Keeping Materials in 2.5

[p3taoctane]

Gidday Bazuka
I noticed a new plugin release 2.5

By any chance does it keep materials or is that still a Octane next release issue?

Many thanks for teh hard work

Peter

[tehfailsafe]

Looking through the maya forum for the first time I've seen this come up a couple times with no clear answer. I struggled with it for a while in the C4D forum til eventually found some obscure post and we figured some stuff out.

The trick to get around it is changing material settings as nodes and mapping them in the node graph. So instead of just using the node inspector on the right to edit them, right click in the node graph to make new > material > glossy, set it as you want, then connect it to the input on the obj mesh.

I don't believe it's a bug, I think it's working as it was originally intended, though it's not intuitive. The node inspector panel on the right lets you look at the materials that are coming from the mesh. When you re-export each from the mesh gets recreated and those materials do too. However new nodes that are created overwrite the mesh materials and get saved into the .ocs file permenantly. So you have to create nodes for the textures you want to change. This quickly leads to "spaghetti monster" as bepo likes to say, but it does work.

However, there IS still a bug where octane will crash if you have a node assigned to the mesh but then several materials that don't need to be changed (maybe they came through fine from the export) and then another node mapped to the mesh. In C4D I was able to figure out the order in which they were saved to the mesh (from top to bottom in the object list) however I haven't figured it out in Maya yet, still having trouble with scale...

Here's an example to illustrate the material node bug.

[bazuka]

about the crash i cant help u coz thats the part of octane render, i can answer u questions only for exporter for maya

ull have to ask dev for this probl

cheers

[p3taoctane]

Thanks tehfailsafe
Very useful i will try this.

Bazuka

What are the key improvements in v5? Is there another link I can read them on?

Thanks

Peter

[bazuka]

is u ask about exporter, nothing big i just made some changes for focusDistance, actually i add the command in export settings

at this moment im waiting for new build of octane so i can see whats new and to improve the exporter (hope they will fix materials probl)

cheers

[p3taoctane]

Sounds good
Thanks