Non-offical Blender 2.56 plugin

[yoyoz]

Hi Sam,

I didn't change the UV export code from the original script, so that's strange result. Would you mind sending me the blend file so I can investigate? (via PM if you don't want to expose the file here).

[tommy5]

yoyoz thanks for your hard work!

got a question regarding materials
now i cant even get diffuse color to octane, think that worked before..
anyway how hard will be to better link materials between apps?
dont know how octane pareses mtl, or can we put more data in mtl
or can we make octane material settings panel in blender
and export mat directly to .ocs ?

here are some of my old material tests
http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... 3583#p3583

[yoyoz]

Hi Tommy,

I'm working on it with the help of steveps3 but I 'm both missing good knowledge of materials in general and of course information about how Octane parses the mtl file. My work-in-progress code outputs not too bad diffuse and glossy materials but I'm fighting with the logics for specular ones as well as for mirrors...

There're too many risk in writing in the ocs file, the only alternative I could see is writing to ocm files that could later be linked in Octane. I'm not sure this is a process that would fit users as it could become quickly very boring... I also lack experience to have a good opinion about what should be the best workflow - taking in account the limits in informaton exchange between Blender and Octane.

BTW, if anybody can give me manually tweaked mtl samples that fit well into Octane and the corresponding blender materials that should have produced them, then I may be able to adapt the exporter.

[matej]

IMO, doing a proper mapping that would translate Blender materials into Octane is not needed and is a waste of (programmer) time. It's not even possible to do 100%, because of big differences between the two pipelines. When I know that I would render with Octane, I just apply the diffuse color texture inside Blender, to help me tweak uv maps - and I do all the material settings in Octane. I don't see the need to create blender materials. I don't even remember when I last used Blender internal renderer...

With a native Octane file format, there will come more possibilities and flexibility. Currently it's not worth the time to try to fight with all the limitations of .obj / .mtl

I'm about to migrate to Ubuntu 10.10 and start using the new version of Blender, and I'll post my experiences with the exporter. It seems you are doing a great job, yoyoz

[yoyoz]

I'm 200% inline with you Matej and I won't spend too much time in tweaking materials in Blender for the reasons you mentioned.

What I'd like to achieve at least is basic but consistent material preparation so:
- if specular intensity is 0, then material is diffuse in Octane with approximative same brightness (fixed in WIP)
- if specular intensity is higher, then material is glossy in Octane (works), with consistent brightness and roughness(fixed in WIP)
- if material uses transparency, then it is specular in Octane with appropriate IOR (broken - may be my fault, but I want to understand the logic used by Octane at import time)

Ideally, I could replace the material panel in Blender so parameters not relevant to Octane are not editable, while the usefull ones are a bit more obvious.

[SamCameron]

Hi Yoyoz, here's the file for you to check, I suggest you to open this file in both versions (2.49 and 2.56) and you will notice how different results in Octane Render just by clicking in the render button from the script, the script in 2.49 is working more close to the original render in Blender, while in 2.56 completly gets a different image, it has problems with UV's aswell as the exporting some of the materials, hope you can have a look, and I really apreciated you amazing work, thank you Yoyoz.

[yoyoz]

Hi Sam, I had to put a random image fortesting (you didn't put the source image in the zip), but with my WIP addon I have the same result in 2.49 viewport, 2.56 viewport and octane render after export from 2.56.
When rewriting the code I noticed that the texture export was not working as expected and it looks like I've already fixed that, without touching the UVs...
Unfortunately, a couple of issues prevent me from releasing this version at the moment. May be tonight or tomorrow...

[SamCameron]

Hi Yoyoz, thanks for your efforts, here's the texture in case you need to test:

P.S: it's weird cause I get completly different results from 2.49 to 2.56 scripts.

[yoyoz]

Here's what I get straight out of the box, with coloroured clay rendering... I think you're going to push me for getting my latest script

[SamCameron]

So now is working as the 2.49 script?, don't rush, I'm pleased with your work even if it take 1 year to launch (hopefully not hehehe), what a great news if you can get the same results as 2.49 script.