OctaneRender™ Standalone 3.00 alpha 1

[smicha]

+\infty

[gardeler]

What about 3ds max FumeFX at least

I'm using fumeFX 4 in max, and export open VDB's to octane stand alone. Works like a charm, so I guess there should be no problem to do it inside max as well.

[gardeler]

First of all, my mind is completely blown away by this release. What you have done when it comes to render speeds and volumes/quality is just jaw dropping!!
So to make it even better, here is a little list of bugs.

The bugs I found so far...

-The volume loader drops all of it's settings if you save and open your octane file. (reverts to default)
-As someone else mentioned before, adaptive grid is not supported. (position of the grid changes every frame.) This is a must work, since working without it is pretty much impossible.
-Would be great to be able to see the different channels in the grid. (especially to get the names right.) Perhaps a drop down list? Look at the vray volumeGrid for inspiration.
-It is great that we now have the support for animated textures. But it would be great to have a simpler version of it as default, just using frame numbers. (I only used the one located in the volume loader.)
-Some of my openVDB's does not read on windows, but they work fine on linux?
-If you have loaded some animated alembic files in your scene, and add volume sequence using the animation option in the loader, it changes the whole timeline to that. That does not seem right.

For anyone out the wanting to use fumeFX 4 VDB's with octane, you need to write "Smoke" where it says density and "FireFuel" where is says temperature in the volume loader. and remember it has to have CAPITAL letter on the "S" and "F", otherwise it doesn't work!!!!
Not gonne tell you how long it took me to figure that one out.

Anyways, great job to all@otoy, and I really look forward to use a version that supports adaptive grids!! (so we can render some animations!!)

[grimm]

The bugs I found so far...

-The volume loader drops all of it's settings if you save and open your octane file. (reverts to default)
-As someone else mentioned before, adaptive grid is not supported. (position of the grid changes every frame.) This is a must work, since working without it is pretty much impossible.
-Would be great to be able to see the different channels in the grid. (especially to get the names right.) Perhaps a drop down list? Look at the vray volumeGrid for inspiration.
-It is great that we now have the support for animated textures. But it would be great to have a simpler version of it as default, just using frame numbers. (I only used the one located in the volume loader.)
-Some of my openVDB's does not read on windows, but they work fine on linux?
-If you have loaded some animated alembic files in your scene, and add volume sequence using the animation option in the loader, it changes the whole timeline to that. That does not seem right.

For anyone out the wanting to use fumeFX 4 VDB's with octane, you need to write "Smoke" where it says density and "FireFuel" where is says temperature in the volume loader. and remember it has to have CAPITAL letter on the "S" and "F", otherwise it doesn't work!!!!
Not gonne tell you how long it took me to figure that one out.

Anyways, great job to all@otoy, and I really look forward to use a version that supports adaptive grids!! (so we can render some animations!!)

+1 on all of those. FYI you can use the OpenVDB tools to discover the grid names, etc. Use vdb_print or vdb_view, but I agree it would be much nicer if you could choose which grid goes into which input.

Jason

[gardeler]

+1 on all of those. FYI you can use the OpenVDB tools to discover the grid names, etc. Use vdb_print or vdb_view, but I agree it would be much nicer if you could choose which grid goes into which input.

Jason

Thank you for the tip Jason, that is good to know.

By the way, do you know if openVDB does not support transforms? Like, if I do a sim in max or maya where i set fire to an object in the scene, the fire is always close to origin and not where the object is when I read it in. So I need to reverse engineer the offset to get it back to where it should be. This is not very awesome when you jump around between octane, maya and max on the same shot! I have only tested with fume in max and maya, so it might be a fume issue...

[haze]

-The volume loader drops all of it's settings if you save and open your octane file. (reverts to default)

This has been fixed in alpha 2, soon to be released.

-As someone else mentioned before, adaptive grid is not supported. (position of the grid changes every frame.) This is a must work, since working without it is pretty much impossible.

There were some issues with grid positioning early on. If you are still experiencing some grids moving inexplicably while scrubbing the timeline after alpha 2 comes out, please send me the scene. OpenVDB is adaptive in the sense that it can be dynamically updated, but this is only useful for programs that actually run simulations of liquids and gasses. To export an explosion for example, we are forced to save 1 VDB for every frame you wish to render.

-Would be great to be able to see the different channels in the grid. (especially to get the names right.) Perhaps a drop down list? Look at the vray volumeGrid for inspiration.

We were already planning to change these to dropdown boxes...

-It is great that we now have the support for animated textures. But it would be great to have a simpler version of it as default, just using frame numbers. (I only used the one located in the volume loader.)

I believe if you normally work using frame numbers, that preference should be saved and become default. Is this not the case when you were using it?

-Some of my openVDB's does not read on windows, but they work fine on linux?

Did octane crash or give you an error? Please let me send me copies of these VDBs so that I can fix this. There have been some issues with volume importing, particularly memory footprint, so it is possible that this was the cause.

-If you have loaded some animated alembic files in your scene, and add volume sequence using the animation option in the loader, it changes the whole timeline to that. That does not seem right.

I can't seem to reproduce this. Are you able to send me the orbx please?

... and I really look forward to use a version that supports adaptive grids!! (so we can render some animations!!)

As I mentioned above, you need to export a number of VDBs and setup an animator on your volume node in order to animate an explosion/fire etc. There will be some motion blur implemented eventually on this. Let me know if I misunderstood.

[haze]

By the way, do you know if openVDB does not support transforms? Like, if I do a sim in max or maya where i set fire to an object in the scene, the fire is always close to origin and not where the object is when I read it in. So I need to reverse engineer the offset to get it back to where it should be. This is not very awesome when you jump around between octane, maya and max on the same shot! I have only tested with fume in max and maya, so it might be a fume issue...

There was an issue with this, where modifying the scale, or changing the import scale of a volume did not scale a volume based on its origin, but rather it's origin before any translation if that makes sense. In any case, let me know if this is still an issue after alpha 2.

[gardeler]

By the way, do you know if openVDB does not support transforms? Like, if I do a sim in max or maya where i set fire to an object in the scene, the fire is always close to origin and not where the object is when I read it in. So I need to reverse engineer the offset to get it back to where it should be. This is not very awesome when you jump around between octane, maya and max on the same shot! I have only tested with fume in max and maya, so it might be a fume issue...

There was an issue with this, where modifying the scale, or changing the import scale of a volume did not scale a volume based on its origin, but rather it's origin before any translation if that makes sense. In any case, let me know if this is still an issue after alpha 2.

Thank's haze, for your quick response. this issue is not only an octane issue. Also max and maya have it. I think it has something to do with how the VDB's are written in the sim software.

[abstrax]

Would it be possible to implement in version 3 a feature which would compile only objects that are being added to the scene ?

For instance if I compiled a scene with 10 million polygons and I need to add a 10 poly object currently I need to reload entire scene which takes quite a while.

???

That's possible since ages ago. In the Standalone that happens automatically (we can't merge geometry to a single mesh yet) and in the plugins you usually have to identify meshes that should not be merged. In 3ds max for example, you have to enable the proxy option.

[BorisGoreta]

No, this is not possible, whenever the total geometry poly count changes you have to recompile the entire scene again.

I don't know how Standalone or Max work but in Lightwave it is like that. Merge and proxy are not Lightwave terms so I don't know what that means.

Basically if you want to add 1 poly to the 10 million poly scene with IPR running you have to recompile entire 10 million and one polygon to see this added polygon.
I am not talking about adding this poly to the existing object thus object is changed, needs to be reloaded and recompiled. I am talking about adding a second object with 1 poly, still all objects need to be recompiled.