How to render animation from C4D/Octane

[Saad]

Hello,
I've been using Maxwell for some time now and picked up Octane 3 for Cinema4D R16 this week. The lighting and texturing is pretty easy to wrap my mind around. However, I'm having difficulty understanding how to render my animation.

This is going to be a super-noob question, but I just can't figure it out. Apologies in advance!

How do I export animations from C4D/Octane? The Live viewer works fine -- renders the current frame in like 20-30 seconds. However, when I add my animation (15s/450f) to Render Queue and hit export, nothing happens. I wait for 20 minutes and not a dent in the render -- I check the output folder and not a single PNG was created (trying to get a PNG sequence).

I tried to look on the forums and they were talking about sending various different file types to the Stand Alone and then exporting camera data and then exporting a video file. I find that overly complicated. Is there anyway to just export the animation into a PNG Sequence or MOV or MP4 straight from the C4D plug-in?

Thank you for your time.

Saad
https://www.behance.net/emrgnce_
http://emrgnce.tumblr.com/

[aoktar]

welcome,
really interesting question. My answer is simply is that you do as other renderers. Your confusion comes from don't check console and octane log. Propably you have render failures. Why don't use normal rendering rather than using render queue?

[jayroth]

Ahmet is correct, of course. You set up your animation for output as you would any renderer. If you like the settings you have in the LiveView, you can transfer those settings with a menu item (sorry, cannot recall the exact name of it ATM). Adjust your settings in the Render Settings Panel, making sure to choose Octane as your renderer. Select Octane in the Render Settings panel to get things the way you want them. Make sure that you also have an Octane Camera to render from, and that your lights are Octane lights, or C4D lights with an Octane tag. Also, make sure you have an Octane tag on the top of your mesh tree, set up for motion blur (if you want it). You will also need to activate motion blur in the Octane Render settings, and the Octane Camera tag as well, where you can specify the shutter speed (0.02 to mimic a film camera).

If you want to render passes, it gets a little tricky, as Octane does not look at the Multi-Pass settings in Render Settings; instead, the Octane Render Settings has a section for multi-passes. It's straightforward after you use it once or twice. Make sure also to activate the desired settings in the Octane Camera tag. I got tripped up by forgetting to enable the Post settings on my tag (though I think there is a global area in Octane Render Settings, but I haven't yet tried that).

The Octane Engine works great through the Takes system as of R17, which is really nice when you are setting up shot variations based upon a master file. You can also create separate render settings for each case using the Takes system. I'm wrapping up some work for a TV pilot as I write this, and I just ran several shots through Octane using this method. It worked flawlessly. In fact, over the past year or so, I have run thousands of frames through Octane with no issue (except my user errors).

Hope this helps!

[Saad]

Thank you both -- Ater hours of tinkering, it started to work. I don't exactly know how as I started maeesing with a wide selection of settings and watched a few YouTube tutorials on render setups.

However, I have run into a new problem.

In LiveView, my objects show up just fine with all materials present. In the picture viewer, however, the lighting and objects render fine, but the materials are gone.

Any idea why this would happen?

[aoktar]

Hi Saad,
Are you checking free vram, console outputs? I think that's around this problems. It never does this if you're not out of some limits or hw problems... Please always post some images with detailed information to let us help you.

Also check this new wip manual:
https://render.otoy.com/plugindownloads ... l-wip1.chm

see LV and rendering topics. Read careful LV vs. PV diffferences section.