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Re: OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.0a [CURRENT] TEST

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 4:41 am
by TBFX
A tree with instanced leaves is something I'm looking at doing too but for a project I have coming up I'm just going to instance whole trees. At the moment I'm just doing a simple emitter and instancing a cube just as a test scene.
The expression I used was just this nParticleShape1.rgbPP = rand(0,1);

Really simple but made sure that each particles rgb was set on creation so the shader assignments are consistent over time.

T.

Re: OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.0a [CURRENT] TEST

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 5:54 am
by JimStar
TBFX wrote:Nice work JimStar!

Everything mentioned above seems to be working well, it'd be great if in the future we could assign weighting to the virtualMaterial's so that we could get a percentage more of one than another etc. Though in the mean time we can just have duplicate shaders in the list to achieve this which I don't think will be too costly render wise, it could eat a bit of VRAM and texture space though so a weighting would be great.

I've found one strange behaviour (it was actually there in the last version but I thought it was probably tied to the other normals bug)

If you create rotated instances their normals seem to be locked and rotate with them, however if you check the smooth option in the octane shader they come right. The strange thing is they render correctly either way in both the geo and shaded normal modes in the infoChannel kernal.

Images attached, in this example each instance was rotated 10 degrees on creation.
I've seen this strange thing before releasing this version, doublechecked the matrix to Octane loading, it seems all is OK from plugins side... It seems that it is some SDK problem, I've already posted the question about it to engine developers yesterday...

Thank you for explanation to all of virtual material usage.
Yes, you have understood it right, the rgbPP works as "tag" to identify the specific particle (as Maya API has no means to do it normal way, no way to get the generated particle unique ID). So, if you want the particle to have the consistent color during lifetime - it should have any rgbPP not changed during lifetime. But some shading effects may be achieved when playing with this rgbPP changed during lifetime too...

Re: OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.0a [CURRENT] TEST

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 6:16 am
by TBFX
JimStar wrote:I've seen this strange thing before releasing this version, doublechecked the matrix to Octane loading, it seems all is OK from plugins side... It seems that it is some SDK problem, I've already posted the question about it to engine developers yesterday...
Thanks, hopefully they can sort it soon.
JimStar wrote:But some shading effects may be achieved when playing with this rgbPP changed during lifetime too...
Absolutely! I wouldn't want it changed. :D

T.

Re: OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.0a [CURRENT] TEST

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 7:20 am
by JimStar
TBFX wrote:... You can also select the secondary material in the node editor and click the add selected in the base materials attribute editor but this is a bit of a pain as you need to use focus in the attribute editor to get one material selected ad another showing. ...
A little tip:
You can do it such a way: in the Hypershader select the first material which you want to add to the Virtual base material, then press and hold "Shift", then select all other materials which you want to add, and as the last one select the base Virtual material (still holding "Shift") - the Attrubute editor of base Virtual material will appear, press the "Add selected" button there, and voila: you have all these materials in the Virtual material's list...;)

Re: OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.0a [CURRENT] TEST

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 7:34 am
by TBFX
JimStar wrote:A little tip:You can do it such a way: in the Hypershader select the first material which you want to add to the Virtual base material, then press and hold "Shift", then select all other materials which you want to add, and as the last one select the base Virtual material (still holding "Shift") - the Attrubute editor of base Virtual material will appear, press the "Add selected" button there, and voila: you have all these materials in the Virtual material's list...
Yeah, that'll work! Hate it when I miss the obvious. :oops: ;)

T.

Re: OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.0a [CURRENT] TEST

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 9:24 am
by JimStar
Forgot to mention: adding the Virtual materials to the list of another base Virtual material (recursion) will work too.;)
But be aware of "looping", I did not made the "infinite loop test" so far...:mrgreen:

Re: OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.0a [CURRENT] TEST

Posted: Wed Oct 03, 2012 7:19 pm
by TBFX
Ooooooh, nested distribution. Now that is cool... don't have a use for it yet, but it IS cool!

T.

Re: OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.0a [CURRENT] TEST

Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2012 2:59 am
by Q-Games
Great! The specular material now works and the weird normal problem is gone! :)
The emissive material refresh problem is still there (set an emissive material, save the scene, reload the scene -> the emission becomes very low until you touch any of the emission slider and it goes back to the saved intensity)
Also the material preview sphere in the upper corner of the material panel still not there (sometimes it appears, but then it disappears again)

good update so far! ;)

Re: OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.0a [CURRENT] TEST

Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2012 6:56 am
by Q-Games
One question: does the Octane Image Texture node supports just jpg?! :shock:
I tried to open PSD or TGA but it doesn't recognize them... :cry:

Re: OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.0a [CURRENT] TEST

Posted: Thu Oct 04, 2012 7:20 am
by JimStar
Q-Games wrote:One question: does the Octane Image Texture node supports just jpg?! :shock:
I tried to open PSD or TGA but it doesn't recognize them... :cry:
Thanks, I've reproduced it. Will fix it in the next version. As a workaround - you can just "copy/paste" the image path string to the "File" attribute.