TurbulenceFD & Octane tutorial

[marchermitte]

Never mind, I tried another scene and It works now... not sure why It doesn't with the first scene. I'm wondering what kind of nodes / textures should we use to connect to the Octane volumetrics Absorption, scattering and emission texture?
I also noticed that there is no refresh / change to the render when scrolling the timeline. The rendered frame is always the same unless reloading. And finaly I'm a bit puzzled by the octane volume ramp when I try It in the emission ramp connection. (the result looks like absorption)
Sorry for my many questions but there isn't much info in the docs.

Thank you!

[juanjgon]

To refresh the volumetrics in the IPR while you scrolling the timeline, you need to enable the full update feature in the IPR window. Anyway be aware that with complex volumes, the loading time can be too high to work with this mode enabled.

There is some information about volumetrics rendering in this thread:
viewtopic.php?f=33&t=51679

Anyway I will try to update the plugin docs as soon as possible.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[marchermitte]

Ok!
Thank you!

[MichaelT]

Just a heads up, I am using the trial version of TFD. And I get version mismatch error.
Because I want to make sure it works before I invest in it.

[juanjgon]

The plugin is compiled with the 1414 TFD SDK, so you need this version to work with it. I am not sure if a 1414 TFD trial is available, but you should ask about it to the TFD developers.

-Juanjo

[OlaHaldor]

Juan, do you have a scene you could share, where you get good detail from the TFD sim, in the Octane render? I'm still struggling with something that look more like blobs instead of the detail I see in the TFD sim.

[erikk]

I am unable to have turbulencefd volumes show up in octane at all.

Does anyone have any scene files they can share?
or better yet a detailed tutorial?
I'll settle for a scene so I can try to reverse engineer how is is set up.

I added the Octane_volumetrics custom object plugin to the TFD container object - changed it to TFD, set the cache path, I linked the volume medium to the volume custom object node.
I pointed to my TFD plugin in the options panel.
I have noticed that in the options panel "Enable Fast IPR render buffer" is greyed out so I cannot change it. - not sure if that matters.

I am fairly new to Lightwave and very new to octane (after years of using Maya, then C4D for payed work, I have chosen Lightwave for my indie film due to cost) so it may be something simple that I am missing, but I have followed the few sparse instructions that I was able to find online (in this forum thread) and still have no luck with volumetrics in octane.

I am running TFD 1-0_1416 - could this be an issue since octane was compiled with 1414
Lightwave 2015.3
Octane 3.03.2.0

Please any help would be great. A sample scene, a manual, step by step instructions (that even an idiot like me can follow), anything

[juanjgon]

I'll post a tutorial about how to use TFD and Octane tomorrow. Also I hope to have the final plugin docs updated with the new 3.0 features along this month.

Thanks for your patience,
-Juanjo

[erikk]

juanjgon,
Thanks! I'll keep an eye out for it

Just a quick update. I re-installed lightwave, TFD and the octane plugin and now have been able to get it to work. I am assuming something was messed up during plugin updates.

A tutorial would still be very much appreciated however,

Thanks

[juanjgon]

Well, work with TFD in LightWave and Octane is fairly easy.

First you need to configure in the plugin options panel the path to the TFD plugin.




Later you need to compute the TFD simulation. The plugin is going to use the TFD cache files to extract the volume information, so you must set a known path to store the cache files.




Once computed, you can add the Octane_volumetrics plugin to the container object, set the volume mode to TFD, set the simulation cache path and configure the grids information. The key here is to understand tha the black body emission node while working with volumetrics is going to get the color temperature from the emission grid, so the emission grid must be scaled to store values in a range of 2000 to 7000, than can be used as color temperature.




Finally you only need to edit the volume material, using the volumetrics node editor. Be aware that the "Normalize" option in the blackbody emission node must be always disabled while working with volumetrics.





Thanks,
-Juanjo