OctaneRender for Maya 2018.1.1-14.25 [OBSOLETE]

Wed Apr 17, 2019 2:31 am

Otoy® is proud to announce the availability of a new OctaneRender™ for Maya® Version 2018.1
The world's fastest and most feature-rich unbiased render engine that integrates completely into Autodesk® Maya®.

Maya® Version Requirements

This release will work with Maya® Versions 2016.5, 2017, 2018 and 2019 64-bit on Windows, Linux and OSX operating systems.

To use this version, you need a GPU of compute model 3.0 or higher. Support for Fermi GPUs (like GTX 4xx and 5xx) has been dropped. Also make sure you use a driver of version 419.17 or higher and if you are working on Mac OS that have a CUDA driver installed that supports at least CUDA 9.1.

Changelog and the installers for Octane Standalone are here:
OctaneRender Standalone 2018.1.1

Changes since version 14.24:

Integrated the 2018.1.1 rendering engine.
Implemented the support of Maya fluid's "shading" mode: Octane now can translate the fluid's shading before start rendering, sampling Maya's shading into Octane voxels geometry. Maya's fluid sampling API is very slow, so be prepared to long translation times of large fluids in Maya's "shading" mode. Use the fluid's "textures" amplitude and similar parameters to fine-tune the Maya's texture opacity output so that it appears properly visible in Octane output. In addition use the new "Voxel multiplier" and "Voxel range" in Octane section of the fluid (along with Octane medium's density and step length): these can be used to widen the dynamic range of Maya's shading output, adapting it for voxels density (in the case if the Maya's shading dynamic range is too narrow and you don't see any details inside the rendered volume). Think of it as an intermediate way to "fake-shade" volumes in Octane, before the true volumes shading gets implemented on the Octane rendering engine level...
Minor improvements of image-format selection UI.
Fixed a broken support of rendering multiple renderable cameras in batch mode.

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Subscription Studio Downloads
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OctaneRender for Maya Studio [Windows]

OctaneRender for Maya Studio [Linux]

OctaneRender for Maya Studio [MacOS]

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Subscription Enterprise Downloads
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OctaneRender for Maya Enterprise [Windows]

OctaneRender for Maya Enterprise [Linux]

OctaneRender for Maya Enterprise [MacOS]

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DEMO Downloads
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OctaneRender for Maya DEMO [Windows]

OctaneRender for Maya DEMO [Linux]

OctaneRender for Maya DEMO [MacOS]

Wed Apr 17, 2019 1:41 pm

Bug : Fluid transparency attribute is inverted in octane, it behaves as if it was opacity,
but tranparency is the oposite of opacity, white tranparency = fully transparent so zero opacity.

Wed Apr 17, 2019 2:01 pm

@JimStar,

Sorry I can't understand your explanation about the new settings, can you explain precisely what each of them is doing :

Voxel multiplier : mutliplier of what exactly ? not multiplier of the number of voxel anyway, looks like another density scale attribute ...

Voxel range: The range of what ? and why this default value of 8 ? I can't see any effect ...

I couldn't find a way to use these settings to improve the fluids translation,
so my guess is maybe you added them because of the inverted TRANSPARENCY, and maybe if transparency is fixed they are not needed anymore ?

Wed Apr 17, 2019 7:46 pm

@JimStar,

This is very nice to have many fluid features finally implemented in the Octane plugin, like density scale, fallof methods, gradient/static grid method, texture opacity and volume falloff.
but something important is missing, maya Fluid are also supposed to be renderable as surface, so as Octane volume SDF geometry :

: maya_2019-04-17_21-07-59.png (6.05 KiB) Viewed 1981 times

So for this we'll need another field to link a surface material wich would be used when surface render is enabled.
Also the octane levelset iso value attribute must takes is value from the surface treshold maya attribute and can be hidden to user, as this is the only purpose of this VDb attribute.

Wed Apr 17, 2019 7:54 pm

@jimStar,

Too bad this new better fluid support make them useless because of the huge translation time,
I compared the computation time for the Maya plugin to translate a fluid with texture, with exporting to VDB file from the open-source VDBui plugin : https://github.com/bram0101/openVDB_mayaGUI

I found the that the octane plugin is 60 times slower than this plugin for doing the exact same thing

For example the same fluid of 100x100x100 voxel takes 3mn of precomputation for the octaneplugin but only 3 s second for VDBui to export as VDB grid.

So, please have a look at this short source code of the VDBui plugin : https://github.com/bram0101/openVDB_may ... ayaGUI.cpp

VDBui is not perfect (Arnold translate the same fluid even faster) ... but it exports correct transparency and texture opacity, and is 60 time faster than your implementation while using the same Maya API but maybe in a better way.
Also the code use a permissive MIT license so you can use it as you wish.