Is Online Activation a Double Edged Sword..?

[sublime]

I dont know if any of you experience this, but i have to go through the animation again from start after the connection dropped. Perhaps its just a minor occasion where the internet connection dropped every now and again and makes octane stops working. I know that online activation is one of the safest ways from the developer's point of view to avoid piracy, but from these past few days, this concept has driven me nuts, as connection at work became unstable (and i believe im not the only person) and i kept redoing the animation from zilch (i dont know if this is a bug, but everytime i tried to redo the animation from the last camera position, octane refused to cooperates and crashed. The only way for me, is to save as the max file, cut the walkthrough and rescale the time line, can you guys try this and see if its only me..).

Is there alternative way to ancticipate such occasions, im sure loads of potential buyer might not have a 24/7 connection.

[pixelrush]

It is usually the case that you can keep rendering a scene if the connection is lost/closed
If it isnt atm for an animation they should make it so.
Probably they over looked that case.
Sounds like there is a bug with the restart of rendering an animation though so report it or I guess they will see it here

[Nostromo]

We don't think there's a bug due to internet drop while rendering.. however, there was a bug in the rendering engine that, under certain condition was not thread safe and could lead to a crash. It's a coincidence someone had it while the connection was off.

Maybe one solution for the animation case you present here would be to have some kind of auto-retry so that if the connection drops, octane "holds" rather than borking, we'll have to investigate possible scenarios

/M

[ROUBAL]

If it isnt atm for an animation they should make it so.
Probably they over looked that case.

For my own, so far I haven't been able to render a long animation with 2.3, and I still have to stay with 2.2, despite good hardware.

I have already reported this problem in the Blender exporter section : When rendering an animation, the script closes and opens Octane for each frame. As my internet connection is not reliable and often cut, and mainly at night when I would want to render animations (friday night is the worse, due to server maintenance of my web provider probably), as soon as Octane encounters a loss of connection when opening to load a new frame, it stops working.

I have generally no problems with still pictures, as I can render very fast and do it during the day when I'm on the machine. But rendering animations is a nightmare.

[kubo]

I think I posted this before, but maybe no one noticed (or it was a stupid suggestion which is more likely) but couldn't it be done to have octane to take a txt file with the tracking coordinates for the camera and target position, and render all inside octane without the need to reload the mesh? much like the turnable animation. I'm sure the exporters scripters could write the same info that they use to export each scene to some standard file and the feed that along with the mesh to octane to have inbuilt flythru animations in octane, since no need to open and close octane each time, this problem would be solved and we would cut animation times a lot.

[radiance]

We don't think there's a bug due to internet drop while rendering.. however, there was a bug in the rendering engine that, under certain condition was not thread safe and could lead to a crash. It's a coincidence someone had it while the connection was off.

Maybe one solution for the animation case you present here would be to have some kind of auto-retry so that if the connection drops, octane "holds" rather than borking, we'll have to investigate possible scenarios

/M

render farm queue software does this automatically,
if no PNG is saved at the end, it will just reschedule the same change.
so it's a pretty easy thing to add to the exporter plugins.

I've had so much to do the last weeks, i'll get the 2.3 expoter specs updated for the plugin devs asap.

Radiance