Alternative method for animations?

[SamCameron]

Hi, I have a question for the developers of Octane, my question is: Are you actually thinking in a different method for work with animations? Cause at the moment it's a big waste of time the actual import method into Octane. Thanks in advance.

[radiance]

What are you thinking of ? Adding keyframe animation in octane's UI ?
I think a tighter integration with the 3d apps should be done first, as then we don't need to reinvent the wheel and leave animation up to the 3d host apps (who already do it very well)

Radiance

[PeterCGS]

I think what SamCameron is after is this:

A Timeline in Octane.

*Being able to either import camera/Light animation, or being able to set keyframes and animated parameters for these kind of objects.

*Animated parameters for materials (Image sequences as textures etc.)

*Pointoven/Geocache Import (Being able to import deformation animation to objects). This is facto standard for many applications, when transfering animated items between them. Just a deformer reading new vertice positions.

*Keyable parameters for imported meshes (SRT + being able to change pivot) or import a pos, rot, scale channels. (Point oven works well for a animated character, cloth etc etc.. But not so good for maybe opening a door or basic animation like such).

Octane renders like nothing else. But import/export every frame take very very long time for animations. Latest project I rendered was 5.30minutes per frame, but Octane rendered every frame in 12 seconds, the rest was export/import time. Being able to keep the object in the scene, and animate it by pointoven cache, would tremendously reduce the time for animation. I think a first step for Octane regarding animation would be able to import camera animation, and point oven/geocache for meshes. That would open up a whole new level for us using Octane as a animation renderer

Tight integration with other 3D apps is nice, but I've seen this before, and they often fail if trying to cover all host apps, because they can't keep up the pace with new versions of the host app.

[SamCameron]

What I was thinking is something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOEqyztsu3o#t=4m40s

A way to interact directly in the host application, but using Octane Render as engine, so that way you don't need to load objects every frame, this is a very slow task in some scenes and a huge bottleneck for animations, I don't mind if you find another way than this to animate in a faster way with Octane Render, but actually is quite slow to load all the objects every frame, speacially in Blender wich has no native .OBJ format and is based on Python as much as I know.

[lixai]

What are you thinking of ? Adding keyframe animation in octane's UI ?
I think a tighter integration with the 3d apps should be done first, as then we don't need to reinvent the wheel and leave animation up to the 3d host apps (who already do it very well)

Radiance

Take for example BunkSpeed (http://www.bunkspeed.com/shot/features/), it will be nice to have what they have.
Alex

[SamCameron]

Bunkspeed is one of the most limited engines for animations, has zero integration with 3d host applications, I think the Lux Render is much good approach.

[dave62]

maybe there is also a way to speed up the export without inventing a whole 3dsuite out of octane.
take a look at Andrey M. Izrantsev (aka bdancer) work with the vray exporter. its so damn fast!!
As i am no coder i am not shure how he done it but somewhere i read that his export is not just python and kind of hardcoded stuff and therefore super fast.
I think it its really a good example how to export the data in a fast way to external render engines..

its worth a click:
http://bdancer.github.com/

[face]

maybe there is also a way to speed up the export without inventing a whole 3dsuite out of octane.
take a look at Andrey M. Izrantsev (aka bdancer) work with the vray exporter. its so damn fast!!
As i am no coder i am not shure how he done it but somewhere i read that his export is not just python and kind of hardcoded stuff and therefore super fast.
I think it its really a good example how to export the data in a fast way to external render engines..

its worth a click:
http://bdancer.github.com/

And where can i see how fast it is?...

face

[mib2berlin]

Special Blender build:*
V-Ray/Blender 2.49.12 (Windows 32bit)
V-Ray/Blender 2.49.12 (Linux 64bit)
Source code

* Special Blender 2.49b build with mesh export optimization (up to 10 times faster export).

Cheers mib

[face]

Special Blender build:*
V-Ray/Blender 2.49.12 (Windows 32bit)
V-Ray/Blender 2.49.12 (Linux 64bit)
Source code

* Special Blender 2.49b build with mesh export optimization (up to 10 times faster export).

Cheers mib

I haven´t the intention to build it.
I don´t know the export time with the standard build.

face