help us develop at the current rate

[[gk]]

chesterfield I hear you on some accounts.

With the Collada and RIB/FBX Octane will load one scene and hack out frames instantly one after one.

[nick]

wow i hope a .fbx import comes along. that would be a colossal enhancement.

being able to export 1 file like fbx would immediately speed up rendering an animation. the maya exporter works great. for me when doing a 3minute/frame rendering about 40seconds is wasted on re-opening octane and importing a new obj. 3000 frames later that 40seconds really adds up !!

[Carl S.]

Radiance

Do you want to see how far ahead of the game you are..

Take a look at this...

http://www.fudzilla.com/graphics/graphi ... ng-on-gpus

Had to laugh.

I think Autodesk and the others will be crying when you send out V1.0 for review.

I like Octane more than Iray but Iray looks like a far the more capable renderer for production at this point in time.

[Carl S.]

chesterfield I hear you on some accounts.

With the Collada and RIB/FBX Octane will load one scene and hack out frames instantly one after one.

I am just guessing here and I hope radiance can chime in on this if I am way off base, but it seems like it will still have to load the scene onto the card each frame. So it will only get rid of the exporting from the host app each frame. Not instantly start rendering the next frame. I hope I am wrong and it does instantly start rendering the next frame.

[[gk]]

Hey, it would totaly defeat the purpose if one had to load a scene for each frame that I give you, cant imagine this will be their approach, not even by a long shot.

As camera, as well as mesh whereabouts are stored in a FBX for example. Everything is there, it should be pritty trivial - when the FBX/Collada format is intergrated - to simply load up a new camera position from a timeline.

I would very much like to see a timeline section intergrated into Octane for scrubbing around a prefabricated animation. All data are stored in the one file, so its just a matter about loading that information into a camera, some objects and so forth, based on the frame number you are on.

[pixelrush]

> timeline for scrubbing through camera animation...

and/or perhaps a way to save a 3d Space Navigation inside Octane as waypoints with recorded camera location,rotation,pause time,focus etc for curve interpolation into a smooth walkthrough? either to produce a fully rendered animation later or to reinact an exploration with pauses to render specific views of interest for the audience...sort of an immersive virtual 3d IPO editor.
So navigate to a place, adjust settings, press the M key to set a marker there, and on to the next place...
I guess you could override progress along the interpolated path on replay to allow a look around - location lock/free rotate - before continuing.
Possibly if you have emitters the power could be recorded too at a particular time - walk into a room and the lights come on or it changes to different lighting/IES or something..change the wall colour..floor tile texture... dunno.. I guess into the future with multiple Nvidia 'Maxwell' GPU such a thing could be reasonably responsive or at least entertaining for clients or useful to architects and interior designers as a design/visualisation tool assessing alternatives

[[gk]]

A lot of those features lies outside the merits of an animatable container format.
I would like to keep things simple and one thing at a time.
We can come up with a zillion new features but first things first.

[pixelrush]

look I'm only wanting to make sure the guys have something to do... its just leveraging the same data...but with extra freedom to define the animation inside Octane

[steveps3]

I'd like to add some comments. They may help, they may not. I am a Blender user. For a long time, I used the internal render engine. In fact I still do a lot of the time. I then discovered Lux and the world of unbiased engines was opened up to me. The major problem with these engines is render time. The results are wonderful but they take days and days to render good looking glass etc. Which is how I got to buying Octane. I saw the demos and I was blown away. I've even upgraded my GPU just so that I can run Octane.

So far, my experience with Octane has been mixed. Render times are great. Lack of features is starting to bug me a bit. Constantly crashing is bugging me even more. So personally I am on the brink of wondering whether I came to Octane too soon. I am not a tech head, I'm not really interested in the technology that is being used, I simply want a render engine that is going to render my images as well as possible, as fast as possible. So in my opinon, don't use your money on running competitions, use it to get Octane to a commercial quality as soon as possible. Rather than running a competition, employ someone else.

As mentioned, I have had problems with crashing. I appreciate that with only a single graphics card, I have a conflict of processing against usability and I don't mind too much that the interface is jerky whilst rendering (working on getting a seconf GPU) but I'm not too happy that every time I change a setting in the nodes editor I am running the risk of the program crashing. Stability really does need working on.

From my sort of outside looking in point of view, I find the Octane website to be quite confusing at times. I know that it is written by highly technical people and is used by highly technical people but for me, I just want details on what the software can do, how to do it and what is coming up next. Just finding videos on how to do things is very hard. The manual needs keeping up to date (I recently had to make a post simply to find out how to zoom out of a render). Basically the site needs to be more user friendly. This in itself would encourage more people to buy Octane.

Good work guys, just don't forget that we are not all rocket scientists.

[matej]

Octane is in beta stage, so obviously is not yet feature-full. As for crashing, that's another beta 'side effect'. The latest v4 is pretty stable, I experience crashes & hangups only occasionally.

There is some level of technical stuff that you must get comfortable with, if you want to understand and use the software properly. In the end you will get more out of it if you know how it works and the logic behind it, rather what you must press or type to do a specific thing. It's the "give the man the fish" vs " teach him to fish" thing...

Also, Radiance said they are rewriting & expanding the manual for the next release(s).