OctaneRender® for Maya® beta 3.03f [OBSOLETE]

[TBFX]

Shadows are not calculated correctly taking into account the opacity texture.

Do you have alpha shadows checked in the render settings?

T.

[nedan]

Shadows are not calculated correctly taking into account the opacity texture.

Do you have alpha shadows checked in the render settings?

T.

No, did not know that. Works now this part. Thanks.
Remains only the groups behavior on render layers question.

[JimStar]

Remains only the groups behavior on render layers question.

Will check it, thank you for the scene. I will let you know later about what I've found...

[JimStar]

nedan
Yes, there is the bug. Will be fixed in next version.

[TBFX]

Jimstar - I did another render and the error you referred to is what it said see image below, this was captured at the end of the second animation frame

Thank you very much! It is what I needed.
Now, thanks to this log, I can tell you what is the exact reason: it is really the engine issue. I don't think it is the big deal (as the rounding is very small), but anyway it is the fact: it seems that the engine rounds a little the counted samples when rendering, so if you render some big amount of samples it becomes "visible". E.g. if the engine sees that the next iteration will give more samples than needed - e.g. you already have 7997 and the engine sees that the next iteration will give 8016, it stops refreshing the image rounding it to the lowest value... It is only my assumption about the engine's algorythms, but it seems that it is something like this...
I just have added the workaround which catches if it happens and treats this frame as finished.

This is a really useful workaround to have as if a card fails during a batch render the render will hopefully continue on.

@jmfowler - After this fix from JimStar did you notice if all the cards you started the render on were still working on the render all the way through? Did any of your cards fail during the render but the render kept going?

T.

[magicU]

Hi all, just purchased my license today..

Having some bizarre problems - this morning I was able to use the plugin fine for a while (albeit in a basic fashion, as I'm not familiar with the Octane workflow just yet).
-load plugin, authenticated
-I could create shapes, add a sun/sky light
-add Octane materials
-hit IPR
things worked more or less as I expected.

Then on adding a light node and hitting refresh, the IPR would just sit there showing no update whatsoever. Exiting maya resulted in a crash..
Reload maya, repeat steps above, this time IPR wouldn't display anything and just stayed an unrendered dark blue.

On a reboot, things seem to work...but when I hit refresh, the problems start up again. Is there some sort of flushing problem with the keplar cards?

I'm able to import objs and render them in the standalone version of Octane.
other info - using 2 GTX 670s, Maya 2012 SP2, Win 7 64bit, 16 GB Ram, i7 3770K.

My problems seem similar to a post I saw by another user (ToxicRik, I think), though that was on a much earlier 2.5x build.
will try it out on 2013 and see if things improve..

[TBFX]

JimStar,

I was doing some virtual shader tests on a simple particle instance scene and have come across some weird behavior. It seems depending on the method of cycling through different geometry on the instances Octane is rendering different geo to what is shown in the viewport. I've attached the scene.

If you go to the instancing section of the particle shape attribute editor and change the cycle options age attr from Birth Time to Particle ID you will get a different result but one that still does not match the viewport.

T.

MultiObjMultiShaderTest.zip

(12.3 KiB) Downloaded 268 times

[RickToxik]

My problems seem similar to a post I saw by another user (ToxicRik, I think), though that was on a much earlier 2.5x build.
will try it out on 2013 and see if things improve..

I was able to get rid of many of those crashes by upgrading my graphic card drivers to the latest. I needed older drivers because of AVID but finally thought that octane was more important than AVID hehehe

[jmfowler]

Jimstar - I did another render and the error you referred to is what it said see image below, this was captured at the end of the second animation frame

Thank you very much! It is what I needed.
Now, thanks to this log, I can tell you what is the exact reason: it is really the engine issue. I don't think it is the big deal (as the rounding is very small), but anyway it is the fact: it seems that the engine rounds a little the counted samples when rendering, so if you render some big amount of samples it becomes "visible". E.g. if the engine sees that the next iteration will give more samples than needed - e.g. you already have 7997 and the engine sees that the next iteration will give 8016, it stops refreshing the image rounding it to the lowest value... It is only my assumption about the engine's algorythms, but it seems that it is something like this...
I just have added the workaround which catches if it happens and treats this frame as finished.

This is a really useful workaround to have as if a card fails during a batch render the render will hopefully continue on.

@jmfowler - After this fix from JimStar did you notice if all the cards you started the render on were still working on the render all the way through? Did any of your cards fail during the render but the render kept going?

T.

Jimstar and TBFX - using 3.03f - good news and bad - I have studied the frames from last night, the first frame rendered in an hour, but the four frames after that took 1.5 hours meaning the 580 card ( probably this one as i have seen this one fail) failed on the second frame and the others, BUT the render kept going!!. NOW - I also had another render command in the .bat file and the render started on the same scene but at a different place - Again the first frame rendered in 1 hour but the frames after that took 1.5 hours...

So - jimstar's workaround fix appears to keep the render going with a failed card but I still don't know why my 580 card fails after the first frame???.....when I render the same scene on my other
computer using 3*680 cards it takes an hour for the image - so I am positive the 580 works all the way through on the first frame, plus the 1.5 hours versus 1 hour is another sign.

I'm going to make my .bat file with a command line for each frame to see if I can keep all 3 cards going.

Jimstar any thoughts?



cheers,
JF.

[magicU]

update - so the problems I had were related to my license! support replied telling me to try deleting the appdata/octane folder contents , to force a refresh - and lo & behold things have been stable since