Sending Information from Standalone to Plugin

[leehenshall]

I think its great you can export a scene from plugin to standalone but can it go the otherway?

For instance I've been trying to get cameras back and forth between stand alone and Maya with no success. It could be user error but i'm guessing this is not currently possible?

If I export a ORBX from Standlaone Maya says "unrecognized file type" I've also noticed you can right click a node in standalone and save it to your localDB which will then become visible in Maya but nothing happens when I try to import it.

Octane would be so powerful if you could export a whole scene back and forth between plugin to standalone and also plugin to plugin.

Any information regarding this would be greatly appreciated

Cheers

Lee

[Phantom107]

If there is a seamless way to do this I can bring a lot of cool stuff from Phantom Scatter and beyond to the plugins

[calus]

Octane would be so powerful if you could export a whole scene back and forth between plugin to standalone and also plugin to plugin.

Actually this is theoretically not hard to do, you can unpack your orbx from standalone (orbx is just a container) it gives obj or alembic files + 1 ocs file.
If I remember well the ocs file is just an xml description of the octane node tree, it's not hard to parse xml and Maya can already import obj and octane alembic files, so an importer is possible.
However the Maya plugin V2 is still too different from Octane standalone, there's even some missing nodes or attributes, so that would be hard to setup the scene in maya.

But there's hope with current refactoring of the plugging by Kai, if for every octane node we really have the same nodes and attributes in maya this will help a lot.
we can for example imagine to have the exact same octane geometry nodes in maya. That would work as proxy geometry loaded in Maya only at render time...
Or even a function to copy and paste nodes from maya node editor to Octane would be eventually possible ...

[leehenshall]

Thanks for the replies. It would be great if the development team could provide some information as to whether this could be possible in the future or if anyone out there can help me figure out a work around to get a camera from standalone to Maya and back again.

It would be great to have the ability to light within standalone via something like HDR light studio or maybe a place highlight button like in Max. Personally I think Standalone is the way to go for me it's far more elegant than the Maya plugin (i know they are working on this but its going to be a long time coming I feel) and i love the node based scene assembly and responsiveness of the render engine within Standalone.

For the time being as a work around it would be great to have my main scene in Standalone and then export a camera back to maya or HDR Light Studio standalone to refine my lighting then bring back into standalone for production rendering.

[linvanchene]

To compare the possibilities:

In the OctaneRender for DAZ Studio plugin you can export and import separate .ORBX or .OCS files that include data for

- camera
- render settings
- environment settings
- material

what you cannot do is import in the plugin

-geometry with setup OctaneRender materials for all surfaces
- complete scenes with all data


As far as I understood based on the information in another thread it may be extremely challenging to share complete scenes with all plugins and standalone back and forth.

The exception currently seems to be Nuke in which complete scene import export is said to be working.

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In any case it would be a huge step forward if import and export of geometry with set up OctaneRender materials would work between any plugins and standalone.

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[calus]

If I understand correctly a feature coming later with "OctaneEngine" development will enable collaborative work from different application on the same ORBX, so this is even better...