Ocatane's render wishlist!

[face]

The conversation of vray materials copys only parameter from one material to another.
You can download a 30day vray trail and convert it self to octane...

face

[bb3d]

First of all I want to thank the makers of Octane for their work and for their business strategy. I am only a poor freelancer and cannot really afford all the other 3rd-party renderers like 3dlight, Maxwell or the shiny new Vray. Providing this exciting technology to everybody at a fair price cannot be appreciated enough

Now to my wish list:
- To overcome the current memory and CUDA limitations, some kind of streaming technology for meshes and textures should be implemented. Like in modern game engines, the renderer should only load those meshes and textures into graphics memory that are needed for the current frame. I know that this is tricky to implement, because the algorithm would have to check for objects outside the view possibly casting shadows or reflections into the scene, but it would make Octane much more competitive to CPU-based renderers in complex scenes.
- Displacement (including "micro-triangle" displacement with automatic mesh-subdivision for fine detail)
- Instances
- hair / fur rendering
- true fog with light volumes and "god ray" effects
- support for volumetric particle rendering (clouds, smoke, fire)
- Matte material for "shadows only" surfaces
- In Octane standalone the behavior of nodes when clicked should be controlled in a more intuitive and "straight-forward" way. Currently I have to take care about those "Enable/Disable this and that" buttons at the left side of the node editor to prevent my render view or node inspector changing accidentally. I would prefer to have 2 buttons on every node - one to display the node in the render view and one to display its parameters in the node inspector. Alternatively it could be solved like in Eyeon Fusion - drag the node over the render view to render it or just click on it to display its parameters.
- For VFX-projects it would be important to have more real camera parameters, including filmback dimensions and ratio.
- Some kind of "Raybrush" like this one in iray -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... 0iso#t=63s
or as an alternative some kind of render region that helps to tweak details of a complex scene quicker.

[kavorka]

I don't think I saw anyone say this, but...

I would love to see the inclusion of .nk files for realistic metals.

[papillon]

Optimized, instantiated curve geometry just like RenderMan RiCurve, in order to render hair, fibers, grass, fur wihout the .obj-driven hassle.

[stinger]

1- Camera show safe frame option
2- Save the conections between nodes when a group of them are saved and then imported.

[Reggie]

Does everything have to be so physically accurate?

I don't really see the point in restricting everything to be perfectly physically accurate. Artists have always been given convenience adjustments in the past and the result is always good. So I'd like to request color correction for textures, lights and ambient occlusion... and in general, I'd like to see Octane be more artist friendly rather than focus on what's phyiscally accurate.

[Reggie]

Ok, a few simpler requests since I've had more time to use and learn Octane. The previous request was pretty generic and not really addressable. But these are more straight forward:

1) Mesh merge node. Is there no way to merge separate obj files currently?
2) Exporting an animated camera from a 3D package. Camera + aim would be best for DOF.
3) Hotkey mapping.
4) Basic geometry that can be added to scenes and transformed for things like lights.
5) More options from the portal material that allow for better manipulation of a scene, such as the ability to cast shadows and not show up in the render, or the ability to only show up in reflections / refractions.

[t_3]

1) Mesh merge node. Is there no way to merge separate obj files currently?

this is coming. afaik the instancing update will also allow to have multiple mesh objects and transforms...

[Reggie]

One more request, I would love the ability to store a render in a frame buffer like Maya's render windows has the "keep image" button, so you can compare shader settings A to B.

Oh and the ability to rotate a texture would be nice.

...And also if Octane is minimized, if it could automatically pause the render, that would be awesome. Of course it could be a feature that could be disabled for users with multiple video cards.

[electroflux]

• Network-Based Rendering - Textures/Models/Data sent to remote systems for splitting up the processing. If you can split over cores on a local system, a remote system can be done, too. There will be the obvious delays to transfer model and textures initially, but returning pixel solutions should not be very intensive at all. You can only put so many cards on one machine
• Network Manager - Client stations connect in and await tasks, split different render jobs over different systems. Maxwell Render does this nicely.
• In addition to the above, a way to specify on local and remote tasks which cores are being used. I think this is quite a minor item, but being able to throttle GPU usage could be nice. Lower the priority of a non-time critical job and keep the system more responsive. Would sparing enough GPU time to restore a responsive UI eat much into the render time?