ORBX preview offset from final render

[ryanaexavier]

Hey! Was just looking for info on this topic. Couple questions,

Can you provide a test file with the instance attribute applied. I think I got it since octane was saying it's loading instances but the documentation was unclear to me on instancing in general and just want to make sure I am doing it right

I have been having issues getting orbx sequences to render. Would you be able to share a scene file with something a simple as a cube rotation for 240 frames which exports out to .orbx as a sequence so I can compare.


Thank you so much in advance

[ryanaexavier]

Just looping back around on possibley getting some examples referenced in the above message.

Thank you!

[juanjgon]

Attached you have an example scene using the instance attribute. As you can see it is a matter of adding the string attribute pointing to the object to be instanced.

About the animated .orbx file, I'm afraid that currently they are not supported by the plugin. You can use a sequence of multiple .orbx files, but not a single animated file yet.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[juanjgon]

Here's a link to download the project and the ORBX proxies on Dropbox:
Hope you can find something in there. Thanks!

I've been investigating this issue and I think that the problem comes from the .orbx files themselves. They have a weird node graph, as you could see if you open them in Standalone. Perhaps the problem comes from exporting them after updating the scene from the previous one or something like that. Have you tried to export the .orbx files one by one after closing/opening Houdini for each one? I need to improve the .orbx export function for proxy files. The current scene tree is not the best one for this kind of objects, because in the end it had been designed to render the .orbx scenes, not use them as proxies.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[Ferdinand13]

Hi Juanjo,

Thanks for confirming this. I didn't look at the ORBX files in Standalone, but will do so asap, as well as trying to see what happens, if I export them individually while opening/closing Houdini for each one (which is gonna get annoying pretty quickly ).

I know you're also working on the Redshift plugin for Houdini and your implementation for RS_Proxies in that one is flawless. Is there any chance to take some of the learnings from there and implement that for Octane (without causing a copyright issue) or is Octane simply working too different in this regard?

[juanjgon]

It is different, but we'll try to improve the use of the .orbx files as proxy objects as far as possible.

-Juanjo

[Ferdinand13]

Here's a link to download the project and the ORBX proxies on Dropbox:
Hope you can find something in there. Thanks!

I've been investigating this issue and I think that the problem comes from the .orbx files themselves. They have a weird node graph, as you could see if you open them in Standalone. Perhaps the problem comes from exporting them after updating the scene from the previous one or something like that. Have you tried to export the .orbx files one by one after closing/opening Houdini for each one? I need to improve the .orbx export function for proxy files. The current scene tree is not the best one for this kind of objects, because in the end it had been designed to render the .orbx scenes, not use them as proxies.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

Hi Juanjo,

I finally found some time to check the ORBX exports from Houdini. However, I quickly ran into a couple of roadblocks, since I don't quite understand the logic behind the exporter of the Octane Render plugin for Houdini. So I've got a scene that's empty apart from one pighead geometry object, which doesn't have a material applied. When I load this into the IPR and right click to export an ORBX, this is what I see when opening up the resulting ORBX file inside Standalone:

The pighead geo is present around 6 or 7 times and there is a crazy amount of other nodes in there that I didn't even want/need to export. Can you explain what's going on there? What I'd expect to see would be one geometry node for the pighead with a Default Material and the Render Target present. What's all this other stuff?

[juanjgon]

All this stuff are the Octane nodes inside all the scene VOP nodes (even if they are not used), plus all the nodes created while updating the scene and so on. The .orbx export from the IPR window is there only for debug purposes, so it can have a lot of crazy stuff. You should export the .orbx files from the ROP node, in full scene reload mode, and even in this case, you are going to get a lot of not used nodes because in the end this feature was designed to export files for rendering, not to be used as proxy objects, so the nodes tree is not cleaned at all.

I need to design a new export feature for proxy files, without all this additional stuff, but I need to think about it, but as I've said, the .orbx files are not exactly designed to work as proxy objects in other scenes.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[Ferdinand13]

Hi Juanjo,

Thanks for explaining. I did some more 'in-depth' testing inside Standalone and have now come to the conclusion that an ORBX file containing nothing more than a 'mesh' node is still valid and shows up correctly when importing the ORBX back into Houdini. So, even if it's a bit more work, I can export geometry as an ORBX from Houdini and then just delete the entire spaghetti ball of unused nodes inside Standalone, then importing the ORBX back into Houdini and I've got the 'Proxy' file I'm after. At least that's what it seems like Do you approve of this workflow as a workaround for now?

[juanjgon]

Yes, this should work fine. And this is the expected output of the new feature that I want to implement at some point on the plugin side to export proxy objects.

Thanks,
-Juanjo