OTOY Forums

Haven't had time to test the new exporter until now. But its a great release! No more annoying switchbacks for the measurements/project filepaths etc. Everything just goes wroom!

One question about the measurements.. Are you 100% sure that your exporter scale isnt 10-times smaller than it actually is? I always model in scale, and if I do a unit export in decimeters (as I always understood that 1-unit in Softimage corresponds to 10cm for some obscure reason) well, then I end up with polynormals looking odd. When I set it to meters the result looks correct. Do I make any sense? When doing a decimeter export the model in Octane seems like each unit is 1cm instead of 1 dm. I don't know, havent done a scientific test for this, just felt odd when working on my current project and using the last soft2octane exporter..

Btw, can I write .exr in the file exporter now, or will it save down the image as .png anyway?

/Regards Peter K

I thougt, that 1unit is 1m and not 10cm.
I will fix it.

Only png can saved now, because there is no command line option to use png16 or exr.

face

Cool! Well, all simulations etc are based on 1 SU = 1 dm. Very odd, I don't know why and stupid, but its the way it is

Another question.. Once Octane starts rendering, do you have anyway of knowing it has completed loading in the object, and started voxelising? It would be so awesome for animation, if softimage as soon as it has exported the geometry, and Octane has imported the obj, soft starts exporting the next frame while octane is rendering. That would take away the time you sit and wait for Soft to export the next frame, and as soon as Octane is done rendering, it can instantly load the next frame. Impossible? Or maybe its a waste of time investigating until the new xml file format is done?

/Regards Peter K

PeterCGS wrote:Cool! Well, all simulations etc are based on 1 SU = 1 dm. Very odd, I don't know why and stupid, but its the way it is

Another question.. Once Octane starts rendering, do you have anyway of knowing it has completed loading in the object, and started voxelising? It would be so awesome for animation, if softimage as soon as it has exported the geometry, and Octane has imported the obj, soft starts exporting the next frame while octane is rendering. That would take away the time you sit and wait for Soft to export the next frame, and as soon as Octane is done rendering, it can instantly load the next frame. Impossible? Or maybe its a waste of time investigating until the new xml file format is done?

/Regards Peter K

I would say to much, but the waste of time would be one argument.
Misterious, i know

face

Hello face. I have a puzzle for you ;]

Somehow, out of the blue, every version of the exporter started ignoring camera position, or messing it up. it seems to be always placed and focused on the origin. I have no idea what happened I uninstalled both exporters and installed the new one, but the error still occurs every time.

Second thing: with 2.46 the scene is cut by an invisible box. Every polygon outside a certain range gets cut off.

And finally, for simple test scenes like a box or whatever primitive, export fails 9 times of 10 saying that no point positions were found.

I am using Soft 2012 SP1 and I have no idea what's going on If you do, please let me know, it's really curious ;]

I checked Octane preferences and discovered that somehow the import scale setting got stuck on decameters. Setting it to meters there again seems to have solved the problem. Still, it doesn't explain why the camera fixed on the origin, or why would the scale setting influence what's seen in the camera at all (or does it?).

Great job on minimizing the pop-up headache, thanks for this
Unfortunately, it has become very difficult to cancel animation. If you pause Octane on one frame to cancel, Softimage freezes. It unfreezes when you press play in Octane, but then Softimage keeps sending frames. Only two options are to hold ESC for minutes (takes 2-3 seconds before it moves from one frame to the next) or close Softimage and run it again.

I'll test strands in the evening, it's great to have them back

To cancel an animation should work better with the next version.
Also when you only export an obj. I has forgotten to insert one thing in the export routine
For the origin problem, i have no idea, here it work correct...

face

Thanks! Overall the new plugin feels much nicer. The not-popping-up-in-your-face thing is great ;] Still takes focus for a second but it's much, much more discreet. Also default paths are a nice touch. Thanks!

Is there anything that can be done hardware-wise to significantly speed up exports from Softimage? Would a RAM upgrade from 4 to 8 gigabytes or buying an SSD have a noticeable positive impact? I'm dealing with massive amounts of strands and exports take very long, like 15 minutes often followed with a total system freeze, so I'm guessing I am badly underresourced. Also, out of curiosity, is there room for improvement in the OBJ exporter itself? Can it be multithreaded and would it be worth it, or would hard disks slow everything down anyway?

BTW, strands seem to work better and ... sorry for off-topic ;]

Hello, is there any difference between exporting for "render frame" and "render animation" ? I have cached lagoa cloth simulation, when i'm setting it up through "render frame", everything looks nice, but when i'm starting to redner animation its sending something wrong to octane. Unfortunately, i can't send screenshots at the moment. It looks like something getting wrong with normals. And as it goes further from the first frame it getting much worse.
Switched to Octane2Softimage, but it has problems with memory leaking.
Soft2Octane has very nice stabillity, only that animation exporting glitch ruins it all.