Thanks jsuarez388 for the points!
I’ve written a big list below of things based on my experiences, discussions with art directors, studios and other artists over the last 2 years, in no particular order.
Otoy
- Otoy and it’s products need a rebrand, even if the logo and colour scheme remains the same (I actually don’t mind either of these) they need a brand that can encompass an intuitive graphic approach to all of the products. A set of rules for how new products should be promoted, designed and appear. These need to be categorised in a way that can be understood quickly and easily. It might seem like this is a really cosmetic change but this can absolutely transform a business as evidenced in many rebrands around the world.
- This brand needs to translate as an experience to the user interface too. Imagine your product was a workflow “The Otoy Way” - How good is it currently? and are you proud to call it your product? How good could it be?
- The website needs an overhaul. The current home page presents services, technology and products together with no discernible difference. When I first wanted to get Octane I almost purchased a subscription to ORC. It’s trying to say everything at one time and is covered in call to actions that feel meaningless. The top nav is sometimes combined with a side bar nav on some pages, this is really confusing because sometimes they have the same options like links to the forum, news and even another product like Octane Bench. So many things are tucked away and unintuitive.
- It would be nice to see some sort of timeline of development, what each team is working on, milestones and deadlines. We’ve just waited 8 months for V4 Stable and I’m aware that you’ve been working parallel to your other releases which is awesome but If users were made aware of what was going on I think it would have made much more sense about why everything was taking so long. Most people here understand your difficult task, and understand that there will be times that things won’t be ready, deadlines not met, and milestones pushed back. Some transparency here would help the brands reputation with both it’s existing and potential users, and mitigate some of the ship jumping.
- There needs to be better use of the newsletter. I have had 1 email from Otoy from the last 2 years and it was last week for the release of Octane V4. Talk to your users, they love you and love your products. We are professionals and check our emails every day. This is so much more formal than digging through a forum or having to sift through Facebook. If users want more they can go there. But weekly, fortnightly or monthly updates via email would be really welcome.
- Does Otoy have a Slack/Discord channel? I’m personally a fan of Slack as it’s work focused but both can categorise discussion by channel which is really helpful. This can mean real time communication between users which I actually think would alleviate the problem of newer users reporting misuse/poor optimisation as bugs. Quite often when I was first learning Octane I just needed someone to tell me I was doing it wrong. This doesn’t need a ticket, a facebook post or a thread on a forum, just some friendly education from a fellow user, something that can be solved in minutes. This is working really well for Greyscalegorilla at the moment.
- It would be ideal for products to have an opt-in for data collection on what people are using/doing. Not only will this increase the sample size of the data set (in turn it’s accuracy) but also the ability to create heat maps of particular workflow issues and would help Otoy focus resources where the most common pain points are.
- On the same note I’d like to see automatically compiled crash reports that can be simply sent as they occur. There are bugs that just go under the radar because someone is too busy/lazy to report them.
- I agree with Notiusweb about the feeling of a ticket system, however a good ticket system isn’t only for the users, it’s to create a database to plot data of persistence, scope and severity of bugs. However, this doesn’t need to replace how the forums work or the interaction between developers and users. All it means is that when a user posts a thread with a bug that someone (user or dev) logs a ticket for it so the data is captured and can be represented or reported on. This would allow Otoy to channel it’s resource more efficiently.
- Uniformed/structured approach to documentation. This should be written and maintained by the same team, carry the same tone of voice and utilise the same imagery where possible. Currently all of the documentation has different structures/contents and some is even written by people who’s first language is not English. It makes the documentation difficult to understand for a user but I imagine it must be insanely difficult to try write as well. I learned 90% of what I know about Octane from Inlifethrill, youtube and this forum, the other 10% from Ahmet’s document on his own site which I stumbled upon somehow. Comparatively I’ve learned 100% of X-particles from Insdydium’s documentation and videos. They are really well made and a great reference point for best practice.
- Most importantly, development like this doesn’t come without cost. Personally, and I can’t speak for all users, If you told me tomorrow that the price of my subscription was going up 20% because Otoy was hiring staff in these areas I’d gladly swallow it. I will mention Adobe CC price hikes every year and it pisses a lot of users off, there are two things that cause this.
- Adobe CC is an industry standard, people don’t have very much choice in a production environment but to pay whatever they ask. I have seen Otoy do the opposite of this with their pricing, to ensure there is a product tier available for almost everyone.
- Adobe continue to make new and bizarre products that they think creative people want instead of properly overhauling their design. AE/PS/AI/Premiere are absolute dinosaurs in their core and it’s reflected through poor performance comparative to other software. Otoy listen to their users and want to make a product that people want to use, something that Adobe really can’t seem to get their head around.
I’ve tried to get a bit more granular with actual things I’ve found using Octane, these are NOT requests, these are a few selected examples of processes that seem overly complex or inefficient to evidence my claims.
Standalone/All Plugins
- Getting a clean Alpha in Octane depends on so many factors and I often don’t understand how or when I should use which combination of settings for my given scenario. As you can probably see there is a lot of threads around describing different and unexpected alpha results.
- Alpha Channel checkbox in Kernels tab
- Keep Environment checkbox Kernels tab
- Pre-multiplied Alpha checkbox in Camera Imager
- Disable Partial Alpha checkbox in Camera Imager
- Alpha Channel checkbox in Render Settings Save
- Interpretation of file by compositing software (After Effects for example, has 2 options of Straight or Pre-multiplied)
There is probably actually more settings that effect getting a clean alpha but some sort of decision tree or workflow optimisation would really help here. A guide for how to interpret these in popular compositing software would be good too (PS, AE, Nuke, Fusion). I see a lot of posts where developers are frustrated with users because they haven’t followed the entire workflow to it’s endpoint. It’s important to understand how the Alpha is used to understand how it should come out of the render engine.
- How often are the live viewers the same across plugins? Do they all look the same and have the same button layout? If they don’t then who’s design is the most functional and efficient?
C4D Plugin
- Overall, settings and menus double up in function all over the place. For example: I have literally never right clicked on the live viewer to create a material, or use any of the functions in this menu because they are all available elsewhere.
- Film region and Render region have the same logo, currently mouse hover is the only way to tell which is which.
- Clay modes logo is some glossy coloured sphere, not sure why this logo is different to the others.
- Store render buffer/Enable A/B could be made as fast buttons like render region. I use this feature a lot and it feels like it has additional steps that could be made a bit faster.
- “Update material thumbnails” button/function, I think I once read somewhere there is a way to do this but the fact that it’s not immediately apparent leads me to think it needs to be more obvious.
Comparisons to Redshift in C4D
- Redshift IPR has 1 button for Stopping/Starting IPR and 1 button for Refreshing IPR. Octane has 4 buttons, Send and Restart, Restart, Pause, Stop and Reset Render Data. I don’t even know what they all do differently but maybe they could be simplified.
- Octane lays out it’s settings in C4D in multiple ways, through tags, the Octane settings window, the C4D render settings window, Live viewer also has a bunch of options too. Redshift has almost all of it’s settings inside the native C4D Render settings window. Something that feels like a Camera setting is inside the Camera tag, something that feels like a render setting is inside the render settings window.
- Redshift’s AOV workflow is a superior UX compared to Octane’s render pass workflow, the Render Passes tab is gigantic and contains so many options that I don’t need or use that often time is spent scanning and reading just to find the right setting. For example 99% of the time I only need beauty, denoise and post in my workflow. In Redshift I just choose to add 3 passes instead of having a checkbox for every possible setting.
I didn’t want to leave this post on a negative note so let me just outline some of the greatest strengths I think Octane/Otoy has.
- Passionate developers & passionate users. This is to a level I’ve never found with any other product. It’s important that the above points I’ve spoken about don’t ever alienate this process but rather encourage and nourish it.
- The Node Network. To me this is the future of creative workflows and even though it’s a bit clunky in C4D compared to Standalone I couldn’t live without it.
- The Tech. Some of the features coming to Octane look mindblowing.
- Unbiased Rendering. I got sent this great article written by chaos group
https://www.chaosgroup.com/blog/the-tru ... -rendering and I generally tend to agree with it. However it’s based on the assumption that things will stay the way they are. Features like vector meshes, out-of-core, polarisation and the 2019 steps to “finish the equation” combined with faster tech like we are seeing from Nvidia simply means the only bottleneck is the hardware. It feels like we are approaching this realtime threshold and biased rendering can go back to being a dirty word.
I want to close by saying that this post is only an attempt to bring light to something I think Otoy could improve on. Good UX and UI comes from a balance of user input, developer input, hard data, then a rigorous method of sorting, interpreting and implementing. The best and most intuitive design is often subconscious, and goes unnoticed by the user. I want Octane to feel this way, and currently it doesn’t. I’m not sure what Otoy need to do - Project managers, data analysts, UI/UX Designers or something else, I don’t think I have all the answers.
These criticisms are not intended to be personal - if I just wanted to use Redshift or Vray or Arnold I wouldn’t have bothered spending all this time making this post, I’d just go use them. I actually really like Octane and I just want to see it be the best it can be.
Cheers, Tim
P.s: This is a more detailed post/interview about the video I mentioned earlier in this thread. Great approach.
Designing the design tools of Cinema 4D — a UX Case Study
https://uxdesign.cc/designing-the-desig ... b5e26859ae
