Howie Farkes' Harpwood Trail and Octane Render

[erik-nl]

It was disappointing to find that our beloved plugin wasn't able to find and render all those trees and plants that Howie neatly packed into orderly groups in his forest scene for DAZ Studio.
Of course I hope that this unfortunate dysfunction can be repaired a.s.a.p., but since breaking up those groups wasn't a practical solution either, I went looking for an alternative.
And I found it (and more) in a tool created especially for distributing green stuff on surfaces in Octane Render: Phantom Scatter.
http://scatter.phantomtechnology.nl/

Long story short: you export your carefully assembled and composed scene and cameras from DAZ Studio via the Octane for DAZ Studio plugin, open it in Octane Render, and then use Phantom Scatter to create additional scatter data for Octane to use.
Phantom scatter's interface takes some getting used to, but results come quick and effective (surprisingly even on the first try!).
Also using Octane Render itself in stead of our wonderful plugin turned out to be a doddle since all the heavy lifting was already done in DAZ Studio.

Here's what my (still unfinished) version of Howie's forest path looks like now:
http://erik-nl.deviantart.com/art/Harpw ... -626892619

I used Howie's distribution maps (kindly supplied by him as extras in the texture set) to scatter ferns, fallen leaves, and small plants in Phantom Scatter, the trees are from broken up groups in DAZ Studio.
Displacement of the rubble and leaves on the ground was done by simply using Howie's colour maps, since there are no height maps in the set.
Looks decent already I think, happy with it even if it took some effort to get to this point.

Cheers!

Erik

[face_off]

If you can provide me a scene using instances groups containing cubes which demonstrates this problem, I can take a closer look. However perhaps the scene you are trying is using some other method to scatter the trees. It hard to tell without seeing the scene - perhaps you could provide some screenshots of the scene item tree.

Paul

[erik-nl]

Hi Paul, I'll make some screenshots.
My guess is that those instances themselves are nothing special, since they render perfectly like any other in Octane, once freed from the groups they're in.
Seems they're simply nested one level too deep for the plugin to detect them.
Can't imagine it would be too difficult to make it (the plugin) look a little harder so to speak.

In the mean time I'm having a great time with Phantom Scatter, it can do so many wonderful things with instances for Octane it's making me dizzy : )
Here's a fun thing, 45,000 glass spheres on a translucent 'blob' that I never imagined I would ever render on my poor (admittedly not very old) laptop:
http://erik-nl.deviantart.com/art/Octan ... -627103946
With 2k Spp not nearly cooked long enough to get rid of all the noise, but hey, this is some complicated geometry!

Cheers!

Erik

[erik-nl]

Here's a cropped screenshot of the scene tab showing the group structure:

The darker cubes named '*** Instances' are the ones that need to be broken up for the Octane plugin to find and render what's inside them.

If you do manage to break such a group up, a looooooooong list of elements will be added to the scene pane, making navigating very difficult.
Only breaking up the tree groups and the grass groups will take a somewhat reasonable amount of time, the other ones will possibly take days to process.
I hope this is sufficient information for you to work on, because if I remember correctly deleting stuff from the scene to slim it down took forever too.

Cheers!

Erik

[erik-nl]

Oh, one nasty little thing I've found about Harpwood Trail:
Howie has given element 'Terrain 01' some odd translations in the x- and z-directions (X=23.84 and Z=-39.82).
These translations will cause problems when you create scatter data in Phantom Scatter (and all other similar tools I think), so in Octane you must set them to zero for the new scatter elements to align properly with the terrain.

Cheers!

Erik

[face_off]

I tried to create a simple version of that scene's layout (specific to the "...Instances" items) - but it rendered correctly in the DAZStudio plugin. So there must be something different with the scene you have which is causing the problem.

My test scene is below.

Paul

[bmosalt]

I tried to create a simple version of that scene's layout (specific to the "...Instances" items) - but it rendered correctly in the DAZStudio plugin. So there must be something different with the scene you have which is causing the problem.

My test scene is below.

Paul

Hi Paul,

The problem with the Harpwood Trail product isn't instances per se. It's that the instances are grouped, which OcDS doesn't recognise. In that Scene image, that Instance node "Beech Large 01 Instances" actually contains around 15 instances of trees. To get OcDS to recognise them, you first have to unpack them using: Edit>Object>Instances>Break Instances Group...

The product is useable, but it's a big hassle to go through and unpack everything. I also ran into trouble trying to unpack the Native Violet groups and had to close DAZ. They were the last groups I unpacked so that might be because of the huge number of instances already in the scene.

Ben

[Spectralis]

I wonder if this is a problem to do with the way the plugin handles hierarchy in a scene? There was a problem in the past which has now been fixed when using D-formers. Changes to D-former parameters were not being updated in the OcDS viewfinder for some reason. When D-formers are added they are listed in the Scene pane as a subset of the object being deformed. Could it be that OsDS has difficulty sometimes identifying certain instructions that are subsets of others? If the scene contains too many hierarchies or the hierarchies contain non-object instructions then they're invisible to OcDS unless it's looking for them. Just a theory.

[erik-nl]

Another Phantom Scatter experiment:
http://erik-nl.deviantart.com/art/Phant ... -627359303
Its a bare Dinoraul tree trunk with 25,710 Stonemason leaves stuck to it, no transparency maps, rendered to 1k Spp in just a few minutes.
Scene exported from DAZ Studio by Octane for DAZ Studio, leaves distribution data generated by Phantom Scatter on tree OBJ, rendered by Octane Standalone.
First try, not bad!
Setting up those leaves took ten minutes at the most, and I've started playing with Phantom Scatter just a few days ago.
This is fun!

[erik-nl]

Since it appears there is no solution for conveniently rendering Howies Ultra Scatter instance groups in Octane for DAZ Studio, I moved on and today bought Phantom Scatter.
Rendering exported DAZ Studio scenes in Octane Standalone isn't such a big deal or terribly time consuming, but I certainly would have preferred being able to do everything in Studio.

Even so, Phantom Scatter in itself turned out to be a reason to voluntarily render in Stand Alone, in hindsight I'm glad Harpwood Trail made me learn more about it : )
Here's another Dinoraul tree trunk with Stonemason mesh leaves, 16,031 of them this time:
http://erik-nl.deviantart.com/art/Phant ... -627954665

Cheers!

Erik