OctaneRender 2024.1 for Houdini production (2024.1.0.1)

[lavrenovlad]

Does CompositingAOVs work as it should?
Not sure why, but the whole design is terrible, not even sure how to make it work, no info no docs, it doesn't even behave the same way as in C4D.

[lavrenovlad]

Question number two is:
I have a problem with very slow texture loading. Not sure if it's a plugin issue or core, basically my problem is that Octane loads up heavy GEO fast, but when I turn textures on (in my case it's around 150 textures of 2K resolution), the loading phase goes up by 5-10x and even though Octane saves some caches to disk, further reloads do not improve. I am not sure why it's so slow, even compared to Blender Cycles it's extremely slow. For example the same type of a scene loads in Cycles in like 10 seconds max, when in Octane I wait like 2-3 whole minutes, it's insane how slow it is.
I tried different compression methods in Image Texture Node, as well as converting the textures to .DDS and none of this helps except for some VRAM improvements

[lavrenovlad]

Okay, Just ran my final test for this. Turns out that the more materials one piece of a geometry has, the slower it will load into memory.
If I test with 1 OBJ that has 15mil polygons and around 150 materials all in one the load times are almost 3 minutes, if I split that object into 4, load time is 1 minute, and if I split the object into 40 GEO nodes then the load time is around 10-15 seconds which is close to what I get in Blender. But in Blender I have 4 objects, so Blender is still faster technically.

On that note, would it be possible to improve ORBX handling in Houdini. I feel like making asset out of a complex object and loading it as ORBX could technically improve the situation for bigger scenes?
The problem with the current ORBX in SOP is that it's just a brick, can do nothing with it, even the visualization of it is botched.
Is there anything that can be improved there? First thing is that there is no proper display of the ORBX geometry in the viewport.

Also I just saved an ORBX as an asset, loaded it in, tried to turn off camera visibility for it in the tag and all of that, it doesn't even affect the whole asset, only parts of it disappear, shit is tragic.

[ricky_otoy]

Does CompositingAOVs work as it should?
Not sure why, but the whole design is terrible, not even sure how to make it work, no info no docs, it doesn't even behave the same way as in C4D.

As discussed in the PM it should work yeah. We will look at improving some aspects of the workflow to make it a little easier. It will have to go with improving the Rendertarget HDA.

[ricky_otoy]

Question number two is:
I have a problem with very slow texture loading. Not sure if it's a plugin issue or core, basically my problem is that Octane loads up heavy GEO fast, but when I turn textures on (in my case it's around 150 textures of 2K resolution), the loading phase goes up by 5-10x and even though Octane saves some caches to disk, further reloads do not improve. I am not sure why it's so slow, even compared to Blender Cycles it's extremely slow. For example the same type of a scene loads in Cycles in like 10 seconds max, when in Octane I wait like 2-3 whole minutes, it's insane how slow it is.
I tried different compression methods in Image Texture Node, as well as converting the textures to .DDS and none of this helps except for some VRAM improvements

We will have to profile this, please send me a scene for when you can too.

[ricky_otoy]

Okay, Just ran my final test for this. Turns out that the more materials one piece of a geometry has, the slower it will load into memory.
If I test with 1 OBJ that has 15mil polygons and around 150 materials all in one the load times are almost 3 minutes, if I split that object into 4, load time is 1 minute, and if I split the object into 40 GEO nodes then the load time is around 10-15 seconds which is close to what I get in Blender. But in Blender I have 4 objects, so Blender is still faster technically.

On that note, would it be possible to improve ORBX handling in Houdini. I feel like making asset out of a complex object and loading it as ORBX could technically improve the situation for bigger scenes?
The problem with the current ORBX in SOP is that it's just a brick, can do nothing with it, even the visualization of it is botched.
Is there anything that can be improved there? First thing is that there is no proper display of the ORBX geometry in the viewport.

Also I just saved an ORBX as an asset, loaded it in, tried to turn off camera visibility for it in the tag and all of that, it doesn't even affect the whole asset, only parts of it disappear, shit is tragic.

For sure we will have a look if we can do something more with the ORBX, can't promise an eta though.

[chocbot]

Hey - I posted a bug about analytic lights in the "OctaneRender 2024.1 Beta 2 for Houdini (2024.1.Beta_2.0)" thread. (First post)
Is there someone looking into it? The bug is still there.

[chocbot]

Oh and one more thing. Just found out that the "projection color to uvw" doesn't work, when I try using it for bump mapping. It's working with normal maps though, so I assume it is a bug and not a limitation of that feature, right?

[ricky_otoy]

Hey - I posted a bug about analytic lights in the "OctaneRender 2024.1 Beta 2 for Houdini (2024.1.Beta_2.0)" thread. (First post)
Is there someone looking into it? The bug is still there.

Hi there, yes as far as I remember - this may be a core issue and had been raised. (Will double check)

Would have to see about your other issue. Best way to check is send over to standalone and see if it is the same there. If not then it is a plugin issue.

[chocbot]

Alright, thanks!