Non-offical Blender 2.56 plugin

[yoyoz]

Please find new version (0.41) of the script on inital post.
Enjoy!
Yoyoz

[steveps3]

wow, we are being treated!

All we need now is Octane 2.4 and my week will be made.

[SamCameron]

Thank you Yoyoz for tweak my scene, I'm going to test it right now, and thanks for your plugin, it's really awesome, do you think would be possible to render particles without the instancer modifier?

[SamCameron]

By the way Yoyoz, I think in the last version it miss the folder icon to select the directories. (Check the attached file)

[yoyoz]

Fixed with v0.42. Thanks for pointing out this, I should have better tested while playing with UI properties

Regarding the particle system, I don't know where it's going and I don't know the reason for the move. For sure we must have particles rendered as meshes for use in Octane, but on the other hand I wonder what's the benefit of instancing instead of the 'traditional' old way. I also lack experience with Blender to get a real opinion...

[SamCameron]

Thanks for the fix Yoyoz, one question... what is left to do with your script? cause at the moment looks very steady and completed, what is in your TO-DO's list?

[yoyoz]

Well, yes it looks stable but here are some topics I'd like to address:

- I still have to figure out how to apply presets. The original code from Enrico can't work anymore with 2.56 because it's no more possible to alter setting/parameters from the drawing part of the interface. I don't know if it's a change made by the Blender team or a bug within the new API. As callbacks seems not supported either at the moment I'm still looking for a workaround.

- user-defined presets: if I can fix the previous one I'll investigate here. No emergency here as it would anyway not allow users to save significant time in their workflow. Just nice to have.

- more fool-proof checking to warn user at an early stage something is wrong (such as bad texture names or non-existing paths)

- code cleanup: I'm trying to split out as many functions as I can to make the code more readable and easier to maintain. It should also make new command line options of Octane easier to implement (if any).

- Camera animation: I should be able to quickly implement this one as soon as I'm done with code cleanup. The goal is to start animation rendering without exporting OBJ/MTL for each frame, assuming you want to make a 'camera travel' into a static scene. For those who need that, it can save hudge amount of time. I've a reference scene that takes 30 secs to export on my i7 (particles+subsurf), which means a camera-only anim of 30 secs @ 25fps would render 30x30x25 seconds faster, ie 6h15min...

- make people understand/believe Blender is a working solution for professional users and that open-source addicts like me are willing to pay for good commercial software such as Octane

My main concern is to avoid as much as possible code regression as I understand some people need the script to save time in their workflow and at the same time want to have the benefit of 2.56 instead of using the stable couple Blender 2.49+official script.

[SamCameron]

I have been working with 2.49 script, but now your script is SO good that I don't need anymore the 2.49 script, so thank you , what I really miss is the possibility of render objects groups, do you know if it's possible?

[yoyoz]

I'll tell you as soon I as get an idea about what you're talking about
Honestly, no clue what object groups could be but I'll have a look.

[SamCameron]

Here's an scene file: