OctaneRender™ for LightWave™ build 1.13.1 released

[tmclemons]

Need help,

My system crashed requiring me to update to windows 8 to boot on a new harddrive, I had to reinstall lightwave, and I am using octane from the previous hard drive. Octane stand alone works fine, but I cannot get the octane plugin to install on lightwave. I keep getting this error message. I also installed both 2008 and 2010 redistributable visual basic packages.

[juanjgon]

Need help,

My system crashed requiring me to update to windows 8 to boot on a new harddrive, I had to reinstall lightwave, and I am using octane from the previous hard drive. Octane stand alone works fine, but I cannot get the octane plugin to install on lightwave. I keep getting this error message. I also installed both 2008 and 2010 redistributable visual basic packages.

You are mixing an old plugin file with new Octane.dll and Octane.dat files (or a new plugin with old libs).

Please, get the original 1.13.1 .zip file and be sure that you have the correct LWOctane.p and the Octane.dll and Octane.dat files from this .zip in your Lightwave/bin directories.

-Juanjo

[FrankPooleFloating]

Hey Juanjo - did they give you new 1.15 SDK yet?

Bump has been improved immensely.. love to get this in LW asap.

[juanjgon]

Hey Juanjo - did they give you new 1.15 SDK yet?

Bump has been improved immensely.. love to get this in LW asap.

Not yet, but soon

-Juanjo

[FrankPooleFloating]

Great!.. you are going straight to 1.15 and not 1.14, right?

[FrankPooleFloating]

Juanjo, is there any way that your (wonderful) Override feature could be tweaked to
add an option to exclude one object from override?.. as you know, I have been crying
and bitching for invisible to camera feature in Octane... if we could render only one
object in our scene, and hit everything else with a matte/mask - via your override - this
could almost be like a poor-man's version (or at least temporary workaround) to help
get crap isolated... without needing to use the MatID render exclusively. OR - maybe
having this feature would allow all objects/surfaces except the excluded one to have
one MatID and the one you want to isolate is another... Is this even possible?

[juanjgon]

Juanjo, is there any way that your (wonderful) Override feature could be tweaked to
add an option to exclude one object from override?.. as you know, I have been crying
and bitching for invisible to camera feature in Octane... if we could render only one
object in our scene, and hit everything else with a matte/mask - via your override - this
could almost be like a poor-man's version (or at least temporary workaround) to help
get crap isolated... without needing to use the MatID render exclusively. OR - maybe
having this feature would allow all objects/surfaces except the excluded one to have
one MatID and the one you want to isolate is another... Is this even possible?

It is a good idea ... I can for example add a custom object plugin "Exclude object from material override" that you can add to any object in the scene to bypass material override for this object. I will add this feature to my TODO list

-Juanjo

[FrankPooleFloating]

OMFG!!... thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you Juanjo!!!

If you can sneak it into your next release candidate, this would indeed rock!
Please do what you can. Did I say thank you?... oy, I did.. but I will say it again.

THANK YOU JUANJO!

[gordonrobb]

Here is a quick test scene in LW and standalone using a shadow catcher. The LW version saves no shadows in the alpha

Thanks for the scene. You are right, there is a problem with the plugin and the fact that Standalone doesn't add a default transmission node to the diffuse shader. Plugin by default add a float value to the transmission input, and set it to 0%.

I am not sure why, but if you have this value to 0%, shadow catcher (using the Matte switch) doesn't work. Workaround is to set the transmission to something greater than 0% (0.01% is fine), and with this value plugin works like standalone.

I am going to see if is possible fix it.

Thanks again for the report

BTW: I have found that the Alpha switch in the IPR window doesn't work in the 1.13.1 release. Is this switch working for you?

-Juanjo

Juan, can you outline for me the process I should be following for using Shadow Catcher in the plugin. I want to render my model using an HDR image. I will use that as a backdrop (assuming the one I use is high enough res), or composite it against another backdrop. I'm assuming I need a plan under my object that is the shadow catcher, but do I render that at the same time? or differnt time and use the output to drive a shadow in my copmositing software? Some guidance would be really apprecieated.

[juanjgon]

Juan, can you outline for me the process I should be following for using Shadow Catcher in the plugin. I want to render my model using an HDR image. I will use that as a backdrop (assuming the one I use is high enough res), or composite it against another backdrop. I'm assuming I need a plan under my object that is the shadow catcher, but do I render that at the same time? or differnt time and use the output to drive a shadow in my copmositing software? Some guidance would be really apprecieated.

I think that if you enable the Matte option you can get the shadow in the alpha channel. If you set the material of the plane under your object as pure black diffuse, you can composite the image and get the shadow in only one pass using the alpha channel.

-Juanjo