OctaneRender for Carrara 2.06.0047 [Stable]

[orion_uk]

48 seconds is the time it takes to pop to the bathroom or drink a few sips of tea ... and then you are BACK!

Wait, Steve.. you keep your kettle in your bathroom

[orion_uk]

Some more notes on Animation.

This is what I do, animation. Carrara is a great all round tool, with a pretty decent animation toolkit you can use without leaving the program. So these features would greatly help an animator.

1. We need to know which frame we are on when animating out a sequence.
2. Time left to complete render would help us to plan our work.
3. When animating with the camera a dynamic render whilst moving the Pan Icon would mean I could have the viewport open whilst choosing a camera position/movement. atm it only updates after I let go of the icon - the Carrara 3dview updates as you move.

Less of a priority, but important.

4. I'm having to keep half an eye on OC guru as I can't see a temperature read out on the cards. This becomes important on long rendering sessions.

Thanks.

Hope this feedback is useful. Thanks for your replies.

[Sighman]

The viewport is tracking the render camera fine from my early experiments. What would really help my scene development is that when I change the 3DView camera, the viewport also updates. With DAZ it will work some of the time, other times I rebuild and it updates. With Carrara I cannot get an update this way.

The reason this is a problem for me is that I specialize in large scenes. Often Carrara it's self is unresponsive due to the scene size, so I set up a lot of cameras covering the set, then switch between them. atm I will have to go in and out of the Render room.

Ah, this is not so easy. I need to test this again but from what I remember, Carrara does not generate an event when you switch the 3DView camera, so I can't track it. What I might be able to do is list the cameras in the viewport and allow you to change it there. It is still going to slow down your workflow a bit but not as much as switching to the Render Room and back.

[Sighman]

1. We need to know which frame we are on when animating out a sequence.

As Orion pointed out, this is shown on the animation tab.

2. Time left to complete render would help us to plan our work.

This would be in 'Microsoft seconds' as animation is based on max samples and not time. I would have to base the estimated time to complete on how long the previous frames were taking.

3. When animating with the camera a dynamic render whilst moving the Pan Icon would mean I could have the viewport open whilst choosing a camera position/movement. atm it only updates after I let go of the icon - the Carrara 3dview updates as you move.

I wish. I have tried. It's a threading issue. Carrara does not release the UI thread until you release the button.

4. I'm having to keep half an eye on OC guru as I can't see a temperature read out on the cards. This becomes important on long rendering sessions.

Not sure what you expect for this one. Do you want a temperature readout on the animation tab?

[SciFiFunk]

Thanks for your responses.

1. (current frame). I missed that! (And it was right in front of me. ha ha, Oh well.) An instant fix then
2. (completion time). Estimated completion time would be excellent even if a little wrong. We are used to this in Carrara atm. Thanks.
3. (GUI update). That's ok. At least you tried. What I am doing to compensate is to keep the testing in 800x450 so on a 1920x1080 screen the Octane viewport is not too much in the way of the 3d View screen.
4. (Temperature). A temp readout on the viewport please. This is what the DAZ interface gives and I'm glancing up at it from time to time. VERY useful in spotting a faulty card as I found out. Also good for long render runs. Worst feeling to burn out a card unnecessarily.
5. (Camera selection). Yes please. A selection list in the viewport would be a great compromise, as you say that keeps the action all within the same screen.

Neil - Don't you keep your kettle in the bathroom then? ha ha.

[PhilW]

I knew Octane was fast - but 48 secs for a bathroom break, now that is FAST!

[SciFiFunk]

I knew Octane was fast - but 48 secs for a bathroom break, now that is FAST!

ha ha. It's the water in the south of England you know. It has certain properties

[SciFiFunk]

Instancing.

I'm a bit confused here. Could you explain what is happening? Whilst I'm grateful for having the surface replicator and replicator keep a single instance in Octane, I'm not sure how to check this.

When I applied CTRL-D to duplicate (a scene with a single object) AND when I used the replicator the mesh count went up. Surely if instancing is working correctly these should stay at 1.

Instancing is KEY to the Sci Fi Funk film being able to use Octane, due to the large scene sizes and heavy dependency on instancing. This is my first try at this and sadly I have to stop for today. I use CTRL-D a lot as it's a quick way of duplicating and in Carrara at least is the equivalent of using the replicator in terms of memory use.

If you could explain to me how to check etc then that will put me in a good position for tomorrows testing .... running some of my large scene files through this plug in.

Till tomorrow!

Steve

[Sighman]

Instancing.

I'm a bit confused here. Could you explain what is happening? Whilst I'm grateful for having the surface replicator and replicator keep a single instance in Octane, I'm not sure how to check this.

When I applied CTRL-D to duplicate (a scene with a single object) AND when I used the replicator the mesh count went up. Surely if instancing is working correctly these should stay at 1.

Instancing is KEY to the Sci Fi Funk film being able to use Octane, due to the large scene sizes and heavy dependency on instancing. This is my first try at this and sadly I have to stop for today. I use CTRL-D a lot as it's a quick way of duplicating and in Carrara at least is the equivalent of using the replicator in terms of memory use.

If you could explain to me how to check etc then that will put me in a good position for tomorrows testing .... running some of my large scene files through this plug in.

Till tomorrow!

Steve

The mesh count reported by octane includes instances. I think this is wrong (they should have their own counter) but it is out of my hands. The best measure is memory. Look at how memory is affected when you add instances verses duplicates.

Large scenes are going to be a battle with the plugin. You might want to talk to PhilW about the compromises he had to make to get his village scene to load.

For now (because I do plan on working on this) duplicates are not instances as far as the plugin is concerned. The main reason for this is modifiers. You can add modifiers to an instance that changes the mesh of the instance and this breaks the instancing requirement of the octane plugin. You can scale, translate, or rotate instances but you cannot morph them because they all need to refer to the same mesh.

The next issue is primitives and size. What takes more memory, a cube or an instance reference to the cube. It turns out the instance takes more. You need a more complex mesh than a cube to see the memory savings. I'm sure you deal with more complex meshes but sometimes there can be a lot of duplicated cubes in a scene.

This leads me to groups. Lets say you want to create a chair from a collection of cube primitives and you create a group to represent that collection. You then want to duplicate that chair. What you end up doing is duplicating all the primitives in the chair and creating a massive instance list of cube primitives. What you need to do is consolidate the chair group into a single mesh and instance that mesh. (I actually haven't had a lot of time to play with Carrara in creating objects from primitives so I could be full of it at this point.)

The bottom line is that I have some work to do to treat duplicates as instances. It is not as cut and dry as it may seem at first. When I can do it is going to come down to priority. Carrara is amazing in its memory foot print but this does not always translate well to Octane.

[PhilW]

Hi Steve,

Octane supports proper instancing with the replicator and surface replicator. However at the moment it does not support instancing for duplicated objects, I know this is a pain, and I know that Sighman has looked at it. (Edit - I see he was responding as I was!)

The way I got around this for one scene (The English Village actually) was to create a small plane, large enough to accommodate one object, and then position this for every duplicated object that you want. Group these small planes together and Export that group as an OBJ, and then re-Import as a single mesh.

You now have an object that you can use a surface replicator on (even though it is not contiguous), and by setting the minimum distance you can get one replicated instance on each of the small planes in your imported object.

I know this is not ideal, but it does at least provide a potential work-around until (hopefully) Sighman is able to implement a full instancing system for duplicated objects too.

I hope this helps.

By the way, nested replication does not carry across, Carrara handles this very well, but Octane creates real objects so that there is only one "layer" of instancing.