Confused on relation of Plugin v Standalone re materials

[gbambo]

The plugin does not have a node based material editor for Octane. This is an unfortunate limitation that differs from the impression given of the plugin being full-feature. Am I missing something?

The plugin does not have access to the Live Material Database according to other forum posts. Or can they be imported somehow?

If I design and assign materials in the standalone interface, those edits do not flow upstream back to my 3ds Max scene, do they? Rather, I have to depend on updating my Octane standalone scene to reflect geometry changes made in Max?

If these impressions are correct. The plugin is just an aid to the standalone edition and not an alternative. The full-featured characterization of the plug-in is confusing in this regard. I just want to make sure my understanding is correct and that my workflow decisions are efficient.

Thanks for this killer product!

[Psimoh]

Personally I don't have a problem with Max not having a carbon-copy version of the Octane standalone material editor. All renderers in Max are supported by the Max compact (or slate) material editor, consisting of renderer-specific materials and textures. Vray doesn't have its own material editor within Max, neither does iRay or Mental Ray, so I for one don't expect Octane to have one. However I do have trouble creating my materials in Max as the performance of the Octane materials in Max's editor is a little sluggish, IMO. iRay, for example, can use Mental Ray to preview its materials in the Max editor which improves performance greatly. For a beta I think the Octane performance is getting there.

I haven't been using Octane long myself (I'm loving it so far) but I already find myself using the Max plugin in favour of the Standalone. For me the materials are the bottleneck to a smooth workflow, as there is not yet a mature library of Octane materials for Max. For example, I wanted a metallic car paint material for my scene. Knowing the theory behind cooking one up I could tinker for a while and make something. The quality would depend upon the amount of time I could lavish on it. But it bugged me that I knew there were some nice materials in the live database, but I couldn't access them within Max. My clunky solution was to open the Standalone and ALT-TAB between it and Max to copy the material settings. That could have been smoother since, as just one example, Max's colour picker uses ranges from 0-255 whilst the Octane colour values range from 0 to 1 - so I had to normalise those numbers myself before punching them into Max. Not nice.

But it is early days. You can export the shaders from Octane standalone. I've had a look at the file in a text editor and it looks like XML, or very like it. Fairly readable, but too dense to be practical for human-readability. Some kind soul might make a Max script that will import these files into Max as material shaders. The ideal would be for the devs here to make a Max plugin, or extend the current one, to import these files as Max/Octane materials. We can only hope.

[gbambo]

Your comment about the slate editor supporting all supported renderers was helpful. I was not clear about that. I agree, that nothing streamlines productivity like a great material library, as baking one's own takes time and skill.

Exactly how does one export a material from the Standalone to the plugin? I can imagine nothing that would be as useful to me as just adding access to the materials library to the plugin.

Can you recommend a good book on the art of designing materials (or a tutorial somewhere)? It is such a vast topic.

I agree that this product is remarkable for a product that is not even at production version 1. Reviewing the forums and reviews, it is clear that it is evolving at a significant pace.

I am a bit of a noob in many areas of 3D. Having the live interactive rendering tool will greatly accelerate my learning curve. The tweak-then-render model of the past made exploring functionality by trial-and-error nearly intolerable.

[Psimoh]

The good news is that this issue (materials in Max etc.) is being looked at. Check out this thread:

http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... 06&start=0

Karba says he's working on bringing the online material system into Max, which is great news.

I'd struggle to recommend any all-encompassing tutorial or book on shader/material creation because, as you say, it is such a vast topic. Instead I'd recommend reverse-engineering existing examples. Take a look at materials that impress you and see how they've been put together. Check out the generous library of Mental Ray materials here http://mrmaterials.com/. The slate material editor makes the relationship between shader nodes more visual and less mysterious than the old compact material editor, IMO. Also, despite my complaint about it, the process of transferring settings by hand from the Octane standalone to the Max slate editor helps to give a feel for what the settings in the materials do.

I'm afraid that my Octane machine is being fitted with more water-cooled GPUs right now and so it is in bits on my desk. Because of that I can't reliably tell you how to export the material from the standalone version. From memory, it is an option at the top of the shader tree. It is either a button or a right-click context menu option to save or export the currently selected material. The file that is exported/saved is (currently) useless to Max. I was curious and opened it in a text editor and it looked a bit like XML to me.

[gbambo]

Thanks for the feed back. Those are useful tips. I will take a look at the repository you mention.

However, I would still benefit from something that discussed the underlying concepts. It helps to have an idea what ambient occlusion is beyond just seeing feedback from tweaking an example material.

[Karba]

I am working on online material DB.

[gbambo]

Yeah! That is truly super news! And it will, in turn, fuel further growth of the material database. Suggestion - allow users to push their material creations up to the public database from within 3ds Max. The more discrete the task of sharing is, the fewer people that will get around to it.

[mbetke]

great news.

Can I save my own offline too with your browser?

[Karba]

great news.

Can I save my own offline too with your browser?

No, it will work only with online DB

[Proupin]

Karba, what is the reason behind not letting the user save an offline library with your browser? or will this change in the future?