OTOY Forums

is there some description on how that cloud thingy works and what it does in the first place?

That feature is for people beta-testing the OctaneRender Cloud. viewforum.php?f=100

Paul

I would like to recreate in Octane some of my Poser materials that use Math nodes like add, subtract and multiply. I can only see a multiply node in Octane. Is there something equivalent to Math nodes in Octane materials?

I would like to recreate in Octane some of my Poser materials that use Math nodes like add, subtract and multiply. I can only see a multiply node in Octane. Is there something equivalent to Math nodes in Octane materials?

"Add" is not a concept that a physically based renderer implements, since it would allows "brighter than 1" textures, which is not possible in reality. Same with subtract - it can result in a texture < 0.

Paul

I know what you know, but how come Cycles/Superfly PBR has native Math nodes?

I know what you know, but how come Cycles/Superfly PBR has native Math nodes?

I don't know Ken - sorry.

Paul

"Add X" would be very useful if considered as a pre-light computation texture editing operation. Manipulating a texture does not involve any light calculation. It is simply photo-shopping in the material shader. So this operation does make a lot of sense.

Texture math nodes edit a texture bitmap and operator x will always clamp to [0,1], so there is just texture image editing. Light calculations are applied after the texture properties are calculated so the texture will never be brighter than 1 and not emit additional light. Even though there are no such math texture property operations explicitly in the octane render system there are some very awkward ways to do some of them.
In fact some proper texture math would not only help working with the material system in poser but octane standalone as well.
Sometimes you just do not want to fumble another texture file variant in photoshop prior to putting it into the material editor, sometimes you just want to use those nodes to achieve similar texture tweaks through a calculation in the material texture property calculation stage. It also can help reusing a loaded texture image thus saving memory.

I think the misunderstanding here is that you understand it as "add x light" was what people want, but this is not the case. People asking for the nodes because they want to mathematically and easily "edit" texture properties before said texture gets put into the light/material calculation.

Inverse404 wrote:"Add X" would be very useful if considered as a pre-light computation texture editing operation. Manipulating a texture does not involve any light calculation. It is simply photo-shopping in the material shader. So this operation does make a lot of sense.

Texture math nodes edit a texture bitmap and operator x will always clamp to [0,1], so there is just texture image editing. Light calculations are applied after the texture properties are calculated so the texture will never be brighter than 1 and not emit additional light. Even though there are no such math texture property operations explicitly in the octane render system there are some very awkward ways to do some of them.
In fact some proper texture math would not only help working with the material system in poser but octane standalone as well.
Sometimes you just do not want to fumble another texture file variant in photoshop prior to putting it into the material editor, sometimes you just want to use those nodes to achieve similar texture tweaks through a calculation in the material texture property calculation stage. It also can help reusing a loaded texture image thus saving memory.

I think the misunderstanding here is that you understand it as "add x light" was what people want, but this is not the case. People asking for the nodes because they want to mathematically and easily "edit" texture properties before said texture gets put into the light/material calculation.

Yes, that is exactly the point with Math nodes - they affect textures, not lighting. I guess that explains how they exist in other PBR solutions, like Cycles. Math nodes are binary operations to manipulate textures to create new shaders. One of the most common uses is to desaturate a texture to use it as a bump or displacement map, or to combine textures with masks, so only parts of the textures are affected by a color transform. It doesn't go against physically based rendering because it's calculated and applied beforehand, and it automatically clamps (or rotates) intervals between 0 and 1. It will never generate an invalid value, unless divided by zero.

Inverse and Ken - this is an Octane Standalone issue, rather than a Poser plugin issue, so I suggest posting your comments on the Octane Standalone 3.03.4 thread where the Otoy devs will read them.

Paul

This thread is now for the STABLE release of the Octane 3 version of the plugin. Pls subscribe to viewtopic.php?f=45&t=56137 for TEST release builds.

Paul

This thread has now be merged into the TEST thread. Pls subscribe to viewtopic.php?f=45&t=56137 for STABLE release updates.

Paul