OTOY Forums

You must be seeing a cached version of the webpage.

Can you try it on another brower?

GeoPappas wrote:You must be seeing a cached version of the webpage.

Can you try it on another brower?

Cleared cache on firefox 4 and it still showed as the same. May be a problem with the beta.

Opened it in internet explorer and it appeared fine. Thanks Geo.

Blincs.

Blincs; try hard refreshing next time. You do this by shift clicking on the refresh icon. This will skip all cached contents and reload the page completely. No need to user a different browser.

Well i promised you guys a picture after tonights testing and here it is.



I modeled the chair and environment in blender specifically for this test (wanted something relatively simple and light). Overal impression is that its fast but workflow has some hiccups for me. Since it seems there are no plugins or scripts supplied with the demo thats what i base my feedback on.

Just exporting your stuff is actually quite cumbersome. Want to rotate the chair a few degrees? Reexport, go through the voxelize proces, assign all materials again from scratch etc. Not ideal and even annoying. As i start experimenting with heavier meshes this will only get worse. With the plugin is it possible to reexport "parts" of your scene? For example just a meshlight with changed position? I need to be able to test the plugins, plain and simple.

Also there are many navigation scenes but why oh why put zoom on mmb instead of on rmb? I am constantly fighting my muscle memory when navigating the scene and i could not find any option to change this. An option for navigation presets would be hugely appreciated by 3d artists who have certain navigation controls hard wired.

Then the nodetree. This is very useful and necessary since materials are all combined in the single mesh object. Since i have not (yet?) found a way to switch camera's my perspective view is my camera. I sometimes dont want to change my camera view to be able to pick a material from an object. However if i pick a material from the nodetree and change its type i get a material preview window. That would be nice if its what i wanted, but I dont. I want to tweak the material IN the scene. So i have to go back to the scene again and then start tweaking. Doing this 100 times gets old very quickly.

In the same league. Have your main obj object selected. This gives you all the materials on the right side of the interface. You want to work on one material so you collapse the others. Now change the type of this one material. BAM! All materials get opened again. Depending on the name of your material you may even have to scroll to find the mat you were working on in the first place. If you change the emission type this also happens.

Thats not to say I do not like Octane. In fact I love it! I do wish I could get a feel for the complete workflow though including the exporters. But perhaps there is a good reason they are not included (although I cannot think of one).

In short, after some more experimentation I'll probably end up buying this beaty.

That said is there any indication of the upgrade price from v1 to v2?

JW

JWvD wrote: Just exporting your stuff is actually quite cumbersome. Want to rotate the chair a few degrees? Reexport, go through the voxelize proces, assign all materials again from scratch etc. Not ideal and even annoying.

You don't need to reassign materials with the paid version (since you can save your Octane scene to a file). All you need to do is make the changes in your 3D app, export, and reload. But I agree that it would be great if we could manipulate (rotate, move, scale, copy, array, hide, etc) objects and lights from within Octane. That would kick it up a notch!

JWvD wrote: With the plugin is it possible to reexport "parts" of your scene? For example just a meshlight with changed position? I need to be able to test the plugins, plain and simple.

Not at this time. The entire scene needs to come across.

JWvD wrote: Have your main obj object selected. This gives you all the materials on the right side of the interface. You want to work on one material so you collapse the others. Now change the type of this one material. BAM! All materials get opened again. Depending on the name of your material you may even have to scroll to find the mat you were working on in the first place. If you change the emission type this also happens.

This has already been reported a few times. I thought it had been fixed, but if it hasn't, then hopefully it will be fixed soon.

JWvD wrote: That said is there any indication of the upgrade price from v1 to v2?

No, and I doubt that there would be since v1 isn't even finished yet.

Thanks for the reply geoppapa. Just wanted to give a quick headsup that i found completely customizable viewport controls under file preferences. No idea why i missed that before. Despite being a little embaressed by my oversight im very happy to have found it.

JW

Hi,

The ability to move lights and objects requires the concept of instances and transforms in the IO file format, which obj does not support.
We will be adding a new format soon that will allow this, after the next release.

Regarding your other comments, once you get used to the pick and edit workflow of materials, you will get used to the workflow and things will go much smoother...

Radiance

Radiance,

The ability to move lights and objects requires the concept of instances and transforms in the IO file format, which obj does not support.
We will be adding a new format soon that will allow this, after the next release.

Do I interpret this correctly as being able to move lights and objects inside of Octane? Or will this allow for "partial" updates from another 3d app (only export what has changed). This is a rather big deal to me since sculpted mesh are high poly and the voxelize process will start to take longer as the sculpts get bigger/more detailed.

I certainly hope it means being allowed to move stuff around inside of octane but partial updates would be great as well.

Regarding your other comments, once you get used to the pick and edit workflow of materials, you will get used to the workflow and things will go much smoother...

I must be misinterpreting your reply. I point out a bug in the fuction of the nodetree and the material (properties) tree and you tell me to get used to the workflow?

I have made a movie to show you exactly what I mean by the issues I mention.

http://www.3dioot.com/octane/mat_handli ... dling.html

I hope this communicates clearly what I ran into. If there are any things that are due to user error feel free to enlighten me.

I have learned quite a few things since my last test including that i appearantly was rendering it in preview mode. (i think it came out excellent for a preview!) I was using directlight and not pathtracing. I also figured out why i had these reflections turning black. I figured it had to do with raydepth but did not yet know where to find it. After consulting the manual I do though. Excellent manual btw! Love the widescreen format and its very pleasing to the eyes!

Anyway that would be enough text for me. I plan to spend some more time this weekend with it (probably with the full commercial version).

Kind regards,

JW

JWvD wrote:Radiance,

The ability to move lights and objects requires the concept of instances and transforms in the IO file format, which obj does not support.
We will be adding a new format soon that will allow this, after the next release.

Do I interpret this correctly as being able to move lights and objects inside of Octane? Or will this allow for "partial" updates from another 3d app (only export what has changed). This is a rather big deal to me since sculpted mesh are high poly and the voxelize process will start to take longer as the sculpts get bigger/more detailed.

I certainly hope it means being allowed to move stuff around inside of octane but partial updates would be great as well.

Regarding your other comments, once you get used to the pick and edit workflow of materials, you will get used to the workflow and things will go much smoother...

I must be misinterpreting your reply. I point out a bug in the fuction of the nodetree and the material (properties) tree and you tell me to get used to the workflow?

I have made a movie to show you exactly what I mean by the issues I mention.

http://www.3dioot.com/octane/mat_handli ... dling.html

I hope this communicates clearly what I ran into. If there are any things that are due to user error feel free to enlighten me.

I have learned quite a few things since my last test including that i appearantly was rendering it in preview mode. (i think it came out excellent for a preview!) I was using directlight and not pathtracing. I also figured out why i had these reflections turning black. I figured it had to do with raydepth but did not yet know where to find it. After consulting the manual I do though. Excellent manual btw! Love the widescreen format and its very pleasing to the eyes!

Anyway that would be enough text for me. I plan to spend some more time this weekend with it (probably with the full commercial version).

Kind regards,

JW

Tend to agree that the materials interface could do with some tweaking.However with the import plug ins available.Most of the materials come across from your 3d program if you have assigned them in that.The material picking is done mostly for altering some of the materials once in Octane or assigning any customised materials made in octane.

I did notice your lighting setup.There are a selection of Studio HDRI files available to customers in the forums.These may help simplify your lighting setup in future.

Please however be aware that a stable Internet connection is required to run a Licensed copy of octane.It is used for access to the online materials database but is also currently the primary security against piracy.Think Ubisoft's Assassins Creed 2 and you'll get the picture.

Anyway i have been using if for my clients renders for quite a few months.I could never go back to mental Ray now.It feels so slooooooow.

Thanks for the comment JabberWocky. Lets hope they take a good hard look at workflow in general. The tools are there, just not fully functioning/smooth. As for the lighting setups, I personally like to place the lights myself and not be dependent on some precooked lighting information.

In the end I decided to buy it. After the money got transferred I got told that verification of purchase is a manual process which therefore only happens during work hours. No fully licensed octane to play with this weekend for me.

Did spend some more time sculpting though. And of course I had to take it to Octane to play with it. The setup is not great (just plain daylight system) but I really wanted to explore the node based material system and since I could not save (demo version damnit!) I was reluctant to change the scenery, add area lights etc.



The node based material system also suffers from some workflow issues (and refresh issues). Blame beta I guess. I look forward to having the full version so I can change scene elements without having to redo materials. That will kick it up a notch

Here is the material for the one's interested. The only texture map in there is an AO map. The rest is primarily gradients to convert the AO map to color for diffuse or tweak the "levels" and I use mix to control bump amount and mix some stuff together.




JWvD