Animation Support

[dannrees]

I'm really close to purchasing Octane and have a few more questions.

Pirmarily concering animation. I realise there's support for it but to what extent?

I'm assuming it supports simple keyframe animation.

From what I seen in the gallery it support character animation. But what sort of workflow can I expect and whats the realistic limits?
Does/will it support any sort of particle animation, I realise theres no particle systems but would it be possible to bake simple particle system animations (like falling leaves for example) or even advanced ones (like basic smoke for example).
Does/will it support physics animations? I imagine baking rigid body is straight forward but what about deforming meshes like cloth and soft body or water?
In essence, what's the limitations on baking and exporting from 3ds max and other software?

Does/will it support camera and light animations. Not just movement but properties like light colour/intensity for example and camera DOF and FOV?

Also what about animated materials and textures?

I'm currently using an 8800gtx (768mb ram) but will soon be upgrading to a GTX260/GTX265. What sort of limitations will I experience with regards to scene data storage and 1gb vram.

I can't fault the quality of the product so far, but in real-life conditions where I may want to render out a short movie with multiple characters and so on. Even if particle and other fancy effects have to be composited, support for light and camera animations would still be required I imagine.

Sorry if any of these questions have been answered before but I have a million things going on in my head right now. Basically what I'm asking is what CAN'T IT DO? I'm in my final year of a computer animation course and if I purchase the software I'll be looking to use it instead of mental ray to render my final stills and animations.

Many thanks

Dann

[kubo]

I'll try to answer as much as possible.
Octane renders whatever you can feed it thru a obj file type (collada is in the works) which means that anything you can model in max can be exported (you can try exporting to obj and importing back), particles, physics, cameras and the such export well, also uv map animation, what it doesn't import (in 3dmax case at least) are objects not native to max (that really is just 3dmax native obj exporter limitation, not octane's), such as vray proxyies or non-standard materials, you'll have to convert them in max to standard instances or materials.
Right now, we are close to see the 1.0 version, you have to export on a frame to frame basis since there is no instances support (which is an obj file limitation, instances are imported as single objects, hence no memory save) but instances will be introduce in the 2.0 expected somewhere at the end of this year, and then the workflow for animation will improve greatly, but as you can see in the gallery there is great animations done even with previous betas, and the pre-2.3 is amazing already, so expect an awesome 1.0.
In my line of work I don't usually get to do much animation, my schedules are pretty tight and my clients hardly give me more than 2 weeks to make miracles, but now, with octane, I can even fit in that timetable a short 30 sec animation besides the renders, which impresses them to no end I can animate (or do anything I like) while I "cook" my finals which is a great time saver.
About the 260, as you can see in my signature I've got one, it's great, don't take me wrong, but I would think before purchasing one to try to squeze a 400 series, preferibly a 460 price wise, with 2Gb of vram, not only for the ram but for the number of cores, my 260 was faster than my processor in most cased comparing it with a biased render for the same scene / quality render, but the 470 just flies.
The vram is the limit, but you can pull a huge amount of polys even in a 260, I think I had a 2M scene no problem, the textures is the thing you have to be more aware of, specially in a 260 with 800Mb (that means no 4k x 4k maps for ALL your textures). But Octane keeps improving optimization wise so you'll be amazed how much you can fit.

[dannrees]

Thanks for your reply. Whoops my bad I meant to type 460gtx haha. I've found a 2gb version of the 460 for a good price so I think I'll go for that. The 470 would be nice but I can't really justify the price difference to be honest. And also there seems to be no 2gb 470 model as far as I can see. So I guess it's a good trade off. I was considering trying to get hold of the 465gtx which can be flashed to a 470 but the thought is a litle scary but I've heard lots of success. It's just no guarantee of finding a 465 with 10 memory chips and they dont perform as well as the 460 and draw more power. My PSU aint so great unfortunately. For smaller scenes I'm guessing I could combine the power of my 8800gtx too?

I hope the animation workflow is tolerable, I would really love to render out my Uni projects with this beauty

[kubo]

well I got a 470, and right now I would go for a 460, first for the extra vram, but above all for the noise, this sucker heats up my office plus is noisy as hell, and the price is much better.