OctaneRender™ for Blender 2.06 - 6.4 Win [OBSOLETE]

[JimStar]

Elonius
To "get rid of render server situation" - I need the detailed reports of your crash situation, and perhaps the scene where it happens. As far as I have no reproduceable reports - I will even not know that the issue exists...
My wife is the 3D artist working mostly in Blender using this plugin heavily. I collect all her detailed reports and fix them before each release, together with reports from these threads. So, I've just asked her one more time right now: she said that in this last version there were no server crashes at all during the work. And she works with really heavy scenes sometimes (http://3d-look.com).

So, it may be some specific things inside your scenes, and these crashes definitely should be reported here in detail to catch the reason. You may do one more thing: right click the OctaneServer before start, and choose "Run as Administrator" - in this case after the crash you will have the crash-dump files under "Dumps" subdirectory inside OctaneServer install directory ("C:\Program Files\OctaneServer" by default).
And be sure that you have a lot of physical memory installed if you are trying to render the really heavy scenes where all meshes are set to "Global". As the Blender's "meshes translation processing" plus server's "meshes merge into one global mesh processing" plus Octane engine's "meshes voxelization processing" - need a huge amount of memory altogether at the same time. The lack of physical memory may be the reason of the crashes too.

The only way to get rid of Octane Server is to change Blender's GNU GPL license, which is probably never going to happen. This is the only way that Otoy can plugin to Blender and still have proprietary code.

Yep, it's true.
Some brief digression...
The lot of excessive complexity added by the client-server approach (forced by Blender's GPL license) makes every little improvement to this plugin extremely complicated. As the two absolutely different softwares (Octane server and whole distribution of reworked Blender) must be developed in parallel and synchronised with each other after every little change (and this for all the Win, OSX and Linux separately). Blender's internals are not documented at all, so it is constant reverse-engineering process during this work instead of simple SDK-documentation reading as in other plugins.
Moreover, catching for every little bug is twice more complicated in this architecture - as the bug may be sourced by server, Blender, or by both...
So, guys - it's a good thing that you have the Blender plugin at all. Terence (the leader of Refractive Software) did not want to issue the Blender plugin at all due to the GPL. As nobody had the idea of how to fully integrate the render-engine into Blender without violating of the GPL license. And I was forced to make some tough research to find this complicated way to fully integrate Octane into Blender not violating the GPL. After that I tried to convince Terence to go this way - mostly due to the reason my wife likes Octane very much and she works in Blender.
So, for now Octane render - is the only commercial render which is fully integrated into blender, the same tight as Cycles. All other known closed-sourced engines which work with Blender - are integrated not even close as fully as Octane does. As they eventually use the file export-import approach internally, even if they look like integrated. But this restricts the convenience of work and the speed significantly as the disk subsystem is used to export-import the data before each render, this restricts from having the "Live-preview" right inside Blender's viewport, the full-blown internal nodes subsystem, etc etc...

So, this client-server system is the only way for you to have the Octane fully integrated into Blender. At least as far as Blender is GPL-licensed. And instead of crying about "it is too complicated", or "it does not work for me" - please just post here the detailed bugreports. The scenes where I would be able to reproduce your issues - are very welcome too.
Sorry for so many letters.

[RajivMudgal]

Thanks Jim
Everything that you have done is highly appreciated by us. I remember that Development for blender was terminated by the previous owner.
Eagerly awaiting the next release with 2.1 composting features (Render passes).
Regards and Respect.
-Rajiv


Note: many crashes were just caused by faulty naming conventions at the objectdata level, simply renaming them to their unique name solved the issue, or using EdgeSplit modifier which got solved by simply applying them.

[Elonius]

I just tested my scene again and well it works now. Weird. Anyway, I appreciate all the hard work you have done so far Jimstar. I will try not to cry so often.

[JimStar]

many crashes were just caused by faulty naming conventions at the objectdata level, simply renaming them to their unique name solved the issue

I remember that I fixed such a bug in some of previous versions - so it should work OK in the current one even with same names. Report please if it still crashes for you in this version.

or using EdgeSplit modifier which got solved by simply applying them.

I will check it.
Just don't forget please to report such a things - as I even did not know that, I hear this for the first time - nobody of artists reported it.

[RajivMudgal]

Sorry Jim, I should have reported, but the scene has hundreds of objects, Finding where the fault lies can sometime become a daunting task... esp. when you are on a deadline, you simply find a way around and deliver the project to the client and then forget about it, also sometimes you are not sure whether its a blender related issue of Octane related. In the studio you dont get even 5 minutes of break because you are on deadline, I usually report once I am back home, and once home you know how lazy one can get, also I dont have access to octane at home so cant double check before uploading the files . I think I need to invest in a personal license one of these days
Nevertheless.
Here is the attachment.

[JimStar]

RajivMudgal
Thanks. Will check it.

[JimStar]

Hi im having renderproblems with an animation (particles).
I used a small glass-sphere to show particles and set meshtype to scatter.
The animation is okay till frame 144 - after that it seems that emitted light will no more seen in the glass-spheres.
Jumping to that error-frames and render a still frame will be okay.

Blend + ImageSeq are attached.

I can't reproduce it. Rendered sequence is attached.
But you gave the scene with textures not packed in, so - I just replaced some materials having textures by my own...

[afecelis]

Hi Jim. Is it possible to have alpha behind a glass material?

I'm using clear/architectural glass with fake shadows on, but even with alpha background turned on I either get the sunlight system or the plain color showing up behind anything that's glass.

thanks for any help.
regards,
Alvaro

[kubicki3d]

Hi Jim. Is it possible to have alpha behind a glass material?

+1
I think it would be very useful.

Afecelis, if you're on tight deadline, go ahead and try this quick solution: replace your specular shader with glossy, set roughness to 0, opacity to around 0.2, index to 1.0. With glossy shader your glass geometry can be a simple plane (unlike specular which requires volume).
Cheers, Szymon

[afecelis]

Thanks a lot kubicki3d, I'll try your tip out