Workflow / Interface Restrictions

[naik3d]

Hey folks,

i have a question and i would really like to hear some thought of
other users regarding my question.

Why isn't it possible to select objects / groups inside the viewport?
(Almost every other package supports this!)
In my view it is a pain in the ass not beeing able to do so.
Especially when trying to quickly change object materials and other stuff.
Why isn't it possbile to transform / scale / rotate objects inside the viewport?
(Again - Almost every other package supports this!)

Maybe some users will state out that you can do this in Max / Maya / Blender
and then use the script to do so but honestly i really feel to be so heavy restricted
when using octane, some kind of prison feeling.
It would be, also so awesome if you just could select a material and drop it onto the object
or have an " assign Material to selection " button.
I mean, i just can't imagine that there is anybody who is not missing such feature.
At the end, we are talking about BASIC functions here.

Are there any plans to change that heavy restricted workflow?
Maybe some developer can point out some of their thought and plan.


cheers

Kian

[abstrax]

Hey folks,

i have a question and i would really like to hear some thought of
other users regarding my question.

Why isn't it possible to select objects / groups inside the viewport?
(Almost every other package supports this!)
In my view it is a pain in the ass not beeing able to do so.
Especially when trying to quickly change object materials and other stuff.
Why isn't it possbile to transform / scale / rotate objects inside the viewport?
(Again - Almost every other package supports this!)

Maybe some users will state out that you can do this in Max / Maya / Blender
and then use the script to do so but honestly i really feel to be so heavy restricted
when using octane, some kind of prison feeling.
It would be, also so awesome if you just could select a material and drop it onto the object
or have an " assign Material to selection " button.
I mean, i just can't imagine that there is anybody who is not missing such feature.
At the end, we are talking about BASIC functions here.

Are there any plans to change that heavy restricted workflow?
Maybe some developer can point out some of their thought and plan.


cheers

Kian

Hi Kian,

You already gave the answer to your questions yourself: Because every other package does it already and you can do it there

But joke aside: OctaneRender is not a 3D modelling/construction/texturing/painting/animation/whatever package, but a renderer. Similar to Mental Ray or Maxwell. It's not supposed to replace 3D packages, but to complement them. It adds render functionality and a realtime material editor. Trying to replace packages like 3ds max, Maya, XSI, C4D, Blender, etc. not only doesn't make any sense, but the scope of that work is way too big.

What would make more sense instead is to improve the integration of Octane into your favourite 3D modelling/... package. This will eventually happen. Introducing scene graphs, object manipulations, etc. is just duplicating work that has been done already many times.

Then there is another problem one should not forget: Octane is a raytracer, which works completely different to your normal OpenGL editor display. Every geometry change requires a voxelizing step and a complete upload of the geometry onto the graphics card, which can't be done in realtime at least until the near future.

-> For geometry stuff use your favourite 3D package. For rendering and materials, use OctaneRender.

Cheers,
Marcus

[arexma]

What I said, over in General Support considering matrials.. I posted my suggestions there by accident

Allthough I consider it a huge PITA as it is with the materials ATM as well, we should not forget we´r in a beta that is neither feature complete nor bugfree.
I agree on the materials with you, but with abstrax on the geometry stuff.
What I noticed though, importing and voxelizing seems to be single threaded atm? I´d love to see it make use of manycore CPUs or if possible the GPU as well.

My basic guess is, there´s simply no manpower available for that atm. The dev´s being stuck in core algorithms to the ears surely have a nice usabiliy improvement list already.
I got to say for the degree of technical features still missing the whole UI is very usable already.
And I think it´s important to get the core right first - atm there isn´t really any direct competitor to Octane and once they got the technical superiority, which most likely consumes most of the time you can still focus, or hire someone to focus on community wishes, workflow and usability.

To drop my thoughts/feedback here too where more people read it and can discuss it:

- MMB/RMB to pan graph editor/node inspector - I can pan the view just fine, but I can´t pan my graph editor/node inspector. No biggy, but in terms of consistency and usablity it would be nice.
- How about a shift+drag to duplicate a node? - at the moment I got to export a node and re-import - the pain!
- Free rearrangeable window layout. Working with 2 screens it would be nice to be able to rearrange the windows as one pleases, by now it is rather rigid, especially when I render 1080p I can choose if I want to see the graph editor or my render viewport.
- Shadow only material preset, I posted already in general support if it is possible already. A material that is not traceable but receives shadows. Need it often for product visualisation and compositing.
- RAL Color codes, or a color convertor would be neat - I often do projects where customers have dedicated RAL colors for logos, construction plants, materials whatsoever. Of course I can convert myself, that´s what I do now, but it would be just sweet to select the RAL colors for instance direcly.
- Pause/resume for animations like daylight and turntable
- I am going bananas with the node connector name popups. The more materials, the greater the pain.. I got no real solution here, maybe as there is a materialpicker it would work to choose a materialnode, drag&drop it on the renderviewport and the outliner makes the connection? And maybe hovering with the materialpicker over the viewport highlights the material connectors and on cancel of the tool the selected one remains highlighted?
- Easy ctrl+c/ctrl+v - often I need to copy material settings... I hate it to go into "edit input field" and copy the variables or colors. I´d love to have a blender like feature where you hover over the color window and simply press ctrl+c to copy and on hover over the other field and ctrl+v the whole color is copied, same for digit parameters
- fine tune sliders - e.g. for camera position/camera target, great to have sliders, not great to barely touch them with the mouse and change them by 1000/px mouse movement... maybe make it so with shift+move you go smaller steps and shift+ctrl+move even smaller.
- make the sliders of campos and camtar match the values - currently the sliders are at 0/0/0 no matter what the camera was imported with
- better camera control - i´d love to have a key I can press to switch between move camera around target/ move target - sure I can export the cam from my 3d suite or re-tweak it there, but sometimes it just looks cooler from a different view, and after all the life feedback is one of the advantages of octane, sometimes i orbit my models for minutes just like a photographer walks around his motives.

[naik3d]

Hey Marcus,

thanks for dropping in mate, really appreciate it!

But maybe you have misunderstood my point.

See, you are right. There is no reason to add modeling / animation / construction / painting
function inside octane. What i'm talking about is to improve and boost the
workflow performance when using octane.
In my view, it's quite hard to export everything , when i change my scene
especially when you are working with big scenes.
Also regarding the viewport selection - i don't know but i'm sure that you
know Bunkspeed Shot, there it seems to be no problem at all to select
and move and change objects inside the viewport and of course in REALTIME.

At the end, im with you that we don't need to copy everything that other 3d apps are offering
but there might be some features and functions which would really help to
work with octane more fluently - right now it's like lumberjack style, if you know what i mean.

But mostly it is applied to the object and material workflow, which is really hard fulfill in a short time.


cheers

Kian

[naik3d]

hi arexma,

of course you are right that we are still in beta, and belive me
i don't forget this but what i'm talking about is the future direcgtion of octane.

atm there isn´t really any direct competitor to Octane

If you apply it to the price range, then you are totally right, otherwise
i must tremendously disagree to that mate.

I don't want to make advertizing for Bspeed Shot but if they
are not a competitor than i don't know. Also there are some others
who are DIRECT competitors. So in my view, it is really getting tight
for some apps, and don't get me wrong, i really love octane
and would really like to use it in my further productions.

BTW : i confirm every feature point in your previous mail.


cheers

kian

[ttaberna]

Here's my 2c about this.
I think there's no need to move objects and scale or rotate them inside octane, as naik3d and abstrax pointed out what is needed is more straight forward and fast exporting implementation plug-in between octane and modelling packages, although it would be great if we can select objects to be able to change its material in an independent way.
When importing geometry into octane, octane groups ,objects by material and if you change the material for one object it changes all other materials in this group. It would be great if octane would let us change the material for one specific object despite the one you give it in your 3d app, and that's a thing other renderers can do.
Example: I export 4 objects 1 sphere 1 cube 1 cone and a base plane. sphere and cube have the same material A(different or same uvs) assigned, and cone has material B and plane material C. In other package I own the way is the same but inside it you can reassign a material D to the sphere letting the cube as it was , with the assigned material A.
It is a great feature be3cause sometimes for instance it happens to me a lot with metals, it depends on the light and the material you assigned maybe you want to do some changes.
I hope I explain myself good so you can understand.
Cheers

[naik3d]

although it would be great if we can select objects to be able to change its material in an independent way.
When importing geometry into octane, octane groups ,objects by material and if you change the material for one object it changes all other materials in this group. It would be great if octane would let us change the material for one specific object despite the one you give it in your 3d app, and that's a thing other renderers can do.

You are absolutely right about that specific point!
That is, for me a big downside right now and a workflow / speed killer.
A massive restriction in my view.

cheers

Kian

[matej]

Someone, somewhere explained that Octane is so fast because of voxelizing. But if you move objects around, the scene needs to be re-voxelized.

I would like to be able in the future to pick objects also by some id, not only by material. It would shorten the number of trips between 3D package & Octane. Say you have two chairs (which share mesh, but are different objects) and you would like to apply a slightly different mat (maybe just offset the textures a little) to the second one - now you must go back to 3D app and assign a new material to it.

(EDIT: basically, what ttaberna said )

Anyway, I'm all for better integration with 3D packages, as abstrax said.

[arexma]

atm there isn´t really any direct competitor to Octane

If you apply it to the price range, then you are totally right, otherwise
i must tremendously disagree to that mate.

I don't want to make advertizing for Bspeed Shot but if they
are not a competitor than i don't know. Also there are some others
who are DIRECT competitors.

I got to admit I wasn´t aware of BS Shot and I don´t think a healthy discussion about tools'n'features will hurt anyone, I doubt someone here will now abandon Octane and quickly get a 1000 bucks license for Shot.. and I don´t want to know what price the Pro version has.
Still, take industry giants like vray. For what I know they are on the way to implement GPGPU calculations, while others are done already and then once it´s done it will have an toiletpaperroll attached as pricetag to hold the digits =)
Smallluxgpu... I´d not use it in a production in its current stage, nor is it a commercial product.
How many others are there? Any commercial OpenCL? Maybe you could save me the time googling....

I also don´t know if others offer direct lighting as well, as I quite often render animations it´s a bless to have it in octane - it is quite a tad away from photorealistic, but rendering a frame in a minute in a quality that would take 30-60 minutes in some stupid biased raytracer... bah!

I really would have to look further into BS Shot with the trail, but their demo video shows nothing too mindblowing compared to octane to justify 1000+ Bucks. I rather pay 200 Euro instead of 100 then for octane to keep development going - or for that matter buy a second one. What i like from the video is the distributed rendering.

I think a software does not only has its qualities in its features and usability (hell I am Blenderuser after all )
But octane... cheap like a romatnic dinner, boosts your productivity more than the workflow slows you down atm, tight community, fast bugfixing and release cycle, feature rich and in it´s beta stage I still feel comfy to use it in a production.... so.. no I don´t se a direct competitor if you get me. For freelancers in the startup or hobbiests alike it´s a bar of "gold pressed latinum" just laying there waiting for the pickup.

Speaking of fast... take my camera navigation suggestion:
Old news... we will have funky WSAD movement in one of the next versions I read.

[matej]

we will have funky WSAD movement in one of the next versions I read.

Are these official sources?

+10^100 for WSAD from my part