Jani wrote: Mon Apr 21, 2025 10:55 am
Hi Chris,
I've got a couple of questions.
1. Could you port the octane plugin to UE 5.3? I don't know if this is a an easy thing to do but since in our production environment we're stuck skipping versions due to our workflow I'd be great if the plugin had a bit more longevity for a specific version.
2. When enabling the flashing icon and adding an AOV there seems to be a crash, is this expected behaviour?
3. Is it possible to have realtime syncing of object transforms? I.e. if I move a box in unreal viewport to have it move at the same time inside octane? Similar to how it works in 3ds max blender c4d etc. I'd be easier to prototype lighting this way.
4. Is it possible to limit VRam usage of UE viewport so that more can be dedicated to octane? I've noticed UE VP taking a lions share of GPU VRam, eve though it doesn't actually need it(i.e. the same scene can take 12gb of VRam but also 6 if 12 isn't available) - thus limiting the amount octane can reserve for its own rendering and needlessly going OOC. Maybe even having octane VP available as an option similar to how PT is toggleable
5. When importing an ORBX and doing the conversion the materials inside unreal VP look nothing like the ones in octane. Now I understand that reverse converting complex materials would be difficult, but if an object is using standard set of PBR textures like diff gloss rough normal I'd love if those could have standard UE mats assigned to them with the correct textures in the correct slots - it saves a lot of time not having to re-materialize everything twice.
6. Why is it that opening octane VP and loading octane takes a fraction of time compared to when one does an ORBX export? I thought that once a scene is loaded it's node graph would be the same as in standalone no? Therefore doing an ORBX export is more like a save as rather than an actual export no? Or am I oversimplifying?
7. Is it possible to add a quick 'disable opacity' on foliage? It seems to me that in scenes with heavy foliage the performance suffers and real time interactivity goes out of the we window with opacity enabled.
Thanks a lot for answering these !
Happy Easter
Jani
1. We generally only support the latest 2 versions of Unreal (though we dropped 5.4 now aswel since 5.5 has been out for a long time)
Ill do a test if 5.3 still works, and if it is not too much work, ill see if I can make a build for you
2. No that is not expected. The Lightning mode only works with Beauty pass, so there is no reason to switch atm, but that definitly should not crash. ill investigate this.
3. I take it you mean that when you drag an object, octane updates while dragging? This used to work, but i turned it off because of massive performance issues. For some reason, when you move objects in unreal, unreal will most often delete and recreate the object in the new position. Which causes the plugin to unload and reload the objects. This would be very slow and could in some cases actually break dragging. So i chose to only update after a drag event
4. I dont think i can do this from the plugin side, (but would be interesting thing to look for). However it is definitly possible to reduce the amount of VRAM unreal is doing as a user. There are various project settings you can turn on/off, and reduce the maximum size of textures, reduce Virtual Texturing pool, turn off nanite (i believe nanite reserves a large vram pool). There is also a gpu memory resource view in unreal that you can use to see what the largest usages are
5. Material conversion should definitly support simple material conversion. Could you share the ORBX with me? You can PM me the link if you want.
6. You would think so. But sadly octane does not have its own native geometry and texture formats. So it will actually have to convert all the textures to png and exrs, and all the meshes to either Alembic or OBJ. Especially for an animated sequencer ORBX export this can be very slow. I have been complaining about this limitation for years, and the Octane team is now implementing it. So hopefully we will get our own fast and native geometry format soon (hopefully this year)
7. Ill make a ticket, this is a good option
)