Animation and Matte/Shadow Materials

[sucka]

New user to Octane, very impressed with initial results and performance.
Have a GTX 470 running on a quad core phenom with 8GB ram and am absolutely blown away
by how fast this is. Takes about 18 seconds for a relatively complex model with full DOF and HDRI illumination
to be "ready" for compositing. Could let it go longer, but..why, if the results are already spectacular?

A few questions that I can't seem to find the answers to:

1.) Is animation supported in the demo? Will it ever be supported? I'd really like to evaluate how animation looks, with motion blur, etc. Why is this not supported in the demo? SUPREMELY dissapointing, considering the potential octane has.

2.)Is displacement mapping supported?

3.)Is there anything equivalent to a matte/shadow material? i.e. an object that only casts and receives shadows, in order to act as "stand in" geometry on which the scene geometry is projected?

4.) How viable is octane for an animation pipeline? For example, if you were to do live action integration: what kinds of passes
is octane able to break out? Alpha/diffuse/z-depth/etc. Someone previously mentioned only alpha was supported at this time, how updated is that information and has anything changed as of version 1.022 beta 2.2?

thanks in advance!
-dan

[abstrax]

New user to Octane, very impressed with initial results and performance.
Have a GTX 470 running on a quad core phenom with 8GB ram and am absolutely blown away
by how fast this is. Takes about 18 seconds for a relatively complex model with full DOF and HDRI illumination
to be "ready" for compositing. Could let it go longer, but..why, if the results are already spectacular?

A few questions that I can't seem to find the answers to:

1.) Is animation supported in the demo? Will it ever be supported? I'd really like to evaluate how animation looks, with motion blur, etc. Why is this not supported in the demo? SUPREMELY dissapointing, considering the potential octane has.

Animation frames look the same as still renderings. Only camera motion blur is supported at the moment. Since saving renderings is disabled in the demo version there is obviously no way for you to see a full animation, but there is no way we can change that easily without adding the possibility to save image. I think by using one of the exporter plugins you can render one frame of an animation and have a look at the camera motion blur.

2.)Is displacement mapping supported?

No, unfortunately not.

3.)Is there anything equivalent to a matte/shadow material? i.e. an object that only casts and receives shadows, in order to act as "stand in" geometry on which the scene geometry is projected?

No, unfortunately not. Maybe in the not too distant future, but that depends how things work out, as a path tracer works very different to your normal render engine, especially if it runs on a GPU.

4.) How viable is octane for an animation pipeline? For example, if you were to do live action integration: what kinds of passes
is octane able to break out? Alpha/diffuse/z-depth/etc. Someone previously mentioned only alpha was supported at this time, how updated is that information and has anything changed as of version 1.022 beta 2.2?

The latest version of OctaneRender (beta 2.4) has alpha channel output (which is stored in the rendered image), but render passes are not available, which is very hard to do in monte-carlo based renderers with depth-of-field.

Cheers,
Marcus

[sucka]

Ok, so no displacement mapping, and no breakout passes for rendering. Dang. This was looking to be my mental ray replacement.
So where can I download the exporter plugins for animation testing? Is there a demo version of the octane exporter plugins?

[abstrax]

Ok, so no displacement mapping, and no breakout passes for rendering. Dang. This was looking to be my mental ray replacement.
So where can I download the exporter plugins for animation testing? Is there a demo version of the octane exporter plugins?

Sorry, I forgot. The exporter plugins are currently not available for demo users, because they are still under development. My bad. Are you using Windows? I will try to setup a test scene, that you can run to see, how the camera motion blur looks like.

Cheers,
Marcus

[sucka]

Yes I am using windows7 64 bit.
A test animation scene would be great, thanks!


Also, i'm sure this has been asked before, but when you setup a scene for an hdri luminance, can you have it render without the HDRI in the final render? ie keeping the hdri illumination data intact, but not showing the hdri in the background...(best for compositing) Is this possible at all?

-dan

[abstrax]

Yes I am using windows7 64 bit.
A test animation scene would be great, thanks!


Also, i'm sure this has been asked before, but when you setup a scene for an hdri luminance, can you have it render without the HDRI in the final render? ie keeping the hdri illumination data intact, but not showing the hdri in the background...(best for compositing) Is this possible at all?

-dan

With version beta 2.4 you can render the scene with an alpha channel, which allows you to add a different background afterwards. The pre-multiplied and not pre-multiplied alpha are supported. This is how it looks like in the render viewport:

And this is the rendered image:

Cheers,
Marcus

[sucka]

awesome...and last question:

are animated cameras supported in octane?

[abstrax]

awesome...and last question:

are animated cameras supported in octane?

Yes, via the normal animation workflow, which is a bit cumbersome, but was easy to implement for the different exporters. It works like this:

- Export your scene initially to Octane.
- Setup your materials lighting and stuff.
- Save the file.
- Render the scene as animation using the exporter plugin. This will go though each frame, store a new OBJ/MTL file combo, relink it in Octane (using the previously setup materials), render it and so on. The camera parameters are passed to Octane via command line (as OBJ files don't store any camera data) and get updated for each frame. This way the exporter can also export some camera motion blur information.

Cheers,
Marcus

[abstrax]

Yes I am using windows7 64 bit.
A test animation scene would be great, thanks!

Hi Dan,

Just want to let you know, that I havent forgotten you. I didn't get around to prepare you a test scene with camera motion blur. Was busy working on the next release. I will do it tomorrow.

Cheers,
Marcus