octane tweaks

[convergen]

Hi Everyone,

Just wanted to post up some UI tweaks / octane tweaks which would make this program alot more useful to use.... Not sure if I am just doing it wrong, but yeah this is a list from people around the office.

-- Deleting nodes via the delete button
-- Copy and pasting nodes via ctrl c ctrl v
-- when you disconnect a node, it goes back to the original setting, not where it just has the empty circle.
-- when you add in materials from blender, the corresponding material nodes should not affected
this one may need some explanation
if we have materials ground metal and wall... each having their material node, if then we add in lights, and open up octane again, the metal node will be connected to the new lights material and wall will be connected to metal, instead of staying with their correct spot
-- being able to turn off the limit of samples... would be good for overnight renders
-- alpha shadows from direct lighting
-- layers... even if it only renders one layer at a time... like it would be SUPER useful if we could do masking / z depths and stuff, even if it was a completely different render.
-- hdr / exr export
-- being able to switch the material preview lighting setup to something different from the obj lighting setup
-- being able to change the scale of the uvs on the material preview to something more relevant to the object we are dealing with.
-- daylight lighting mixed with hdr background (so we can have clouds in the sky) & strong shadows.
-- in the node outliner, when you change a material it expands everything... have it remember what you have open / not and save like that.
-- being able to create a node in the node graph from the node outliner (everything is set from the export in blender... would be able to go, create node from these settings so that i can plug it into another material / save it to an ocm file)
-- being able to set the sensor size on the camera so we can integrate a live plate
-- being able to set our own camera response settings
-- being able to have multiple uv maps
-- zooming in / out & panning of the node graph
-- material macro having multiple outputs

and ofcourse camera animation / object animation but i guess thats something for later. oh and instance support...

Anyway, octane is awesome, dont get me wrong.. Been using it alot these past few weeks... but these improvements will make it that much nicer to use

Carlo

[kivig]

-- Deleting nodes via the delete button

+1. A confirmation dialog would be mandatory then though.

-- Copy and pasting nodes via ctrl c ctrl v
-- when you disconnect a node, it goes back to the original setting, not where it just has the empty circle.
-- when you add in materials from blender, the corresponding material nodes should not affected
this one may need some explanation
if we have materials ground metal and wall... each having their material node, if then we add in lights, and open up octane again, the metal node will be connected to the new lights material and wall will be connected to metal, instead of staying with their correct spot
-- being able to turn off the limit of samples... would be good for overnight renders
-- alpha shadows from direct lighting
-- layers... even if it only renders one layer at a time... like it would be SUPER useful if we could do masking / z depths and stuff, even if it was a completely different render.
-- hdr / exr export
-- being able to switch the material preview lighting setup to something different from the obj lighting setup
-- being able to change the scale of the uvs on the material preview to something more relevant to the object we are dealing with.
-- being able to set the sensor size on the camera so we can integrate a live plate
-- being able to set our own camera response settings
-- zooming in / out & panning of the node graph

+12

[abstrax]

Thanks for the thoughts. We have added them to our collection of ideas/requests.

Cheers,
Marcus

[Jaberwocky]

Good List

+1

[Alain]

Very good list.

It has a few very good inputs for the usability of Octane.

Please implement them !

Kind regards
Alain

[convergen]

Three more suggestions!
When opening the file, DONT steal the focus of the windows with image texture loading or voxelising etc.etc., exports take 5 minutes + imports into octane take another few minutes, its good to work on another file whilst thats going.

also, would also be benificial to have a local DB (or even a networkable DB for companies with multiple people working in octane) full of materials. We cannot upload them to the Live DB due to our agreements... but a local DB would be super useful.

Maybe also have a , there it goes again... loading image textures.... stole my train of thought aswell... OH thats right, a option to override the given UV's for the object and to generate UV's for a certain object, sort of like how blender has the generated UV coordinates.

[matej]

I'm so hoping for a "LocalDB" ASAP. Managing materials (nodes in general) is currently way harder than it should be. btw, if you need certain "auto" coordinates, you can UV unwrap as cube / spherical / cylinder projection in Blender.

---

In regard of texture coordinates:

1.) Since the devs are revisioning the exporter procedure & file formats, please include support for multiple UV sets per object (ie. so that UV set could be specified separately for each texture in a material)

2.) A Transform node that would work for UVs - scale XY, offset XY, rotate XY (would in some cases save you additional re-exporting)

3.) The concepts of image and texture should be clearly separated. Multiple textures can be derived from an image [file], while a texture can belong only to one image. This way if you change an image [file] all the derived textures point to the new file (currently there is no such distinction, for example; if the loader can't find an image file it will ask you to specify the path each time the image is used as texture. If you want to replace an image, you must manually relink each texture node where the image is used, etc..).

4.) A mapping is a unique (distinct) combination of:

• * transform UV
  * UV set
  * texture (not image)
  * object

An object (mesh) can have multiple UV sets. Each texture can have it's own UV set. The same UV set can be used multiple times, each time with a different transform (a transform plugged into a UV set node should not affect other nodes with the same UV set). That's how things work in most 3D packages.

[convergen]

I know about UV mapping through blender... But we operate on a per object basis for UV unwrapping... so if a object doesnt need to be unwrapped we dont... It would just be nice to be able to go hey that wall needs a bit of a grain to it, lets just throw a small marble bump on it. instead of having to go back into blender, unwrap it and export it again (exporting at the moment takes ages... 500meg exports arent the quickest)

another UI tweak would be to have the option of expanding / restoring the current view by the tap of the space bar like how maya operates.

[matej]

It would just be nice to be able to go hey that wall needs a bit of a grain to it, lets just throw a small marble bump on it. instead of having to go back into blender, unwrap it and export it again

Totally agree. In fact I asked for auto coordinates feature half a year ago. Because simple objects really don't need UV unwrapping.

[GeoPappas]

It would just be nice to be able to go hey that wall needs a bit of a grain to it, lets just throw a small marble bump on it. instead of having to go back into blender, unwrap it and export it again

Totally agree. In fact I asked for auto coordinates feature half a year ago. Because simple objects really don't need UV unwrapping.

+1.

This was one of the first issues that I ran into with Octane over a year ago.

Octane would be so much easier to use if you could just apply a texture without having to UV unwrap it. It would also be nice if you could rotate, scale, and move the texture as well.