No subdivision surfaces?

Forums: No subdivision surfaces?
A public forum for discussing and asking questions about the Octane for Unity Alpha

Moderator: ChrisHekman

No subdivision surfaces?

Postby adamnerva » Sun Sep 30, 2018 5:10 pm

adamnerva Sun Sep 30, 2018 5:10 pm
A big issue I have with this Unity/Octane marriage is how terrible Octane is at rendering low-poly assets. There are renderers out there with shading termination hacks that make for beautiful low-poly renders. Thea render, Modo, and Furryball come to mind. These renderers are optimized for lower-poly content, and so they don't suffer from terminator artifacts.

I have looked through the manual, and I can't find subdivision surfaces mentioned anywhere. How do I access the subdiv levels for my scene geometry? I think this is really important. I would like to import all-quad FBX assets and have them subdivided at render time. If I have to export these assets at high subdiv levels, that's going explode asset import times and bog-down Unity.

Hopefully there is a solution for this, and I've just overlooked it.
Attachments
shadingTerminator.jpg
shadingTerminator.jpg (5.13 KiB) Viewed 5327 times
adamnerva
Licensed Customer
Licensed Customer
 
Posts: 112
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 9:01 pm

Re: No subdivision surfaces?

Postby adamnerva » Mon Oct 01, 2018 2:14 am

adamnerva Mon Oct 01, 2018 2:14 am
It looks like I've asked this same question before, and xhed responded. And now I've created another. Apologies for that. I will add an octane shader to my mesh and see if that gets me access to subdivision settings. I'll report back. Thanks, xhed, for your answer in the other thread.
adamnerva
Licensed Customer
Licensed Customer
 
Posts: 112
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 9:01 pm

Re: No subdivision surfaces?

Postby adamnerva » Mon Oct 01, 2018 5:10 am

adamnerva Mon Oct 01, 2018 5:10 am
It looks like there is still no way to set subdivisions. The edit mesh wrench icon is grayed out, and no settings in PBR Instance Properties script or materials.
adamnerva
Licensed Customer
Licensed Customer
 
Posts: 112
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 9:01 pm

Re: No subdivision surfaces?

Postby Xhed » Mon Oct 01, 2018 12:12 pm

Xhed Mon Oct 01, 2018 12:12 pm
Octane does not support the creation of subdivisions, you'll need to provide it with a more detailed mesh.
- Rick
User avatar
Xhed
OctaneRender Team
OctaneRender Team
 
Posts: 239
Joined: Wed Jul 10, 2013 10:27 pm
Location: Breda, The Netherlands

Re: No subdivision surfaces?

Postby adamnerva » Mon Oct 01, 2018 2:07 pm

adamnerva Mon Oct 01, 2018 2:07 pm
Xhed wrote:Octane does not support the creation of subdivisions, you'll need to provide it with a more detailed mesh.


But Octane Standalone does allow me to click the little wrench icon and set the subdiv level. Also, don't the other DCC plugins handle this pretty seamlessly too? So this is just a Unity thing?

The problem with just importing assets at high subdiv levels is that Unity is not well optimized for this. Just updating the editor to the newest version can trigger a re-import on your project, and if you are using lots of dense meshes, that's going to be a long, painful process when that happens.
adamnerva
Licensed Customer
Licensed Customer
 
Posts: 112
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 9:01 pm

Re: No subdivision surfaces?

Postby adamnerva » Sun Oct 07, 2018 4:44 am

adamnerva Sun Oct 07, 2018 4:44 am
So I thought I would report back on a couple solutions to minimize the faceted terminator artifacts that appear on low poly assets using octane render in Unity.

The first solution is to use this free asset:

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/catmull-clark-mesh-subdivision-95479

The above asset can be used to subdivide the meshes in your shot near the camera that might be causing shading issues. But even with 2 subdiv levels you still might have the dreaded terminator issues.

So the 2nd thing you'll need to do is increase the Ray epsilon in the PBR render target.

Using both these things together, you should be able to get production quality renders out of Octane Unity (for static assets at least).

My thoughts are that if this free asset can do what I asking, I think it's reasonable for Octane for Unity to be able to do this at render time. If meshes in the scene had an exposed property for subdiv level, that would be fantastic.

Also, .002 or .003 might be a better starting default for ray epsilon.
adamnerva
Licensed Customer
Licensed Customer
 
Posts: 112
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 9:01 pm

Re: No subdivision surfaces?

Postby Xhed » Tue Oct 09, 2018 8:54 am

Xhed Tue Oct 09, 2018 8:54 am
I've discussed the issue with our Octane devs, and they've given me a few pointers on how to tell Octane to create subdivisions. The big issue will be in adding elements in Unity to control the subdivisions for your mesh. As subdivisions are done on a mesh (not on an instance), and the scene hierarchy consists of instanced meshes, I'll need to figure out a way to hook up the controls to Unity.
- Rick
User avatar
Xhed
OctaneRender Team
OctaneRender Team
 
Posts: 239
Joined: Wed Jul 10, 2013 10:27 pm
Location: Breda, The Netherlands

Re: No subdivision surfaces?

Postby adamnerva » Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:55 am

adamnerva Tue Oct 09, 2018 10:55 am
Cool. I hope you can find a way to make this happen. Btw, I see there is an option in the unity FBX import options to keep as quads for subdivision.
adamnerva
Licensed Customer
Licensed Customer
 
Posts: 112
Joined: Mon Apr 27, 2015 9:01 pm

Return to Octane for Unity


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests

Thu Mar 28, 2024 6:38 pm [ UTC ]