interoperability PC / Mac OS / Blender / C4D etc

[charduff]

Hello forum

My company is looking to consolidate rendering engines across platforms - I'm wondering if anyone could shed some wisdom on interoperability between systems (and apps) that use Octane. Specifically, if one of us works in the apple environment on Blender with Octane, is it a simple enough workflow to open the same file in Blender on PC? Following this, If we set up all our materials in Blender Octane, is it relatively straightforward to port these material settings to C4D?

Thank you very much,
Charles

[Joshua236]

Sounds like a solid plan! Blender files with Octane materials should generally transfer between Mac and PC without issue, but porting them to C4D might require some tweaking due to differences in material handling.retro bowl college

[bepeg4d]

Hi,

About converting a scene from Blender to C4D Octane, you can save the Octane materials in the scene in LocalDB from Blender, export and import the geometry/cameras to C4d, then import the materials from LocalDB in c4doctane, and assign them back to geometry..

ciao,
Beppe

[skientia]

In addition to Beppe's suggestions:

• the Octane Standalone pipeline is worth looking into: all 3D DCCs (software host) export data universally (e.g. .abc, .usd, .exr, .tiff, etc...) to Standalone, uniform shading and lighting, ORBX and OctaneDB compatible. The workflow is partially shown on this page (universally applicable).
• More about ORBX and the possibilities (additional ORBX pages to be released).

As long as versioning is matched, or retro compatibility is ensured, it should works flawlessly.

However, it is currently not possible to open project files from different DCCs in the likes of what OpenUSD and MaterialX are supposed to offer as this is still an under development from all parties involved. An Octane Standalone ORBX / Alembic workflow is similar to a Gaffer/Katana pipeline wise, more organized and efficient than working from different DCCs and attempting to share geometry and rendering data between them as such system is not natively available.