Octane v3 baked maps & UE4

[ZombieDisco]

Hey! Making steady progress. Everything is basically working now, I'm working on a video demonstrating features at the moment.

[Seekerfinder]

Justin,
I get the benefits of baking but would we be able to render views in a viewport without having to bake light-maps, as in any other other host app with the UE plugin? Also, are the daylight systems integrated?
Cheers,
Seeker

[ZombieDisco]

This feature exists although at the moment but due to how we capture materials it's not as high quality a result as other plugins, but it's very close. The plan was to add an option in the future to render from Matinee/Sequencer using Octane. I've been using it as a mini-viewport but if there's any demand for it, it can be a full-size viewport as well.

[Seekerfinder]

This feature exists although at the moment but due to how we capture materials it's not as high quality a result as other plugins, but it's very close. The plan was to add an option in the future to render from Matinee/Sequencer using Octane. I've been using it as a mini-viewport but if there's any demand for it, it can be a full-size viewport as well.

So it's a material issue, not a lighting issue? Which channels are the problem ones? UV's ok? Do all other nodes port successfully? I would love to see it work out the box like any other host app. UE4 has many advantages and great potential.

[ZombieDisco]

This feature exists although at the moment but due to how we capture materials it's not as high quality a result as other plugins, but it's very close. The plan was to add an option in the future to render from Matinee/Sequencer using Octane. I've been using it as a mini-viewport but if there's any demand for it, it can be a full-size viewport as well.

So it's a material issue, not a lighting issue? Which channels are the problem ones? UV's ok? Do all other nodes port successfully? I would love to see it work out the box like any other host app. UE4 has many advantages and great potential.

There's no 1:1 way to get material results from UE due to the way their materials are constructed and then compiled into HLSL - the only answer is to get results from the GPU. So that's what we do - set up a plane with a render target and extract the material from the various buffers, including some tricky stuff to get emissive data for both lighting and surface emission. I may be exaggerating it a bit, it looks pretty good when you capture it at full resolution and the results are good enough to use as baked surfaces, but right now it's not 100% accurate for every kind of surface. Great for archvis, maybe not so great for a swamp monster's skin. I'll post a video soon and you'll get an idea of what it looks like.

[Seekerfinder]

What about just getting material id's from UE and applying Octane materials in the vp? UE has a huge library of foliage & entourage. And if we can get Octane working with blueprints, it would be great for animations and offer a lot of flexibility.

Great for archvis, maybe not so great for a swamp monster's skin. I'll post a video soon and you'll get an idea of what it looks like.

Can't wait!

Seeker

[ZombieDisco]

Just having the material ID isn't enough unfortunately, you also need the results of the material which can look like this: https://i.imgur.com/XEmyORc.png

So while it'd be possible to fetch the texture samples assigned to a material (pretty easily too) what the shader actually does with them can be pretty radical.

Can you describe how you'd envisage an Octane blueprint node working? Currently it's an editor plugin so there'd be no way to use it in a deployed game (if the end user had a license!)

[Seekerfinder]

Just having the material ID isn't enough unfortunately, you also need the results of the material which can look like this: https://i.imgur.com/XEmyORc.png

So while it'd be possible to fetch the texture samples assigned to a material (pretty easily too) what the shader actually does with them can be pretty radical.

I thought it might work like the other apps, as long as the material has a unique ID / pin in the Octane material node it might be possible to apply an Octane material. So from where I'm sitting it's the Octane shader in the Octane render window - not live / baked view in this case. Sorry if I'm oversimplifying it... Just trying to understand what might be possible.

Can you describe how you'd envisage an Octane blueprint node working? Currently it's an editor plugin so there'd be no way to use it in a deployed game (if the end user had a license!)

So we see the UE potential for archviz. The way we envisage using it is for advanced animation functionality for example. For instance rendering an animation sequence while the sun is setting - assuming we'd access to (or at least parity with) the Octane daylight system. Like a kind of compositing tool I guess.

[ZombieDisco]

It sounds like you're describing the Sequencer functionality I mentioned above, in which case it's something we'd like to do and under most circumstances should look good. You wouldn't need to make a blueprint for this, you'd just set up your animation and start rendering out. I'll definitely let everyone know when support for this is coming and it shouldn't be too far after the initial release. That said, texture baking for realtime applications is probably the most useful feature so that will be the subject of the first release at a minimum.

For materials, the difference between UE and virtually everything else is that in other programs you have access to the material texture maps and you know how they're being used or can at least get the final output. In UE there's no such facility so capturing the GPU result as best we can is a cunning solution to that. UE just added an orthographic camera to render target capture and this improved it enough to make the results usable for more than just calculating light bounces. That was only last week though so I'm still testing the new quality limits.

[Seekerfinder]

Thanks Justin(!) Makes sense. Is there an ETA?