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t_3 wrote: .......next update - scheduled for tomorrow...

YAY! Please tell me hotpixel fixes are in it - that's the only unsolvable (for me) multi-frame flaw currently (that I can see).

Isotemod wrote:I was wondering if you had looked at the user made material preset's?

At this time it messes up material/object assignments in the plugin.

This prevents us using texture atlas uv's set up previously to reduce texture counts and/sizes.

i have checked a few things regarding this: afaik .duf material presets load ok in general. to save a set of atlas materials, i needed to save a character preset (mats only), since the uv sets seem to be generally missing in material presets (even if the ds save dialog says it will save uv). loading that back (the character preset) also works (here). what is currently needed, is to manually reload the geometry to have the changed uv applied - this one should be possible to automate (the current auto reload checks for geometry changes only, thus missing changed uv sets and doesn't start a rebuild because of that).

apart from that there seems to be a general issue that after loading material sets sometimes (i guess again something timing dependent) the plugin looses track of some linked surfaces (in other words they disappear from the daz surfaces tree in the plugin). usually reloading the mat set brings them back. i had this happen vary rarely, and because of that i was not able to track the reason down yet.

to investigate things further i'd need some examples; maybe screenshots of the resulting state, steps done before, ...

jimgale wrote:

t_3 wrote: .......next update - scheduled for tomorrow...

YAY! Please tell me hotpixel fixes are in it - that's the only unsolvable (for me) multi-frame flaw currently (that I can see).

sadly that is nothing the plugin can fix; there are some usual causes, and some strategies to avoid them, maybe something helps:

- having highly reflective glossy/specular materials, reducing the diffuse power and/or index/specular amount may help.

- emitters shining through specular materials (not transparent glossy/diffuse) can cause more hotpixels to appear, so if possible this is to avoid, or the effect can be reduced by tweaking the specular material in question.

- if using hdri environments, importance sampling should be activated (which is the default).

- using a hdri environment, specific maps may be problematic (if the dynamic range is large); playing with power and/or gamma can help.

- raising the general light amount and subsequently lowering exposure might help also.

- emitters with a high poly count are likely to produce more hotpixels than low poly emitters.

- smaller high-power emitters are more likely to...

- depending on the materials in use, raising the caustic_blur can help (if you use the pathtracing/pmc kernels)

- brute force solution: turn on the hotpixel_removal in the imager node; the default 0 means none will be removed, whereas 1 means all of them (probably). something between 0.4 and 0.8 should work in most cases, without wiping out much other tiny details. you may tweak this value even if you have finished rendering (as all other imager parameters); just activate pause so you don't accidentally trigger a render restart...

t_3 : thanks -will try each (removal already set to 1.0, no effect).

the one other thing was saving the maxsamples so that (even though it says 400), I don't have to do + then - before rendering another animation (reverts to 16000 samples even tho it says otherwise on the pane).

looking forward to the update!

news regarding user mat sets/contained texture atlases:
the auto rebuild on uv set changes works; this means:

- if a texture atlas is newly created (and applied), the geometry will be rebuilt to accept the new uv set, materials won't* - here you need use the replace maps function to update them.

- if a character preset** is applied, that contains a "atlased" material set, a new set*** of (octane) mats will be created, plus the geometry rebuilds - resulting in a correctly textured figure.

*) i currently see no easy way to automate this; the plugin can find out that maps where changed, but it doesn't know for sure, if this happened because an atlas was created, and in general it can never know if a specific map should be replaced by any other or not***. since it is just a single click for any number of affected materials, i think it should stay under user control where or when to replace maps.

**) i haven't found another way to successfully save and load a user preset with an atlas - am i missing something?

***) i'm currently working (apart a lot of other things and remaining problems) on material templates. i currently can't say in detail how it will work, but this will of course change the way how mat set loading works (if such a template material is used); these materials will update maps whenever they are updated in studio, whatever the cause is. this also means that loading mat sets will no longer create new octane materials for these templates, but just apply the new file (without changing power, gamma scale and inversion). this should be ready along with (finally) the option to save user mat presets.

last point: i just found a sequence of tasks where loading a .duf causes some surfaces in the daz tree to vanish; means i'm now most probably able to pull out the reason and fix this; i'll give it another day to include it in the coming update...

jimgale wrote:t_3 : thanks -will try each (removal already set to 1.0, no effect).

umm, 1.0 means _no_ removal. i know this is a very counter-intuitive meaning; my way to remember it is, to scratch the "_removal" part and think of hotpixels "on" = 1, hotpixels "off" = 0

t_3 wrote:

jimgale wrote:t_3 : thanks -will try each (removal already set to 1.0, no effect).

umm, 1.0 means _no_ removal. i know this is a very counter-intuitive meaning; my way to remember it is, to scratch the "_removal" part and think of hotpixels "on" = 1, hotpixels "off" = 0

hahah. awesome. well - please have that "user error" fixed. [no work for you, btw].
thanks.

Excellent news on locating that issue that causes wierd material assignments.

I also have not found another way of applying a new UV set without saving as .obj and then loading from that, the material preset way is much cleaner anyhow imho.

One of the clearer examples of the assignment problem was made visible by this.

Load a V4
Apply a material preset (with auto generated materials on)
Tweak Octane material to make it obvious a change has been made.
Load another V4 and move it clear a bit to see both.
Apply a material preset (with auto generated materials on)

At this point reload the viewport and look at the material tab and you should see that the material assignments switched between the V4's and the original V4's materials are are blank and unaccessible.

This has been about since closed beta but I thought it was only atlas'd materials that caused it and it was on your "to do" list

Ive got a couple of other wierd and wonderfull things for you from the past such as simple planes used as emitters sometimes seem to duplicate resulting in an noisy brighter image, seems connected to the hidden object option but ive not tried to get this issue this version and you have tweaked what can be hidden so ill get back to you.

Isotemod wrote:Load another V4 and move it clear a bit to see both.
Apply a material preset (with auto generated materials on)

well, confirmed. seems i have never tried that is the same with genesis - a 2nd figure and applying a mat set ends in mismatch.

Isotemod wrote:Ive got a couple of other wierd and wonderfull things for you from the past such as simple planes used as emitters sometimes seem to duplicate resulting in an noisy brighter image, seems connected to the hidden object option but ive not tried to get this issue this version and you have tweaked what can be hidden so ill get back to you.

in fact i have seen this old ghost raise its ugly head myself, just this weekend, when testing with older stuff. these were still ds3 saves, which caused weird behavior with hidden things (esp. bones) in studio itself, but i'm sure the plugin adds some additional problems on top of that; had no time to test this in many variations so if you can have a look at it, and if it is connected to a specific start configuration, or hidden objects/bones in general would be helpful...

Sorry if I missed it but... there is a OSX version?