Textures in viewport/OGL

[limeforce]

Hey! Would be nice to have a better viewport/OpenGL preview of the Octane materials, just an RGB color for a whole material is hardly enough. At the moment I'm using a separate take with basic Houdini shaders to preview my work, but it's cumbersome to set up. Anyone have an idea for a quicker workaround, something like encapsulating Octane vopnets in another network (which? how?) that has a more advanced OGL shader?

Or perhaps the OGL preview could be improved in the plugin directly? Add options in Octane Network parameters --- "Use texture" for OGL Diffuse, OGL Specular etc, most important maps would be Diffuse & Normal in my opinion.

[juanjgon]

It is fairly easy add to the Octane vopnet node the parameters related to the OpenGL viewports. Now it only has some basic OGL parameters, but it is easy add more using the parameters interface (from the Render Properties tab, SHOP Options, OGL), and even link them to the internal Octane VOP nodes.

Anyway for a future release I want to improve the default Octane Materials HDAs, adding some internal texture nodes linked to the OpenGL viewport parameters ... but as you can see in the attached image, it is easy build your own HDAs with any kind of feature you could need, in this case support of color and bump texture maps in the viewports. The only issue is that the texture mapping is to going to work only over UV mapped objects, the Octane texture projections can't be supported in the OGL viewports.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[limeforce]

Cheers, seems like it's exactly what I was looking for, have not had a chance to test yet though. Default HDA updates are welcome as well

[snakeboxmedia]

So this is still not a thing is it?

I find it really hard to get this to work, and also feel like I really shouldn't have to go through all the interface settings in 2019 just to show a texture in the viewport? has there been no more development on this or am I just missing something? thanks

[juanjgon]

Nope, sorry, not yet. Usually, all the studios are building their own custom material HDAs with their internal workflow and the OpenGL tags, but I agree that perhaps we should include some kind of "uber" material including some textures maps, like the Mantra principled shader. I'll try to work on it at some point.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[fantome]

i agree Juanjo,
just focusing on a uber material , based on the octane universal material would be great. having an openGL preview close to the Mantra principle shader would be great.
as a side note it looks that houdini 18 will handle a mechanism to be able to assign mutiple shader and switch accordingly to the good context.
for exemple one Asset could have at the same time an arnold / redshift / octane shader assign, and houdini will be able to pick the right one according to the render engine you use.
maybe it could be possible to use that feature and have an OpenGL shader for viewport , but when Octane start it read the good octane shader.
it is thus maybe useless to connect and embed the openGL code directy inside the octane material ?

[luijee]

Hey, any news on this?

It'd be good to setup a basic interface on the Octane Material Builder like Labs Quick material for example (needs to expose a few more things, displacement etc)

Tried setting these OGL parameters myself but getting inconsistent behaviour in the viewport, sometimes it shows up sometimes not. Think its getting overwritten by the basic OGL colour parameters already on there.