Octane Render Power Tools

[tyrot]

if he releases LW version i would purchase it at a hearbeat..

Worthy? Of course! ... even he put 100 euros i would get .. If you have endless time to wait..and experiment ... and your business plan is based on single frames... of course it is not..

But for a video rendering it is "THE worthy" thing....

I am so happy that he addressed this and built a small business around it.

I am hoping Holocube will work with him... and this will be launched for Lightwave...

[SamCameron]

50% of the real price only for 3 days!, so now the price is 30€:

http://www.octanepowertools.com/content ... ext-3-days

That's much better isn't?

[vagos21]

hello face,

so how did you manage to do it? may i get a bit technical? i used specific memory hack for every version of octane? i've been messing around with it using cheatEngine but the address for the camera positions change every time i start the app, i have to find them again over and over manually...

i didn't want to hack the software ofcourse, i own it, i just wanted to make an exporter exactly like that, and give it here for free. just exporting a text file with camera animation info from any 3D app with a script, and using a similar app i'd build like octane power tools to do the job. i'm using VB.NET,
and this is where i'm stuck. changing memory addresses for this stuff... any ideas?

[face]

hello face,

so how did you manage to do it? may i get a bit technical? i used specific memory hack for every version of octane? i've been messing around with it using cheatEngine but the address for the camera positions change every time i start the app, i have to find them again over and over manually...

i didn't want to hack the software ofcourse, i own it, i just wanted to make an exporter exactly like that, and give it here for free. just exporting a text file with camera animation info from any 3D app with a script, and using a similar app i'd build like octane power tools to do the job. i'm using VB.NET,
and this is where i'm stuck. changing memory addresses for this stuff... any ideas?

Hehe, cheat engine was my friend too.
Go backwards, and you find a adress or a pointer, where the camera data is.
This adress is changed every time you start Octane.
Injecte here a code, which read the adress/pointer and writes it to a memory which is not used or is used with some error messages we never would see.
This adress is fix. So you only must read in the adress and add a offset to each x, y, z camera position.
Same with the camera target position, aperture and focal depth.

I has used it also with the samples.
If you know, where the samples are stored, add a minus off from e.g. 4 and set the bit to 1. This will refresh the scene and the render begins from start.

But my handycap was, that i haven´t found the bit, which is set, to store the image. So i can´t save an image every frame.
The problem is also, that the positions of the code is changed in every version.
Also you have to know the position for 4 versions. 32/64bit, Windows/Linux.

Another thing is, that the information on the website, where you can buy the tools, is incorrect.
He writes, that the scene must exported every frame.
Thats incorrect, if you use the export camera only option in the plugins.
If you write your own obj-export, you can also save time.
He need to export ~1mio. triangles around 1:40minutes. I need for the same ~20sec...

face

[radiance]

Hi everyone,

I have not had much time to comment on the appearance of this tool,
so i will do so here.

Although this tool is quite usefull for fast animation rendering with one or a few PCs,
it's a workaround for a feature that is already on the drawing table at Refractive Software,
so I am afraid it won't have a long lifetime.

One of the things I am also not very keen on, like face has explained before in this thread,
is that it assumes a lot of things about Octane, which will very likely be broken with nearly all new releases of Octane, and may cause frustration for some of it's users.

I've got nothing against these people, but I don't think it's something that will be a good option for (all) Octane users,
it would have been better if they had consulted with us before starting development.

We are planning various new development that will make animation rendering a lot easier.
The new scene IO file format, better plugins, with support for instances and such, of which development will start at the end of next week (new IO format that is),
will solve this issue, maybe not %100, but it will be a major improvement to get things done much faster.

We're also working on our new partnership (which i've already spoken about in the 2.5 offline mode news post in the news forum), and will likely be expaning the development team with more people very soon. (We have already finished interviews and found the people in question).

Adding a timeline to octane and keyframing, all in the UI, would be the ulitmate solution, and is also something I really want to do in a few months,
once the basics are completely finished.

In the mean time, although RS cannot officially support this tool (I would not want our customers to become dependent on a tool that will likely be unstable and broken a lot of the time between releases, and will also become obsolete soon)
So, if you can use it, and you want to purchase, go ahead, but we cannot make any guarantees, nor can we lose development time at this stage to support a tool like this...)


Radiance

[tyrot]

actually i guess the whole point is , because of Octane's insane speed and quality users like myself left their previous (native) renderer and started to use Octane for everything.. even in its early stage...

Video is so important for any serious archviz business... since i installed octane we made almost 30 minutes of archviz animation for our clients and all of them was using turntable (we were putting invisible polygons far away from the main object just for focusing on them in order to achieve a straight dolly shot to right or to left...)

So the problem is clients now want more camera angles... and moving objects..

So this tiny little thing is perfect for that particular need ..."right now". We can render animated characters in native App and export them with alpha channel and make the render in octane really fast then ... combine them two in After Effects...viola... we have octane + Native apps camera + objects.. .Right now...

I know Radiance wants to solve the timeline problem once for all ... but time to time little gifts like this is more than welcome because it solves a BIG problem right now ...

[SamCameron]

I have to agree with several points of radiance, I have even spoke about some of these points with the author, so I think radiance has reason about that, but I have to tell as well that we (the costumers) been waiting for such a feature like this almost since the very beginning of Octane Render, and as you can see radiance there's some of the user (at least 3) that they tried to achieve a similar functionality by hacking some code, and most of them they got an amazing result, and very usable, now... these people has MUCH less resources than the entire refractive software company, they work by their own and they provide a feature that you've been promising since several months ago (more than a year actually I think), we don't ask for a complex animated system, we just need something simple as this tool, but we do not deserve to wait for one more year, and we do not deserve to put our money in someone elses hands, I would rather with the money to you cause you can assume a compromise with your clients and everyone here is depending of you.
You're putting several features in every release as beta or alpha code, and somethings doesn't even work correctly yet, so why do not provide a similar functionality than this software called Power tools? even if it's buggy (as buggy as some of the actual features), I don't understand why 3 guys with very low resources can get this to work and you that are the real propertary, you than know whe code more than anyone else, and you than have more people working than these 3 guys are taking SO long in providing a simple camera animation. We don't need more promises, we need fact, we need estimated dates, and after all we need results. Sorry for being so critic, I'm really happy with 2.48 version but really piss me off to have to pay to someone else for a feature that you promised time ago.

EDIT:

Ops... I forgot, here's an interesting quote from the author of Power tools:

yes octane power tools will work with all the past, current and future version of octane render.

[vagos21]

it's exactly what SamCameron says, this feature has been too long away from us and just waiting for it doesn't help the situation. i'm into the archviz industry where fly-throughs are a key, and it's been missing for many many months. such a tool is not against octane, it's really in favour of it, helping people do faster animation until its own internal animation system is complete. And nobody could ever complain about a tool that's not supported by refractive, those who want to use it can buy/download it, those who don't just don't have to. The reason i want to make my own is, i really wouldn't give half the price of a licence for it, it's like buying 3ds max for $4000 and an "exporter plugin" for $2000 lol... anyway, we'll see what happens with the development of such a thing, i hope something good will come out

[face]

EDIT:

Ops... I forgot, here's an interesting quote from the author of Power tools:

yes octane power tools will work with all the past, current and future version of octane render.

If that is true, he can´t use a hack, then I think he use a tool like AutoIt.
It would also speak for AutoIt or same, because he must export the camera data.
But there is a problem, some values can´t set in Octane. As there are, camera motion blur and focal depth.
Ok, thats only a hint...

Now to the main intention why i write this lines...
It is correct, that some people have/has the intention to integrate some features like this tool.
Why RS integrate can´t integrate this feature?
I will try to give you an answer.
There are two ways to comunicate with an other program.
The easiest but unattractive way is to check, if a textfile exists.
If it exists, read in the data from the file, apply the data, delete the file and check again if it exists.
The plugin must do the same.
Write the file, check if the file exists, what means, the data aren´t used. Then wait till the file is missing to create the new one.
This can work for animation, but not for a realtime feedback.

The second and cleaner methode is to establish a client/server connection on two different ports.
The first port is only to send/received a command, like "camera" or "light". The second port contains the camera/light data.
Because the CPU have time to make some things, it is possible to create a thread which is listen on the first port for incomming commands.
If there a command is comming in, create another thread, which reads and apply the data from the second port.
That gives you the possibility, if a new command is comming in and the camera/light data aren´t used complete, to kill the thread and create a new one.
This should be fast enough to become a feedback which works for animation and nearly realtime.

My choice, if I would be a RS developer, is the second, cleaner methode.
But the problem is, the scripts/plugins are written from people from outside, like me.
And now the question, what do you mean how many of the script/plugin developer have the skill to implement it?
If you know the answer, you can see two things.
First you will see how many 3d apps would have it.
Second, because RS will not affect the users of apps which wouldn´t have this feature, it will not be integrated so long it´s not guaranteed that all can use it.

And now its time to have a look at Silverstone

Edit:
I know, all of you need it, but think sometimes about it to implement it.

face

[GeoPappas]

And now its time to have a look at Silverstone

What is Silverstone? Got a link?