3gb EVGA GTX 580 Hydro-copper arrived - 1st install of Octan

[gtelliott]

My son (15) is an avid CG modeler, animator and "movie maker", using Zbrush, C4D (R-11), the whole Adobe Suite, Final Cut Pro and others on an early 2008 Mac Pro (12 GB Ram 4TB of storage). Hs biggest frustration (and hold-up on all of his projects) has been endless rendering time. Looked into upgrading the Mac to take advantage of Octane, no legitimate GPU options that seemed significant. Decided to upgrade our older (2006) velocity Micro PC, and use it to do all of his Zbrush and C4d work. A.k.a, his 3gb GTX 580 hydro-copper has arrived today. Were going to install, set-up water cool, up the PSU from 500 to 850 Watts, and get it going tonight. (Hope to double up GTX's in the future if all works well). After that long and unnecessary build-up, my question is that I would like to avoid as many errors and snags as I can in getting it going. Already told him to watch the tutorial. PC runs Windows 7 64-Bit.

Can one of you very knowledgeable and helpful folks layout a license purchase, initial install and start-up path for me in hopes that I can get him up and running error free? Were in in Florida, USA.

[radiance]

Hey,

Its pretty straight forward,
Buy license, download, install, activate, download the plugin for C4D, install, download the latest nvidia drivers from www.nvidia.com, install, and off you go.
After purchase you get instructions on how to do all this,
And from there on, the included PDF manual should explain how to use the software.

Radiance

[gtelliott]

Radiance. Thank you kindly for your reply. Did get everything up and running, and have been able to export his C4d modeled objects, make adjustments to materials and lighting and render single frame saved as an .ocs file with nice results. Only problem has been that we can't seem to "name" the project so that when we close it out and try to go back and "render animation" from "existing project" there is no "existing project" to render.

I suspect it is ignorance on setting up the export or project settings, but I just can't figure out where I am making the error.

G. Elliott

[kubo]

if you saved the scene once everything was setup to your taste (mesh, materials ligths....) as an .ocs (say awesome.ocs) then you go back to your modeling app, in the exporter settings choose existing project and it'll let you pick the scene, go to wherever you saved the "awesome.ocs" file, choose that one and setup the rest of the parameters and hit render animation.
Check the folder where you saved the file and see if the name and extension are right

[gtelliott]

Thank you for your reply Kubo. We have saved some of the rendered scenes as .ocs files in a "Projects" folder set-up on one of his larger hard-drives, and can navigate to them in his C4D, or open them in Octane. I guess where I am confused is, that when we do the export and project configuration using the C4D script, we give the project a name at the designated location, but when it opens in Octane everything still says it is an "un-named project". If we go ahead and do the scene adjustments and "save" giving it a file name with the .ocs extension, it still says "un-named project" in the Outline.

If we open a previously named and existing .ocs file in Octane, the tab in the Outline still says it is an "un-named project". Perhaps it doesn't matter as far as getting an animation rendered from the desired .ocs scene if we can navigate. It may be that I do not understand the distinction between a "project" name and the name given when saving the scene as an .ocs file.

G. Elliott

[kubo]

what build are you using? I just test it with 2.46b and when you use the plugin to export a new or an existing project, in the top left corner, next to "octane 2.46b" it reads the whole project path+filename.