Octanes searches for texture assets in old path

[firstperson]

I have a scene with lots of geometry and many texture references and materials which normally takes a long time to export to octane when activating the live viewer in Cinema4D. Given the number of assets and complex shaders this doesn't surprise me.

Recently when sending a scene Cinema4D will hang on certain materials while exporting them, taking minutes to export a single material (im looking in the lower left where it says "Octane:generate material:material_name"). now it may take 10-20 minutes to export the scene to the live viewer. This also causes a total freeze of Cinema4D when octane tried to generate material previews even when not using the live viewer. just opening up a materials node editor triggers all the materials re-generate. im not sure what change has caused this because this was not always the case, even tried rolling back to 4.02.1 R3 but i have the same issue.

some extra info

- i reduced all texture assets to be max 2k to reduce load. but there is no correlation between the materials that take long to export and asset file size.
- as far as i can tell there is no correlation between complexity of nodes in the material and load time. sometimes the materials that take long are very simple.
- all materials are using universal shader
- all assets are local on m.2 c drive
- box specs are i7-8700k|48 gb ram|2 Quadro RTX 8000
- running Nvidia drivers 419.67
- before anyone asks i cannot share this scene due NDA

[aoktar]

Firstperson
1- Go and install this version
viewtopic.php?f=85&t=71355

2- Activate all log options from settings/other for your scene. Then work and reproduce the problem, later post c4doctanelog.txt.

3- Spending minutes for a material is not expected result. You can easily delete some materials and try again. Even you can remove some textures in materials test it again.

[firstperson]

Actually i believe i have solved this issue. when i check the logs i can see octane cannot find texture assets for the materials that are taking long to generate.

but when i look in Cinema4Ds texture manager all textures are located in tex folder as i would expect, since i saved project with all assets.

even when looking in the materials with missing textures, the image texture node shows the expected path (in \tex), but when i try and locate the texture through the image texture node it points to the old texture location before the collect.

so after deleting the image texture node with the broken path and replacing it with one that links to the \tex folder this issue is fixed.

questions tho:

im not sure why some of these image texture nodes appear to link to the new collected location but really point back to an old location. i just saved project with assets in C4D as i would normally do and indeed all the assets are in \tex folder but not correctly linked for some reason.

probably an issue on my end but to me it seems like even if the texture is linked to the old location, the texture is still there. so not sure why octane cannot load it.

why does the generation of the material take so long when it runs into a texture it cannot find? seems like it should just move on when it determines the texture is not there.

Thanks for your time.

eli

[aoktar]

why does the generation of the material take so long when it runs into a texture it cannot find?

Can you be having a lot of textures in your many searchable texture paths? Also having network paths in texture search list?
Also update to 4.04, it has a fix for refreshing all materials when you open Node Editor.

[firstperson]

yes some of the paths can point to folders with maybe 50 textures in them. also i have updated to 4.04.

I guess what im still trying to figure out is why when i saved the project with assets some of the texture paths were correctly rewritten and some were not.

when i look in both the Cinema4D texture manager and the Octane texture manager it shows all the textures in the new collected location (\tex folder) but octane still looks for some of the assets in the old location.

you can see in the screenshot above the image texture node seems like its looking in the right place, but when you click the locate button its shows the old path where the texture was before the assets were collected.

[aoktar]

when i look in both the Cinema4D texture manager and the Octane texture manager it shows all the textures in the new collected location (\tex folder) but octane still looks for some of the assets in the old location.

Plugin has some tricks to accelerate search process for textures. Probably it's not aware of you changed the path. But I need to test again.

[firstperson]

okay so at this point my only option may be manually re-point every image texture node to the new location?

heh i have around 1000 referenced texture assets for this scene

(also i updated to 4.04 and octane still generates all material previews when trying to open the node editor for a single material)

[niestudio]

okay so at this point my only option may be manually re-point every image texture node to the new location?

heh i have around 1000 referenced texture assets for this scene

(also i updated to 4.04 and octane still generates all material previews when trying to open the node editor for a single material)

Have you looked at the octane texture manager? Once in there you can find/replace old paths with new ones.

[firstperson]

Have you looked at the octane texture manager? Once in there you can find/replace old paths with new ones.

as i have said both the C4D texture manager and the Octane texture manager both point the expected location after a collect; which is \tex (this is the location where the assets are, and where i want them).

for some reason octane is still looking for the assets in old location.

[firstperson]

just wanted to update in case anyone else come across this issue.

I realize now the reason the material generation was slow is due to a network issue not related to octane or C4D. My workstation was recently moved to a new switch which likely has created an unreliable connection to networked drives.
but this was odd since i collected all assets for this project onto a local drive using Cinema4D's "Save Project with Assets..." so Octane shouldn't be looking on networked drives at all.

when i check the log i can see some texture assets are unable to be loaded (do to the aforementioned switch), but the path its using is the old networked path of the original asset; not the new \tex path

when looking at Octanes texture manager and in the image texture node you can see its pointing to the new \tex path but octane still searches for the asset in the old path, pre "Save Project with Assets..."

I will also change the name of the subject to better reflect the actual issue.