer than final render. Those times a Path trace render have actually started, 80% of the times it crashes both Blender and Windows. That has never happened with direct lighting if that can be a clue.

For a longer explanation please see last octane blender versions thread.

I thought "Fixed a bug: a modified image textures file re-uploading to the server failed" could have fixed this issue. Was it ment to? If not, I would love to get some help trouble shooting this.

Can it be a windows error? I´m on windows 7, 64bit, 2xTitan (V1). I thought I just push through two more projects before upgrading to Win10. In other projects than this I had no problem with rendering, but I frequently get blue screens when shutting down Blender. If this can be related to my issue above I will take the time to install Windows even if it will take quite some time to get everything in to working order. On the other hand, if it fixes the problem it is easily worth the time.

My last trick apart from upgrading to Win10 would be to go in to each separate product scene that contains imported fbx models, get rid of all textures but those I load in to octane nodes and then rebuild all my assembly scenes. The strange thing is that all separate product scenes, that I later append in to the assembly scenes, renders without any issues with those unused texture nodes present. So if I do this extremely time consuming effort, I can´t be sure it actually helps...

Praying would be good perhaps...

Thanks

[JimStar]

Looks like your problem is not related to the one that was fixed in this version.
I can't reproduce it on my scenes. You can just PM me the link to it - if I will be able to reproduce it on your scene, I'll release the fix quickly.

[JimStar]

Marten74
OK, I've downloaded your scene. There are no image files packed into the scene, so there is not much use of it to understand the reason of your problems.
But there are absolutely no problems if I set some image files manually into some of your image textures - these image textures are uploaded to server and rendered absolutely correctly, without any errors in the console.
So, the problem is somewhere on your side. Play with your image files and paths to them. Make sure all your image textures have the valid paths to image files. Make sure the texture files modification timestamp is set correctly by your system in the filesystem for both OctaneServer textures cache directory (c:\Users\<user name>\livedb\<machine address>\textures\) and source Blender scene image files.

2.png (5.72 KiB) Viewed 8168 times

3.png (25.44 KiB) Viewed 8168 times

[afecelis]

Hi JS, thanks for the new version. I'm having problems installing both the server/blender programs under Windows, even when running the installers as administrator. I get the usual windows warning about installing the program but I click the option "run anyway" for it to proceed, however, after that, the installation process just hangs and never completes, it doesn't even get to the installation's splash screen. This is only happening with the Octaneblender files, I've tried installing/uninstalling other programs and they all work well. Any ideas on what may be causing this?

regards,
Alvaro

[enricocerica]

Hi and thanks,
Still can't use the texture environment, only sunlight is working, I have this issue since several versions and can't fix that.
I made a fresh install but nope.
Can anyone just explain me the correct workflow to add an hdr texture environment just in case I miss something.

[enricocerica]

Hi and thanks,
Still can't use the texture environment, only sunlight is working, I have this issue since several versions and can't fix that.
I made a fresh install but nope.
Can anyone just explain me the correct workflow to add an hdr texture environment just in case I miss something.

Ok sorry, didn't knew I had to use a node for that, it works now.

[Marten74]

Marten74
OK, I've downloaded your scene. There are no image files packed into the scene, so there is not much use of it to understand the reason of your problems.
But there are absolutely no problems if I set some image files manually into some of your image textures - these image textures are uploaded to server and rendered absolutely correctly, without any errors in the console.
So, the problem is somewhere on your side. Play with your image files and paths to them. Make sure all your image textures have the valid paths to image files. Make sure the texture files modification timestamp is set correctly by your system in the filesystem for both OctaneServer textures cache directory (c:\Users\<user name>\livedb\<machine address>\textures\) and source Blender scene image files.

1.png

2.png

3.png

Hi Jim!

Thanks for checking it out. I wrote you that I failed to pack the files in to the Blend and you got a screen shot of the list of missing textures. What I can´t understand is why most of the missing texture links in that list were pointing to directories where the textures actually are. Is this where the time stamp could be an issue?

The way I have checked out if the image textures have a valid image path is to re open the texture in the octane texture nodes, making sure there are no strange characters in the search path or the file names. Is there a better way to do this?

I´m sorry, could you please clarify the time stamp a bit? What am I looking for and where exactly? One thing I notice when going to the folder c:\Users\<user name>\livedb\<machine address>\textures\ is that none of the textures in this problem project are present. Second, I noticed my user name have two spaces in it. When working I always avoid this and frequently use under score instead. But when installing windows I obviously did not think about the user name actually being part of a search path for Octane textures... Would you say this could be the problem? If so, why have it not been a problem before? I have worked for two years with Blender on this particular windows installation with no texture issues.

Thanks for enduring my questions

Cheers!

[JimStar]

Marten74
The spaces in the path should not be a problem.
About the timestamp. To make the plugin capable to "feel" your on-the-fly texture files changes and replace the cached files if this happens - it pays attention to the modification time of texture files when uploading them to the server. When receiving the texture node, OctaneServer first checks if it has the texture file in its cache. If there is no file with that name - OctaneServer asks Blender to upload this file first. But if the file with that name already exists in the cache, OctaneServer compares the modification timestamp of cached file with timestamp sent together with texture node. If the timestamp of cached file is lower then OctaneServer asks Blender to upload the texture file again, and rewrites the cached one.

So, imagine you have some broken filesystem (e.g. on some network-mounted disk that you use as source for image files) that reports the modification timestamp of files as current or even some future time. Or you have the system time set somewhere in past. In this case whenever OctaneServer receives the texture node from Blender - the uploaded texture will always have the referenced image file "newer" than the cached one. So, even if OctaneServer asks Blender to re-upload this "newer" image file, after re-uploading of it the OctaneServer anyway will see that this just uploaded and cached file is older than the one texture node is referencing. Because the re-uploaded file was saved with current time on the moment of saving, and the source file always has the later modification timestamp than that. In this case OctaneServer will delete the "wrong" cached file and report the error you see on the console - because it never can reach the up-to-date file cached on the server side.

[Marten74]

Marten74
The spaces in the path should not be a problem.
About the timestamp. To make the plugin capable to "feel" your on-the-fly texture files changes and replace the cached files if this happens - it pays attention to the modification time of texture files when uploading them to the server. When receiving the texture node, OctaneServer first checks if it has the texture file in its cache. If there is no file with that name - OctaneServer asks Blender to upload this file first. But if the file with that name already exists in the cache, OctaneServer compares the modification timestamp of cached file with timestamp sent together with texture node. If the timestamp of cached file is lower then OctaneServer asks Blender to upload the texture file again, and rewrites the cached one.

So, imagine you have some broken filesystem (e.g. on some network-mounted disk that you use as source for image files) that reports the modification timestamp of files as current or even some future time. Or you have the system time set somewhere in past. In this case whenever OctaneServer receives the texture node from Blender - the uploaded texture will always have the referenced image file "newer" than the cached one. So, even if OctaneServer asks Blender to re-upload this "newer" image file, after re-uploading of it the OctaneServer anyway will see that this just uploaded and cached file is older than the one texture node is referencing. Because the re-uploaded file was saved with current time on the moment of saving, and the source file always has the later modification timestamp than that. In this case OctaneServer will delete the "wrong" cached file and report the error you see on the console - because it never can reach the up-to-date file cached on the server side.

Thanks Jim for this explanation! It sounds that time stamp might very well be what is causing the problem. What would be the best way to remedy this? Rename and reload textures? Delete the cache? There were no textures from this project in "c:\Users\<user name>\livedb\<machine address>\textures\" though...