some news from the ongoing frontier

[Zwavelaar]

Wow! That looks very promising. I'm very impressed by your skills t_3. Can't wait to use the update. I love the Octane Render! And things will only get better, thanks to you.

[t_3]

bit by bit...

to make editing easier, emitters in a scene will be grouped into an own category in the materials list; additionally the mat tab editing pane filters out node pins, that are usually not needed for an emitter, like bump, normal and so on (these are still accessible through the nge of course).

any material that contains an emitter type node is shown in this group. as such nodes may be disconnected (in the material), i.e. to test different lighting situations, they are shown highlighted as long as they are actually emitting light into the scene, otherwise ... not highlighted

what else can be seen here:
- material presets; can be accessed just by drag & drop to copy and use them within the current scene.
- another shortcut on top of the dz shader tree allows mat creation not only for missing but also currently selected surfaces, in addition it can be chosen what to create (auto or blank mats, materials from .duf embedded data, and the misc. emitter types).
- material previews
- plus a lot enhancements and fixes to the trees drag & drop handling. amongst others the trees will keep expanded/collapsed nodes, even when nodes get expanded through filtering (e.g. text search).
- drag & drop is generally enhanced - it will be possible to drop any entry from the octane material tree into the nge, to add these materials into the currently edited mat, dragging between live db thumbnails and the dz mat tree will be possible in both directions (and also from the octane mat tree for replacements).

+++

[bluerocket]

Nice

Regards

[PizmoSF]

Thank you. Even as it is, I love using the Daz3d plugin. You give so much flexibility, and, if there is anything I love, it's messin' with stuff. These improvements are very exciting. Thanks for all your great work and a great product.

[AlfaseeD]

It would be so nice to know when this update will be available !

.. or at least the month

Thanks!

Ps Yes, I really, really need a way to save my material preset and load when I need to use in a new scene ... In the same way the Poser's plugins works!

[t_3]

... the textures module is now almost finished; while doing this i got some intense sense of total overkill on the other hand, when altering maps in a central place this might affect various materials, and so there most probably should be lots of lookup possibilities to find out what such a change will result in:

so, what this place is meant to do:

• first of all, resizing maps to 1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 of their original size; resized maps are cached on disk and re-used from there whenever needed. it is not possible to use a resized version of a map in one place, and the full-res map in another - at least not using this tool. doing so would be anyway contrary to the expected result - and that is to save vram.
• change the octane image type (image, floatimage, alphaimage) - usually a map should have the same type wherever applied, as this is the most efficient use (vram again).
• change/replace maps, using the all new image menu (more about that later).
• total overview: you'll see where a map is used in octane and/or studio, including the (final) material pin (for octane) or respectively the channel within any of the daz materials that use this map. plus open an octane mat in the nodegraph editor.
• some color coding tells if a map is actually within a linked oc mat or not (blue), if the oc node type is other than the native type (i.e. image node using a plain grayscale map), or if it has multiple uses (i.e. floatimage and image).
• stats display to check overall vram usage, plus the map count.

[t_3]

Thank you. Even as it is, I love using the Daz3d plugin. You give so much flexibility, and, if there is anything I love, it's messin' with stuff. These improvements are very exciting. Thanks for all your great work and a great product.

thanks! makes me really happy to read such sentences from time to time

[t_3]

It would be so nice to know when this update will be available !

.. or at least the month

i'm working my a.. off to have a nice xmas present for all of you. knowing the past history of development, i should better not be more specific

Ps Yes, I really, really need a way to save my material preset and load when I need to use in a new scene ... In the same way the Poser's plugins works!

honestly, i don't know how or what the poser plug does, but i expect to provide an easy and flexible way to do it. will post a little more in a few days. since still in the works questions and wishes are welcome...

[SimonJM]

As I think I have said before, it'll be ready when it's ready. The fact that my birthday is near christmas should no way be seen as any additional pressure ...

[Zwavelaar]

Yeah, it's better to wait a while longer to get a real awesome update. Too many software companies release their products way too fast. Octane for Daz is a real quality plugin. And we want to keep it that way.

Good luck with the proces t_3!