Octane v3 baked maps & UE4

[Seekerfinder]

It all sounds pretty convoluted... Hope the Octane plugin for UE4 would simplify the workflow.
Seeker

[ristoraven]

It all sounds pretty convoluted... Hope the Octane plugin for UE4 would simplify the workflow.
Seeker

To be sure, we are talking about a hack here, not a very convenient way to make a scene.

Octane plugin probably will rename UE4 to UE5. It will be a game changer.

[ristoraven]

Creating for GearVR with UE4 appears to be quite painful with the very low poly budget and other limitations.. Even with high-poly->low-poly bakes and optimizations..

Would it be possible, by any means, to have Octane cubemap support for UE4? So that it would work as it works now with .ORBX player, but I could add multiple directional (3D spatial) sound tracks, few performance cheap .fbx animations and some other effects?

That would rock this town inside out.

[ristoraven]

So far, my tests show that if I don't mind GearVr limitations and I would do the scene to a proper gaming PC, the graphics quality when doing textures in Quixel and using them via Octane bake is pretty much pointless. UE4 can do very good looking scenes right out off the bat with Quixel maps without Octane in the middle.. Competes with Octane render quality IMO. Trick is to just simply switch off all the UE4 bloom candy effects and increase the world contrast just a little bit.

----

John Carmack didn't say it in vain that GearVR should be thought as Playstation 1 back in the days..

Draw calls should be kept less than 100 000 per view. That is not much. I think all the games people will do to GearVR will be just the artists/developers "gee look what I can do" -demos.. Not something where average consumer could "sink into".

I think only solutions are that Octane cubemap support would come to UE4, where the entire poly budget could be spent on one or two .fbx animations..

Or

I just wait the Octane native authoring tools and forget UE4.. Make the few animations with cubemaps and alpha channels.

One thing in the wish list for Octane native tool set is multitrack spatial 3D audio. GearVR specs says that it could handle eight tracks.. That would be great.

[Goldorak]

ORBX player 3 adds new compositing layers beyond the current stereo cube maps:

- baked mesh layers (under 65K polys on GVR)
- live streaming of UE4 characters, scenes or overlays set up with Octane+UE4 plug-in -> ORC publishing tools (see cloud demos in the above menu)
- light field volumes rendered on ORC (based on bounding box/volume of a specified baking group ID); These can also be streamed back live into ORBX player as a full BG, or as a portal, or as an object layer (in place of a baked mesh layer).

The UE4 streams and chrome in the cloud demos can stream into a texture as of the last update for the ORBX player (we support XINPUT shimming from GVR BT gamepad for the UE4 streams).

More will come online as we get Octane 3 alpha 3 out and add ORC rendering AND publishing tools

[ZombieDisco]

Hey guys! I'm the UE Octane plugin developer and I'm glad you made this thread! I've been itching to talk about what we're doing with UE and baking.

So as you've established, you can bake surfaces and lighting using Octane and place it into UE. Here's an example of something we've made (it's a little noisy due to a bug in the dev build):



This scene was modeled in C4D, baked in Octane and assembled in UE manually (for now). For archvis purposes baking with Octane is vastly better than the built-in lightmass renderer.

You can also mix the results with UE dynamic lighting:



We're still kicking around the solution ourselves and figuring out exactly how to get the render passes we need to get the best result. As you've guessed, normals and AO, specular, metallic and roughness masks are on the cards, so if you're baking manually right now you'll want those.

We also export the lighting to an emissive channel in each material. Right now this means you have to remove any UE directional lights (such as sunlight) in order for it to look correct, but generally you should do this for archvis or indoor scenes anyway. The lighting pass we export is the raw 16-bit diffuse. UE4 loves the EXR format, incidentally.

We don't bake the base diffuse textures out (eg. the diffuse filter pass). Right now traditional gaming techniques such as tiled detail textures look better up close. Here's a close-up of the barstools for example:



And the diffuse texture we use:



We're chugging away trying to get the plugin ready for an alpha release, at which point the UE4 baking workflow should be much simpler. Hit me up with any questions you might have!

[Seekerfinder]

Hi Justin,
Good to see you on the job. A bunch of us here are quite excited about the UE4 / Octane combo and it's potential.

I am somewhat confused though... I was under the impression we were going to see an Octane plugin inside of UE4, with a render window like the other plugins, no? Is all you're creating a procedure for baking textures to apply more efficiently to models exported for use in UE4? No path tracing in UE4? This is the dream since Brigade went underground a few years ago. I may have missed some headline along the way.... Please enlighten us.

Best,
Seeker

[ZombieDisco]

Hi Seeker!

We have an in-UE Octane render window too! It's quite useful to render the scene from the perspective of the current UE camera and get a feel for what the lighting will look like once it's baked. That said, I'd love to hear how you guys would like it to be implemented and how you expect to use it. In-editor baking is definitely one of the killer Octane features for UE4 and Unity though.

To be more specific, baking takes place inside the UE editor using Octane. This gives you lighting for that specific game level. Octane also allows you to import and export assets and scenes via OrbX. Some example workflows would be:

1. Import an archvis scene via OrbX to UE4, add character controller, bake static lighting, put on HMD, walk around, etc.
2. Take an existing UE4 game level and bake static lighting.
3. Export a UE4 scene via OrbX to an external program
4. Render a Sequencer animation using Octane.

Eventually we'd like to use Octane to replace parts of the lightmass process for a completely seamless integration. As Goldorak mentioned above, we're also interested in using it as one of the layers in a streamed GearVR experience, which has me REALLY excited. Some of these workflows are the direct result of how we want to use Octane and UE for these new applications.

Octane's path-tracing isn't really suitable for 60fps real time applications. I can't comment further on that at the moment though.

(Edited post for clarity)

[ristoraven]

Thanks for the info.

Based on this, as a basic premise I think it would make sence, that

1. if I want to create content for GearVR ---> it's cubemaps.

2. If I want to create content for Rift ---> I can use UE4 and Octane combination.

[Seekerfinder]

Hi Justin,
I actually see UE4 as almost a compositing system for archviz.

We have an in-UE Octane render window too! It's quite useful to render the scene from the perspective of the current UE camera and get a feel for what the lighting will look like once it's baked. That said, I'd love to hear how you guys would like it to be implemented and how you expect to use it. In-editor baking is definitely one of the killer Octane features for UE4 and Unity though.

To be more specific, baking takes place inside the UE editor using Octane. This gives you lighting for that specific game level. Octane also allows you to import and export assets and scenes via OrbX. Some example workflows would be:

1. Import an archvis scene via OrbX to UE4, add character controller, bake static lighting, put on HMD, walk around, etc.
2. Take an existing UE4 game level and bake static lighting.
3. Export a UE4 scene via OrbX to an external program
4. Render a Sequencer animation using Octane.

Awesome! I am new to UE but I see endless potential with it's native functionality in combination with Octane. I focus on archviz (and increasingly product viz) so for me light baking is of limited usage since controlling of daylight settings should be dynamic. Texture baking is great, however one of Octane's strengths is also it's ability to modify materials quickly to show various finishing / colour options. But for a final / unchanging VR experience I am sure baking would be great.

Eventually we'd like to use Octane to replace parts of the lightmass process for a completely seamless integration. As Goldorak mentioned above, we're also interested in using it as one of the layers in a streamed GearVR experience, which has me REALLY excited. Some of these workflows are the direct result of how we want to use Octane and UE for these new applications.

If you have the Octane render window inside UE4, are the baked textures exposed to Octane for faster rendering (a round-trip scenario) or are they only exposed to UE4? And inside UE4, will we only have UE4's GI or is this where the 'lightmass' integration thing comes in? I guess until we see the integration it's hard to grasp the workflow.

Octane's path-tracing isn't really suitable for 60fps real time applications. I can't comment further on that at the moment though.

Brigade let us down so badly on this score - raising us up, dropping us hard (I can't comment further on that at the moment though). Sure, but that is not the point for me. Again, how I would envisage using UE4 is to create my building model in my CAD package, possibly apply materials there using the Octane plugin, import to UE4, bake textures, ability to change textures on the fly (Octane textures or UE4 or both?), re-bake if required for setting up cameras and pre-viz, add entourage, foliage etc inside UE4 using its' tools or our own blueprints. Navigate, save cameras, render them to images, create camera path, render to walk-through / fly-by animations. Use some UE4 daylight system but also have the ability to use Octane's brilliant daylight system - maybe we could have one in UE4 that the Octane plugin could track...?

Can't wait see some integration. I was a beta tester for Revit and Sketchup, let me know if you need some testing & feedback for UE4...

Best,
Seeker