OTOY Forums

What's the secret for exporting alembic files?
I had it working once in the previous version. But other times it just didnt work.
Now, I got it rendering just fine in Blender Octane, but nothing gets exported for alembic when I check export to alembic.

What is the process for alembic, what is needed?

Okay, I tried clicking "animation" instead of "render" and it seems to work now.
Is there a way to get the alembic export working.

Also, I am still getting a separate material node for each instance of the material.
I noticed in the alembic import options in Octane, it has an option to merge materials with the same name. So, its either Blender exporting several materials, or Octane not merging them. Anyone else get this problem?

AhAh, the funny thing, is that you helped me on the same topic some weeks ago if I remember well !

So, I have put a big card board in front of me, over my screen :

For Alembic Export :

1 - ENABLE Octane server !
2 - DO NOT write any file name in the path field. Only type a folder path.
3 - Select the Animation Mode : Camera Only /Movable proxies / Full
4 - Toggle the Export Alembic button.
5 - Select the Kind of object you want to export : Global / Scatter / Movable / Reshapable / As is.
6 - Hit Animation.

If you have an animated object and if you don't select Movable of Reshapable you will get as many input per material as there are frames in the animation ! As I said earlier, I made one time the mistake of not selecting Reshapable ... and I got a node with 2100 input materials !

Good luck !

So far, I haven't yet used the Scatter and As is choices, and I don't exactly know what they do and how they work.

Is it possible to animate scatters ? It would be great for fur on clothes or animals ! As is is a bit mysterious... does it select automatically the kind of object by reading in the Mesh/Octane properties panel ?

I just did some instancing tests.

I set my mesh to scatter, and set export as scatter.
I had a chair with 10 instances. When imported, it brought them in as instances. Also, I did a quick animation and everything was working correctly.

I have just tried animated scatter with a dozen of cubes. It seems to work as expected. Great : I should be able to animate branches and leaves on trees as well as well as fur or grass !

@Jimstar : Would it be possible to write in the Alembic node at least the names of the materials for each input pin ? Currently, pins are only named Diffuse or Glossy... when a big model is exported with many inputs, it is tedious to check each pin to know what is what !

@Jimstar : I remember that you told me something about that, but I think it was for the first version. So I would like to know if the plugin is able to export in other fps values than 24 fps in the current version ?

ROUBAL wrote:@Jimstar : Would it be possible to write in the Alembic node at least the names of the materials for each input pin ? Currently, pins are only named Diffuse or Glossy... when a big model is exported with many inputs, it is tedious to check each pin to know what is what !

How long ago did you see it?..
It saves node names starting from this version.

ROUBAL wrote:@Jimstar : I remember that you told me something about that, but I think it was for the first version. So I would like to know if the plugin is able to export in other fps values than 24 fps in the current version ?

Yes, it should work starting from this version.

ROUBAL wrote:
@Jimstar : Would it be possible to write in the Alembic node at least the names of the materials for each input pin ? Currently, pins are only named Diffuse or Glossy... when a big model is exported with many inputs, it is tedious to check each pin to know what is what !

How long ago did you see it?..
It saves node names starting from this version.

Thank you for your patient answers !

Sorry, I saw it just before writing these lines... but I fear that I have used the wrong version to export... one more time... I shouldn't do this kind of work at night...

EDIT : Well, I have bad news : I can't get a consistent behaviour in Blender for octane 2.70 : My license Login/Password for standalone and plugin are present at each startup, but most of the time I can't get a render by the render button as well as in Render mode in the viewport.

In this case I get a "waiting for image" message, or a" Not connected |No server at adress 127.0.0.1 message". Sometimes I get a render, sometime not.

Often I get a pop up window from Windows 7 saying that Octane has to closed. The server icon is still here, but disappears as soon as the mouse pointer passes over (without clicking).

Octane server closes by itself from time to time and often when closing Blender as well. On the opposite sometimes I can't kill it an I have to right click many times on the tray icon !

I also got the message below in the console. It is weird because My two GTX 580 compute model 2.0 are in position 1 and 3 in Octane standalone Cuda panel and I selected the checkboxes 1 and 3 as always, and only my GTX 260 used for display is a Compute model 1.3 on slot 2, and it is not selected for rendering !

It happens on a simple scene with an Octane specular material. No Blender lamp : scene lit by the octane Daylight environment.

I would also want to say that the lack of display of the number of actually running GPUs Inside Blender doesn't allow to see if there is a GPU failure. The Ms/sec can be an indication but it is necessary to look at it at the beginning of rendering... assuming that all GPUs work fine at this moment.

Does octane support UDIM textures ?

Hi all,

Something strange, I need to versionning my textures to have the texture updated in Blender Octane. If I save-as my texture from photoshop with the same name, no update, as Octane have a cached texture file not cleaned after reloading the texture. If I delete the texture and replace by an other file with the same name (and same directory), the texture is the same as before, like cached file, including if the file is totally different.
Matt[/color]

Hey MattRM, I'M having the exact same thing happening here, the only difference is that I am using Gimp to paint and edit
my textures.My work around is to rename the edited file with a unique file name then Octane will load the edited texture
correctly.