OTOY Forums

@Roubal,
Regarding those features you asked, especially the keyframing inside Octane - I don't think it will happen. Radiance mentioned several times that Octane is supposed to be a renderer that delivers realistic results, without the need of many compositing techniques. Reading in between lines that would translate to; no shadow catcher materials & other similar tricks, we are going for strict realism. I think that Cycles will be a more appropriate renderer for such tasks.

I'm afraid Blender users are still seen as some kind of amateurs & hobbyists, that, despite of the quality we are able to produce, are not taken seriously - especially not by big companies. So, while it would be nice and correct to be treated equally like any other users of licensed 3D apps, I don't think it will happen (I mean look at us, we don't even have an official exporter ).

And when the majority of Octane users will work with integrated plugins, don't expect that RS / OTOY will code the missing functionality in the standalone version, just for a minority of us. It's not realistic to expect so, despite the cuddly & reassuring official statements...

@Matej : I dont see Shadow Catcher as a trick. Maybe Shadow Caster and No Shadow material... but Shadow caster is a tool needed to composite in an other software realistic renders done in Octane with an image obtained by any possible method. It is a complementary tool with background transparency.

Currently we have to use tricks because the only way to export shadows is to set up special materials to create a mask in order to simulate shadows in the compositing software.

And Keyframing the camera is not something about compositing. RS built in Octane the turntable animation feature. So why not a keyframe system?

Well, I guess we should just wait for an official statement. But if RS had concrete answers to those questions (which are months old, if not years), they would already give them.

ROUBAL wrote:And Keyframing the camera is not something about compositing. RS built in Octane the turntable animation feature. So why not a keyframe system?

if you have a list of about 300 things to do and only a hand full of people you need clear priorities (ya, of course ) guessing from all what the engine still needs (tons of more or less important wishes and true needs out there), and having octane going integrated, camera keyframing i guess is not in the top 250 of this list. also additional compositing channels are not that easy as 1-2-3 to implement. needs weeks if not months of work imo.

what is needed for blender users is an integrated plugin thats the only real solution. maybe induce a kickstarter project financing a lawyer who develops a waterprof legal base for having such an integration; sounds dumb? but this is the basic problem. there is imo no clear knowledge how the legal path to a fully integrated plugin with gpl'ed blender might look. potent coders would have started already yesterday not just today developing this plugin, if only the legal problem was resolved...

Yes, t_3 is right. And THIS thread is the proof that Octane authorities do not have anything against Blender plugin. And I already stated to Radiance some days ago that I'm ready to start coding the Blender plugin right now (or after finishing the current work). So, coders - is not a problem, don't worry about it.
The only IMPORTANT thing that must be decided BEFORE coding start - how to make it secure from the point of view of GPL. And that - is the GENERAL problem of creating this plugin, not the coding itself.
So, try to solve this problem - and you will get some closer to Blender plugin...

Disclamer: It's only MY IMHO, Octane authorities may have another opinion about it...

@t_3 : I am perfectly conscious about priorities. The reason why I insist so much to get an answer from RS about this camera keyframing feature is because we were adviced four months ago to not purchase a third party tool to do that and wait for the close upcoming solution... and since, full silence.

@JimStar : I am used to Copyright and patents laws (at least in Europe), but I have no knowledge at all about software specific licences, so I feel pretty useless on that problem.

ROUBAL wrote:@t_3 : I am perfectly conscious about priorities. The reason why I insist to get an answer from RS about this camera keyframing feature is because we were adviced four months ago to not purchase a third party tool to do that and wait for the close upcoming solution... and since, full silence.

hm, i was guessing the upcoming solution mentioned were the integrated plugins, but you are right. searched for it and found a quote from radiance, that they might want to add a timeline into the standalone ui within a "few months" - but this was before marcus left! imo this caused a major drawback for not only a few plans they had. so having at least a few new crew members on board because of the otoy deal may breathe fresh air into some of this plans. but personally i won't expect anything that low on the list (where it certainly is) anytime soon, esp. in the light of integration works currently going on.

neither would i expect radiance showing us a roadmap with deadlines written to it; as long as only this few people are working night and day to push things forward, this is imo just not possible (and wouldn't be wise anyway)...

Yes, it's better to not talk about dates. But still, they must have a rough plan on what they will work on toward the final 1.0 version. Can we expect more shading functionality, instances, hdr+sun, auto texture coordinates...? etc.

btw, it was clear that when Radiance talked about the replacement for OPT he meant the integrated plugin for 3DSmax, that was just in the works.

ROUBAL wrote:@Face :

Radiance wrote :

I hope this answers most of your questions, and please ask me more, I will respond here...

As he is not much present on the forum, I asked him my question here in this topic as he said he will respond here... but no response so far.

So I don't think it is the wrong thread, even if my question is not directly linked to Otoy, if it is the only topic visited by Radiance.

@Matej : OPT works, but every time you move something in the interface you have to recalibrate all parameters targets, and it is very tedious !

Even if RS priority is to embed Octane in other packages, I think that Blender users desserve the same attention as other clients. Even if Octane is not expensive, it has required a lot of investment in hardware to be used : High end graphic cards, connection to network due to Internet activation, switch to 64 bits OS, add of RAM on motherboard, purchase of a Cubix box in my case as my mother board didn't support the Graphic cards... A total of 4200 Euros.

For my own, I think that It would be very unfair now to leave faithful Blender users without the aforementioned basic and necessary features.

Hi,

You can always use the standalone in the future, it won't dissapear.
About integrated animation paths in the standalone UI, it's a lot of work to do.
We really need to finish up v1.0 first, add instancing/moving objects and finalize before we can add it.

A blender plugin is possible, but we need to do some kind of poll to see how many people would buy it (as cycles will ruin much of the demand)...
It's definately on my mind and I will try to find an answer to the blender integration question soon...

Radiance

Thank you very much for your response Radiance. Any plan to include Shadow Catcher, Shadow Caster and No Shadow material in the standalone version ?