OctaneRender for Carrara 3.08.03.42[Stable and Test]

[Sighman]

Sighman,
I am still observing the smoothing bug, but it only arises at certain viewing angles. I have as instructed set the Rounded Edge value to 0 for all materials in the Mix. In the example image below, in the areas facing toward and away fro the sun the smoothing seems fine but along the terminator it gets strange. This problems does seem to go away if I disable fake shadows. Thanks for your help. FYI I havent installed the very newest update, but I figured I fill you in i=on this now. I'll be installing the new one (.26) soon.

Try raising your ray epsilon value in the kernel. Just nudge it up a bit at a time because too much ray epsilon will cause other unwanted side effects. For example, if it is currently .000001 try setting it to .000002, .000003, etc. Until the banding go away. Do a google search for 'ray epsilon octane' to find more info, including a YouTube video.

[rashadcarter]

Sighman, I had seem the ray epsilon video before, but I had no idea that this was an occasion to use it. the default setting is 0.000100 in both the stand alone version and the Carrara plug-in. But apparently in the DS plug in the default value is 0.0000010 for some strange reason. Anyhow I tried raising the ray epsilon value up from .0001 to 0.0006 which did remove the banding, but it also caused terrible side effects, basically breaking all of my specular materials in the render. My thoughts go in several direction about this. Firstly, I am somewhat doubtful that the ray epsilon value is the culprit since the problem goes away whenever Fake shadows are disabled. Also, the banding is not random, it follows the polygon normals of the model. This got me looking more closely at the mesh resolution in Octane. I suspect the subdivision information might not always be making its way to Octane. When I raised the rendering value up from 2 to 3 the banding went away. When I reset the value back to 2 the banding did not come back in my tests so far. I also think this may be an issue that only arises with point style light sources like the Sunlight. Still trying to pin this down and find an acceptable solution. For now I will simply crank subdivision to remove the banding and leave the ray epsilon at the default setting. I will continue testing to find a better description of this problem.

[Sighman]

I doubt there is much I can do from a plugin point of view. I simply pass the geometry and material information onto octanne for rendering. If you think some setting is not being sent to octane properly then I can look at that, otherwise, it is up to you to figure out what settings work best for your scene. If you really think that something is not working as it should then you should export the scene to orbx and load it into the standalone. If you can repeat it there then I can forward the issue to the octane team. Or you can submit the issue yourself via the commercial forum so that you can explain the issue is better detail than I can.

Regarding the default setting for ray epsilon, I set the default based on the initial scene resolution of the Carrara scene. You will see a different default for small, medium, and large scenes.

[rashadcarter]

I thought I remembered seeing there was a tutorial thread on the new gradient hair feature. Is that tutorial no longer available?

[Sighman]

I thought I remembered seeing there was a tutorial thread on the new gradient hair feature. Is that tutorial no longer available?

I don't have one specific to Carrara but you can apply the same technique as discribed here...
viewtopic.php?f=24&t=56856

[Sighman]

New update posted to this thread.

[EddyMI3D]

Thank you!

[PhilW]

So cool that you are keeping up with these developments - thanks Sighman!

[PhilW]

I have been getting Carrara crashes whenever I try to render hair in the latest version (27). I have now rolled back to v26 and that renders hair fine, so something has been introduced with the latest version which causes Carrara to crash whenever there is dynamic hair in the scene.

[Sighman]

New update posted to address crash in replicators (and hair I hope).