Introducing the Octane for DAZ Studio plug-in

[larsmidnatt]

Thanks for the blazing fast response. This info confirms a lot for me regarding future workflow.

[sternbach]

Hi t_3, good to hear that. Another question: Is there a way to use the Garibaldi hair system in Octane through the plugin?

tia and all the best,

peter

[Akanaro]

Hi t_3, good to hear that. Another question: Is there a way to use the Garibaldi hair system in Octane through the plugin?

tia and all the best,

peter

Garibaldi hair works exclusively with DAZ studio (Renderman) shaders and will thus not be usable with Octane as no geometry is created, only splines as guide objects for the renderer.

To put it in matrix terms - There is no hair.

[sternbach]

Hi t_3, good to hear that. Another question: Is there a way to use the Garibaldi hair system in Octane through the plugin?

tia and all the best,

peter

Garibaldi hair works exclusively with DAZ studio (Renderman) shaders and will thus not be usable with Octane as no geometry is created, only splines as guide objects for the renderer.

To put it in matrix terms - There is no hair.

Hmmm ... there's always geometry... and ... as futurebiscuit said, there's already an OBJ export feature implemented
=> http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/ ... 15/#221755 - so, it might be possible...

[larsmidnatt]

As someone who has used both GH and LAMH extenstively (the only two hair solutions for Daz Studio) I can say the OBJ export method with require far more system resources than it is really worth. It is doable, but not worth it most of the time (at least for women IMHO). Granted many users have superior specs to me, so your mileage will vary. Even so there are better things to throw all that power at. I've got an i5 3.3 ghz and 8 gigs of ram, and 3 gig gts660ti. So fairly low end cpu and ram these days. But it works really well for me in most scenarios.

For me Octane has no issues with standard poser/daz mesh hair, even the really articulate stuff that is sold. No problem reasonably large environments from stone mason. Mutiple clothed figures and weapons work well too. Octane has handled scenes with a few million polys well for me.

One human with obj hair from LAMH or GH is another story. Things become very slow, and the poly count jumps out of control. (even when the tri count is a lot less than a full scene, hair hits a lot harder than a spaced out environment)

Human hair exported as an obj is million+ polys. You can try to cheat and knock the number down, but then the hair doesn't look very good. Rendering is slowed dramatically as well when using hair exported this way. A million tightly spaced pieces of geometry with specular and a little bit of transparency is not a lot of fun to play with. (slows the viewport a ton, may just lock up and crash octane).

I have had some success with LAMH for fur on clothes and maybe the occasional animal that is not the main feature. Or the animal would NEED to be the main feature and not have a lot of other things in the scene.

the GH obj export option is limited and not supported. It doesn't have many settings. It did work a little better in octane than LAMH did.

I wasn't really satisfied with either solution, but may retry them in time. LAMH will have an update soon and I will see if that makes it more useable.

and look at the Devs comment for the GH obj exporter

It's a pretty minor feature to write. I've had mixed feeling about adding it. Basically I was just fed up of people bugging me about it.

There is a reason he didn't want to add it, the tool is really for rendering with renderman curves and that is the power of his plugin (as well as LAMH).

But I have certainly seen some good animals rendered outside of daz that use LAMH or GH. Animal fur can be thicker than human hair so you can get away with less of it. Also human hair for women tends to be pretty long requiring a lot more geometry to make it look convincing.

[Akanaro]

I'm kind of starting to lose interest in this. Which is sad really because a month ago I was really eager to have this. In that time though I have grown more and more concerned, asking myself if I really want to pay E99 to someone who is obviously not capable of delivering the goods on time. News is slow, development even slower and I really don't think the support for this is going to be much better after it is eventually released. Too often these days we as customers (potential or otherwise) are left at the mercy of developers who treat their work as a hobby or just a way to make some extra cash.

If you have a product to sell then sell it or don't advertise it. I'm tired of all the 'jokes' and 'wow, you're awesome for fucking me around for a month now' bullshit. The same goes for otoy as group. Are you serious about octane or not? If you are then stop treating it like an amateur show and get professional. Inform your clients what's going on, stick to target dates and don't sell bullshit.

Thank you.

[t_3]

I'm kind of starting to lose interest in this. Which is sad really because a month ago I was really eager to have this. In that time though I have grown more and more concerned, asking myself if I really want to pay E99 to someone who is obviously not capable of delivering the goods on time. News is slow, development even slower and I really don't think the support for this is going to be much better after it is eventually released. Too often these days we as customers (potential or otherwise) are left at the mercy of developers who treat their work as a hobby or just a way to make some extra cash.

If you have a product to sell then sell it or don't advertise it. I'm tired of all the 'jokes' and 'wow, you're awesome for fucking me around for a month now' bullshit. The same goes for otoy as group. Are you serious about octane or not? If you are then stop treating it like an amateur show and get professional. Inform your clients what's going on, stick to target dates and don't sell bullshit.

Thank you.

was there any target date? in this case i'm missing something. if it was wise introducing something in the works until it is ready for sale is another thing. i appreciate for wrong expectations on how long it'd need to finalize it, and to write them in public. on the other hand - still i don't understand your problem. if there was no info about it, would you still complain about not being able to buy it?

questioning my intentions ("hobby", "extra cash") is not only pure speculation, but indeed wrong, wrong, wrong. i have spent countless hours working on this - hours which i could made some "extra cash" a whole lot easier if this is what i want. and if i was after some "extra" cash, i may have delivered something crappy fast, instead of spending days and nights solving all the problems merging octane into something like daz studio, which was never really meant to integrate another rendering engine. and as far as i'm aware of, there is just nothing like this, not even close (maybe for a reason).

oh, and by the way i'm serious about my project, which doesn't mean problems can be solved by just wanting it. it needs hard work and even more time - sorry to say that. and i'm sorry for every week passing without having it done, much more sorry than you can be, i assure you.

[Akanaro]

Someone in the daz forum even said Octane won't ever happen for DS LOL. I corrected them kindly

thanks for flying the flag there

of course i can only say it will happen. it would be a very expansive joke to work that hard and for such a long time to drop it after being almost done. there where a lot of problems and gazillions of troubles, paired with the intention to make that thing really stand out, so it needed waaay more time i ever thought. it is not about the money, but was made up from enthusiasm for octane and its possibilities within daz studio (and with a lot blue eyes), all leading to extend development time again and again. but i'm still sure, the outcome will compensate for the long time wait.

so what about the "when"; i said i was hoping for any time before christmas, since i know these holidays are a perfect time to play with some shiny new toys. but i think i will fail to keep the promise
the 1.0RC development might be settled within the next few days, but i still need some feedback from the beta testers, most probably they'll find some overseen bugs, and apart from that otoy needs to set up a manual, an installer, prepare the web shop, ... and since these guys have well deserved their holidays (unlike me ), i doubt that all that will work out until 24th evening.

so still in 2012?
well, i currently spend every awake hour (many) to make it happen.
so plz don't give up on it, as i won't give up on getting it done...

Not a target date set in stone no but as your above post indicated you were very close to releasing it a month ago. That's fine, life happens and things go wrong, we all get that. But then neither you nor anyone else from otoy says a word for weeks after this and nothing happens. If people didn't start asking would we have gotten a response at all? Then you tell us how your trusted closed beta testers have discovered a killer bug and wouldn't you know it there goes the self imposed deadline. Fair enough, it can happen. It would have been nice though if you said something instead of vanishing and pretending you didn't raise people's hopes and expectations and then just left them hanging. And now we're repeating the cycle. That is what makes me upset. If it seems unfair to you I'm sorry but wouldn't you know it, sometimes people might just tell you how they really feel about being told 'soon'.

[t_3]

Not a target date set in stone no but as your above post indicated you were very close to releasing it a month ago. That's fine, life happens and things go wrong, we all get that. But then neither you nor anyone else from otoy says a word for weeks after this and nothing happens. If people didn't start asking would we have gotten a response at all? Then you tell us how your trusted closed beta testers have discovered a killer bug and wouldn't you know it there goes the self imposed deadline. Fair enough, it can happen. It would have been nice though if you said something instead of vanishing and pretending you didn't raise people's hopes and expectations and then just left them hanging. And now we're repeating the cycle. That is what makes me upset. If it seems unfair to you I'm sorry but wouldn't you know it, sometimes people might just tell you how they really feel about being told 'soon'.

ok. taken. i remember well what if have thought and written (even without reading it again). and i do know - and apologize - for communications not being all that well. one "funny" side note: i was myself a complaining user about otoy (then refractive) a year back when they scheduled some major updates which then didn't appear for months. fair enough that i now get that back

about saying or not saying; imo in the current situation anything i could tell would be some sort of mocking around - apart from the word "done". there is progress, yes, there are closed beta updates (5 in the last 10 days), there are fixes, improvements, still some issues; not enough to tell an exact date yet. at some point it will be ready - believe me or not

btw, if you like me to post infos about every closed beta update, i have no problem to do so.

the vanishing thing: it is still a one man show. writing posts = not writing code. and from time to time it is necessary to lock out anything but the code, to get something done. if you're interested: switching to the new geometry engine in november caused instabilities over and over. it's one thing reading the scene from ds once; doing that whenever the scene changes is something very, very different. i felt i need to go through that since it made working with it so much better, and i needed to, since i of course had to use the latest octane version for the plugin also. and after trying lots of different things to resolve those instabilities, every time thinking "now it's ok" (like in mid december), i stumbled over a new previously unseen combination of things nr. 197, where it still crashed. so i decided to rework a few basic parts from ground up. this happened from about christmas until the 2nd week in january. would it have been wiser to tell you "hey, i'm just throwing away 15% of the code to make it even better"? would you take that as a "professional" approach? but that happens all the time, in many software projects, at least if you have the guts to do so. other options are to give up or release crap. me won't do neither.

one last thing: i understand that you just want the thing and no more excuses, so this is not what i think is or was unfair, even if i still can't give you what you want. the only thing that made me upset was, when you questioned my intentions; hobby or extra cash does not exactly meet the truth...

[larsmidnatt]

No need to tell us the world...I think most of us are happy hearing from you every two weeks or so, just so you can tell us you haven't taken the plane anywhere.

No need to get into the gritty bits, it's interesting and even entertaining at times, but writing posts can be very time consuming. Especially technical ones you're trying to explain in terms folks who may be out of the know can understand.

Good weekend to ya.