Octane queries - lens shift, Blender etc.

[xerula]

Hi,

I'm looking into getting Octane for use with Blender and my single GTX 580 3GB. It looks like a really good solution for me so far. A few dumb questions at this early stage of playing around.

1. I read that the Octane camera has support for tiled rendering using "lens shift". Does this mean that if my scene fits into the gpu RAM, I can set the camera field, resolution and xy offset such that I can render an arbitrary number of tiles at the highest supported resolution, for stitching together later? Any details about the tiled rendering would be useful. I occasionally attempt extremely large renders. Can I export camera offset values from Blender?

2. Is there support for Blender objects that have multiple materials assigned to different regions of the same mesh? Alternatively, if I have vertex subgroups defined for one mesh in my .obj file, can I assign different materials in Octane according to these groups?

3. I have seen some tutorials for SSS in Octane. I can't find anything about this or the tiled rendering in the manual that's downloadable on the demo page. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but is there another manual for the full version?

4. What's your feeling about the strength of the Blender-Octane link? Is there momentum towards an integration? Will we be relying on unofficial exporters indefinitely?

many thanks

[convergen]

I'm not an official here, but I do know the answers to a couple of these questions
1. There is no tile rendering support in octane at the moment, the lens shifting is meant for correcting perspective distortions... can be used to make interesting miniature photos -- http://www.hemmy.net/2008/03/06/tilt-sh ... otography/ .. This means the rendersize must be able to fit totally in the ram to be able to render at that resolution

2. You can have multiple materials assigned to one mesh, that gets exported out of blender fine.... Its on a per face level using the material editor in blender, the vertex subgroups do not get exported /imported

3. There are some quite indepth tutorials on the forums here explaining SSS and how to use it

[t_3]

by the way - and another unofficial thought - perspective correction via lens shift and the subsequent change of fov and camera direction may be indeed enable to render tiles, but as this process isn't automated, the mileage may vary

[abreukers]

4. Yes. (sorry).

- we are interested in a collaboration for blender. we want to fully explore all the possible issues given any case or setup in relation to our conflicting license schemes and we are looking forward to establishing clear and detailed guidelines for this plugin in particular. So, just so you know, we are pursuing it but there is just no tentative dates to give out.

[xerula]

Thanks for the replies guys.

Ah - a tilt shift lens... that's something I've played with irl. I have some inkling about how to kludge a tiled render with that as t_3 suggests, but irl the focusing would necessitate a lot of tile overlap. I guess I'll have to experiment and see.

Re: question 2. I have started coding little standalone procedural mesh generation scripts that produce .obj files with mesh subgroups. I'll just load one and see if they are recognized. Unfortunately my machine with the GTX is in pieces since last night, as I'm doing a general overhaul...

Well I think I am sold on Octane considering the price point and it looks like there is plenty to learn before I start agitating for new features. Thanks again!

[t_3]

Well I think I am sold on Octane considering the price point and it looks like there is plenty to learn before I start agitating for new features. Thanks again!

since you are still going with the demo you might find it interesting, that the current RC is already way ahead; new rendering kernels, better performance, sss are only some of things happened since, and instancing is scheduled for the near future...