OctaneRender™ 3.0 for Houdini™ - production build 3.00

[juanjgon]

A complete liveDB download is not an option in the Houdini plugin. It is not designed to work with a full dump of the LiveDB materials and textures, like for example the Modo plugin. The plugin uses the same workflow than Standalone, opening the LiveDB window to download the selected material.

We are working in the OSX problem with the LiveDB window. I hope to have it fixed soon.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[C-You]

Thanks for Info.

YES - its MODO what I am using and to have all materials at once in place is really cool. And because
MODO v10 still lacks of fog/smoke/fire and such things I looked around and found Houdini
again I looked a long time ago but forgot about it because of its huge price. But now with
Indie + 3rd Party Render I took a closer look and decided to go another way. MODO will
have great procedurals too shortly in upcoming v10.1, but compared to Houdini monster this
feature will be a very little tool I think and compare is unfair. But the new Mesh fusion in MODO is
really cool - and so I think to use MODO in future only for modeling (what this app was created for
and is unbeatable in this category) and do the magic of cinematic output in Houdini - but still
have the ability to choose MODO or Houdini to render with OR - and thats very cool workflow.

I have to learn a lot with Houdini to get its real power, but I make this step really quick with
help of videos and your support (thank you) and of course with my little coding background. If
you are an only designer with absolute no coding background you will get completely lost
and will fail for sure with this app or will have a long long learning curve.

Houdini really rocks - and with MODO together its absolutely awesome - but without you
plugin coder guys you can´t use all this stuff out of the box - so thanks a lot to OTOY support team.

[C-You]

Is it possible to smooth an OR material from a group to have fading instead hard polys?

How can I blend 2 material groups to get soft material gradient - lets say the red and green in the torus example?

[juanjgon]

Not yet using point attributes, like "Cd". We don't have support for custom attributes yet in Octane. You are going to need to use a shading workflow (a gradient or a texture map) to make this effect.

-Juanjo

[C-You]

How do I save a self created OR material to disk as preset and how do I import that into another project?
In standalone its save as macro I saw in a video - where to find in plugin?

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Find in the manuals that it should be done as an asset - right? This would be a complicated way and
it will store into the houdini file area. Or can I store an asset where I want to be on disk? With such
things the first in mind is every time - what happens with my data if I make a clean install for a new OS?
For this particular thing I really like to have everything on disk areas I can easy backup and not forget.

If I am right and asset is the only way at the moment - is there any way to do the same cool thing that
face_off did with MODO? In MODO plugin he creates a NodeGraph Node that can copy/paste materials
between MODO and standalone.

This feature would be awesome, because then I could create all materials in standalone and save them as
macros. The big advantage would be that I have to create the material only once and can load them up in
MODO and in Houdini via copy/paste and get the same result. And the macros can be saved everywhere - right?

Otherwise I don´t know how to create materials and reuse it in MODO and in the opposite.

Is this possible?

----

And another important material question - are Substances by the new SideFX plugin possible
to render in octane plugin?

[juanjgon]

Yes, you can save material presets as Houdini digital assets, or you can save them to gallery (the icons in the gallery are not supported yet, but the material works fine). In both cases you can use any custom path to store the asset or the gallery.

You can import materials in Houdini from other packages using the LocalDB feature (once it works in OSX, because it is in the same LiveDB window that now freezes). I can add also a function to export the Houdini materials to the LocalDB/LiveDB, let me think about it ... or you can even export the whole scene as an .orbx using the ROP node Archive feature to manage all the available materials inside a Houdini from Standalone.

The SideFX substance plugin is not going to work with Octane, as far I know. You need to build a material using only Octane nodes.

-Juanjo

[C-You]

A LocalDB in both direction would also be cool to have.

I thought about .orbx too in the beginning, but you said its not possible in Indie.
And for that reason the ORC is not available whats really bad - there should be way
of make a flag in the .orbx-file that you don´t be able to edit the resolution for render
and so not act against the SideFX license for Indie (FullHD) - only an idea.

[juanjgon]

Learned a lot in short time, but I realized with every new session that I am clicking so often
for close and reopen MPlay because of the bug - do we can expect an update shortly?

What version of Houdini are you using? I can send to you a pre-release of the next build with this problem fixed.

-Juanjo

[C-You]

WOW - you are so great ...

To be on safe side of live I have installed the production version houdini-15.5.480-macosx_x86_64_clang6.1_10.10

[juanjgon]

To be on safe side of live I have installed the production version houdini-15.5.480-macosx_x86_64_clang6.1_10.10

This is a pre-release of the next plugin build for H15.5 OSX. Some OSX problems, like the MPlay and the LiveDB windows freezes should be fixed now.
https://render.otoy.com/customerdownloa ... 80_OSX.zip

Remember that you must update the path in the houdini.env file to point to the new version.

-Juanjo