OTOY Forums

Any time frame for our expectations for completion? How much will the plugin cost?

Timeframe - I've been around long enough to know not to estimate these things However development is near completion, if that helps.

Cost - Unsure.

Hi there, this is very exciting news.

When will the beta test kick off? I'm very interested in trying this out asap. I was a previous standalone user and currently use the octane max plugin, so I'm aware of what the plugin should be capable of. I use octane exclusively for rendering almost daily, I don't use Firefly at all anymore, so please put me down for the beta testing

There are two main things I'm currently very concerned with the approach that's been taken, but maybe I've misunderstood.

1) Does the entire poser scene get exported to physical files for every scene? I render animations mostly and obviously every second counts in terms of animations even an additional 30 seconds per frame immensely increases the overall rendering process. As I understand it the max plugin reloads the geometry for every frame, but it does so in an efficient manner that minimizes the impact. The bottom line I guess is, will it take longer to render the same amount of frames with Poser plugin vs the Max plugin?

2) Handling of materials. In max I use the slate material editor which is even easier to use than the standalone version. The lack of direct control in the Poser plugin seems a little odd the way it's presented in the video. How exactly would you setup a multi material for example. A SSS body texture setup where you have a mix material branching off into a glossy and diffuse for just the one body texture?

Also:
3) Will all the finer camera settings as per the imager settings in octane make it across?
4) What about the sun + settings? How will it be moved around the scene? Possible to use sun + hdri light together?
5) Once the scene is loaded can you turn lights on and off without reloading?

I would really like to test this to see how it works.

When will the beta test kick off?

Now! There is a call for testers on the front page of the Octane website (http://render.otoy.com/index.php)

Does the entire poser scene get exported to physical files for every scene?

No, the entire scene is transmitted from Poser to Octane directly through the API (not through files). A V4 or Alyson figure is about 10secs on my PC. For animations, currently the whole scene is refreshed from Poser, however I hope by the end of next week to have implemented a system where only the vertex positions will be refreshed, which will be much faster.

The bottom line I guess is, will it take longer to render the same amount of frames with Poser plugin vs the Max plugin?

In general, I suspect Max scenes have a lot more polys than Poser scenes, however on the flip side, the Poser API is via python. So, I'm not sure I can give you an answer to this at the moment.

2) Handling of materials. In max I use the slate material editor which is even easier to use than the standalone version. The lack of direct control in the Poser plugin seems a little odd the way it's presented in the video. How exactly would you setup a multi material for example. A SSS body texture setup where you have a mix material branching off into a glossy and diffuse for just the one body texture?

Anything you can do in the node graph, you can do using the tree layout*. he tree layout also enables copy/paste nodes (incl whole materials with all their node), export a whole material or all the materials for a prop or figure, and re-import. When you import the nodes, you get the option to replace the existing texturemaps with the imported maps, or retain the existing maps. So you can copy the head material and paste to the torso material, and it keeps all the torso maps.

(*) The only thing you cannot do is have a single node (say a color) inputting to 2 materials. In this case, you use 2 nodes.

To create the SSS mix, you select the "Body" glossy material and change it to a mix. Then set materal1 to glossy, material2 to diffuse, etc etc. Once you have the structure right, export it, and load it into any skin material and it will put the exist maps into the new SSS node structure.

The Poser system was done this way because a lot of the Poser figures have a ton of duplicated skin materials, which will be tedious for people to setup using the existing node graph.

3) Will all the finer camera settings as per the imager settings in octane make it across?

Yes

4) What about the sun + settings? How will it be moved around the scene? Possible to use sun + hdri light together?

Sun is controlled by a direction vector, turbidity, power and northoffset. These are sliders, not the widget in Octane standalone. As with standalone, you can pick sun or HDRI, but not have both together.

5) Once the scene is loaded can you turn lights on and off without reloading?

Do you mean Poser lights or Octane lights? Changing the Poser lights has no effect on the Octane scene - since they are ignored. You can tweak the Octane lights intensity in the Materials tab and it does not reload the scene. If you move the light (emitter plane) in Poser, you'll need to reload the scene for it to pickup the change in vertex positions.

Hope that helps.

face_off wrote:

When will the beta test kick off?

Now! There is a call for testers on the front page of the Octane website (http://render.otoy.com/index.php)

ok I've posted in the beta thread , hopefully I get picked to test this, want to get my hands on it asap

face_off wrote:

The bottom line I guess is, will it take longer to render the same amount of frames with Poser plugin vs the Max plugin?

In general, I suspect Max scenes have a lot more polys than Poser scenes, however on the flip side, the Poser API is via python. So, I'm not sure I can give you an answer to this at the moment.

well hopefully I'll be able to test this in that case, this is extremely important

face_off wrote:

2) Handling of materials. In max I use the slate material editor which is even easier to use than the standalone version. The lack of direct control in the Poser plugin seems a little odd the way it's presented in the video. How exactly would you setup a multi material for example. A SSS body texture setup where you have a mix material branching off into a glossy and diffuse for just the one body texture?

Anything you can do in the node graph, you can do using the tree layout*. he tree layout also enables copy/paste nodes (incl whole materials with all their node), export a whole material or all the materials for a prop or figure, and re-import. When you import the nodes, you get the option to replace the existing texturemaps with the imported maps, or retain the existing maps. So you can copy the head material and paste to the torso material, and it keeps all the torso maps.

(*) The only thing you cannot do is have a single node (say a color) inputting to 2 materials. In this case, you use 2 nodes.

To create the SSS mix, you select the "Body" glossy material and change it to a mix. Then set materal1 to glossy, material2 to diffuse, etc etc. Once you have the structure right, export it, and load it into any skin material and it will put the exist maps into the new SSS node structure.


The Poser system was done this way because a lot of the Poser figures have a ton of duplicated skin materials, which will be tedious for people to setup using the existing node graph.

ok that sounds a lot better, I like the import/ export in particular, one thing I do with max is have all textures for the entire figure in a multi mat, which makes reassigning texture very easy, will poser's import/ export also do this including mats for parented objects?
if it works like saving a typical material collection in poser than that's perfect

face_off wrote:

4) What about the sun + settings? How will it be moved around the scene? Possible to use sun + hdri light together?

Sun is controlled by a direction vector, turbidity, power and northoffset. These are sliders, not the widget in Octane standalone. As with standalone, you can pick sun or HDRI, but not have both together.

actually in Max there's an octane sun object which is very handy for placing the sun, but I guess sliders are not the end of the world

face_off wrote: Hope that helps.

yes, thanks, now I'm just waiting to participate in the beta, put in a good word for me

one thing I do with max is have all textures for the entire figure in a multi mat, which makes reassigning texture very easy, will poser's import/ export also do this including mats for parented objects?

Not absolutely sure what you mean here (I'm not a Max person). In Poser, the materials are assigned by figure rather than parented prop within the figure, so set skin_torso will set the skin for hip, thigh, abdomen, etc.

face_off wrote:

one thing I do with max is have all textures for the entire figure in a multi mat, which makes reassigning texture very easy, will poser's import/ export also do this including mats for parented objects?

Not absolutely sure what you mean here (I'm not a Max person). In Poser, the materials are assigned by figure rather than parented prop within the figure, so set skin_torso will set the skin for hip, thigh, abdomen, etc.

well it's just a material that contains any number of sub mats really, but essentially if I can save the materials similar to how poser handles material collections than that's perfectly fine

on a totally different note since you mentioned you created poser physics? As I understand it, it's hard body only, will there support for soft bodies?

Regarding soft body dynamics, I have posted some prototype results with sb dynamics on the PoserPhysics facebook page, so yes, this is definitely planned for the next version.

This is a quick test render I did using the OctaneRender for Poser plugin.

http://youtu.be/hsBm7A0Nnl4

I was doing some stress testing on higher poly figures and got these 2 renders using the Daz sports car which I thought were pretty good. Car1 was using the converted Poser materials. For car2 I made the car body a little shiner (adjusted 1 material, copied into the clipboard, pasted to other other body materials using "Retain Existing Texturemaps"). So it was basically start Poser, load car, run plugin, render!

I just purchased a dual core Xeon and 2X 4gb GTX 680s setup exclusively for octane If I could test drive this it would be a DREAM

Where do I sign ?