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Spectralis wrote:I'm really relieved there's been a pre-xmas update. It feels like a final release might arrive in the first quarter of new year. I've stuck with v1.2 as, so far, v2 hasn't been as reliable for animation. Has anyone testing the new release tried rendering animation and if so how has it been?

I've gone ahead and test rendered a simple animation scene. Things seem promising at this point, however I encountered an issue that could be related to GPU options that messed up one of my animation renders. If I can reproduce all the errors I got, I will submit bug reports to t_3.

The scene consists of 200 frames of animation. It's very crude, I only spent about 5 minutes setting it up; very bad timing, no polish at all... it's not intended to impress by any stretch I also added a bit a of camera movement to test the camera motion blur. The camera focus has been set to follow the bouncing green sphere (f-stop 1.5 ; focal length 65)



This is my first test. I have both object and camera motion blur set to "on" in the OcDS Animations tab. I used both of my GPUs to render this, I toggled "use prioritization" on for one of them. I watched both the OcDS and DS viewports as the animation was rendering and both were updating as they were supposed to. As you can see, the motion blur is crazy strong... don't know yet if we can control it, but at least we know it's working.



My second test, this time without motion blur. I was curious to see what would happen if both GPUs are set to "use prioritization", so I toggled them all on. A curious thing happened; in the OcDS viewport it said 2 GPUs were used but the animation was rendering significantly slower as though only using one GPU. And even though both viewports were updating just fine while it was rendering, the rendered images showed something different; it seems objects had stopped updating after frame 44 while the camera kept going. Whether or not this is related to the change I made to the GPU configuration is unknown.



I tried again, but this time I unchecked one of the "use prioritization" boxes, other than that all settings remained the same. This time render speed almost doubled and objects updated properly in the renders. Again, I didn't do a frame-by-frame check, but I see no "craziness" here, at least nothing that I can see.

So far there's been no objects or camera "teleporting" randomly somewhere across the frames or disappearing while rendering - one of the issues with animation that I encountered in 2.12 4th pre-release and 1.2.

Dkron wrote:Now if only the plugin would update the geometry after rendering a frame in the animation tab, this would be the best version of the plugin.

I'm going to do an animation test with a human figure and conforming items soon and report back.

@all: a quick one: thanks for the recent comments... will get back to some of them ~tomorrow; currently working on a few fixes for this release:
- shadow cast switch
- object layer support for finished mode
- probably messed up geometries in finished mode
- few more

@garand3d: camera motion blur strength is controlled by setting the shutter speed, accessible either in the viewport (top-right camera button), the dropdown box below in the camera motion blur section on the right, or in the octanerender parameters group of the dz camera node. the default is 1/8 sec.

note that camera motion blur can be set on/off per camera, and motion blur needs to be activated in the sfx menu of the viewport to also render it in stills; means you can preview the strength by just jumping to another keyframe (= without rendering an animation). the motion blur switch for animations is independent from that (so you can have it off for stills and on for anim or vice versa); the camera specific on/off switch is in addition respected for both...

Hi t_3,
It's a long time that I didn't make some render on DS.I think about return back and purchase the 2.x version of OcDS. But this is not my priority as I work on 3DSmax plugin. I would like you to tell us when the status of the plugin will change, just before the increase of the price. As a discount (beta state) is always good to take.
Thanks

Thanks for all your work t_3.

I'm having a specific problem with mix materials. While the structure of the material stays in place (an excellent improvement), many, but not all, of the image maps, RGB and greyscale, seem to drop out. I'm unable to figure out why some of they stay in and some drop out.

Thanks again!

Sincerely,
PizmoSF

@itou31: i'm going to give a warning 1-2 weeks ahead

@PizmoSF: do you by chance uses resizing on maps? could be because of that or for other reason - i'll going to check that; pls also drop me a short info via the online form (link in the 1st post)...

@Dkron & all: one crash a day is still more than what i like to hear, so it would be good to know about where and with what action it did happen.

@Eolyn: can you please explain that a little more? most probably it's a bug not a "feature"

@joelegecko: pls let me know how it works for you now; all the conversion and migration from old plugin or different octane versions plus handling relative map paths or on-the-fly resized maps, presets, etc. is unbelievable heavy stuff and i'm pretty sure i haven't yet tracked down every possible bugger.

@DrHemulen: your question about how bad geo grafting currently is - i can't tell it depends on how the graft was put together. if it works for one product it may still completely fail for another one. that's why it is that hard to get right. i can only say for sure, that i'm building the geometry right, but the mat linking is, well, random. my usual test case is bot geneses, and if you look at the masses of new and in-place geometries that are created, along with tons of materials, you'll probably get a taste what it means to resolve that mess programmatically...

t_3 wrote: @garand3d: camera motion blur strength is controlled by setting the shutter speed, accessible either in the viewport (top-right camera button), the dropdown box below in the camera motion blur section on the right, or in the octanerender parameters group of the dz camera node. the default is 1/8 sec.

Ahh wonderful, that's where the settings are! They've been right under my nose all this time and I never noticed.
Thanks t_3, I'm going to experiment more with those settings.

t_3 wrote: note that camera motion blur can be set on/off per camera, and motion blur needs to be activated in the sfx menu of the viewport to also render it in stills; means you can preview the strength by just jumping to another keyframe (= without rendering an animation). the motion blur switch for animations is independent from that (so you can have it off for stills and on for anim or vice versa); the camera specific on/off switch is in addition respected for both...

This is very very handy indeed, a huge time and power saver. Good job, man!

Thanks t_3. Downloading it. Will report if anything comes up that is not already reported by others.

I tested the latest update for about an hour. Seems like the camera focus is working better than in the last release. Did a new simple scene and didn't have any issues other than what was already reported. (final button makes characters nude).

Seems like this is notably the firmest of the pre-releases so far. If I get some time this week, I 'll do something more daring. (like merging and autofit and stuff )

There is still a problem with rendering animations in the plugin. It appears that Octane plugin does not refresh the scene to the next frame after rendering. Also, at this time there is apparently no way to stop the rendering process while rendering animations. (So, if you set up the animation wrong, there would be no way to stop the rendering to fix the problems without terminating the program and starting again.)

t_3 wrote: @Dkron & all: one crash a day is still more than what i like to hear, so it would be good to know about where and with what action it did happen.

As with all other releases, the most crashes appeared after i drag and dropped a material preset from the livedb or one of my own presets either in the viewport or directly onto the surface in the surfaces list. This happend also while the viewport was not active. This happend much more often in the older releases and i can't reproduce it right now. It only happens when i don't want it to happen.