OcDS 2.1 PRE RELEASE 5th

[larsmidnatt]

mh... maybe someone could explain whats the (technical?) difference between the "final" button and if i let render without? i cant see any differences or mistakes when i do renders without pushing that button. atm it isnt working anyway so there is no choice

The main thing is speed. But you lose the ability to work with a lot of setting when it is enabled.

Final render is a mode where it collapses all the meshes into a single mesh basically which speeds up rendering by about 20%. Once in final mode, changes to geometry will not be reflected in the renderer unless you hit the reload button. There are some settings you can tweak for final render mode, such as disable camera movement so that way you don't accidentally move it while its rendering and force the renderer to restart.

For example I think you can disable sub-d in live mode, but have your settings set to enable sub-d again once you hit the final render button. So some of the differences between modes will be dependent on how you set up live/final mode in your preferences.

Final render is when you are done making changes and want to leave the render alone to process. It's not working in the current version, it does some strange things to props and clothing.

in final render mode you can still toggle post processing and imager settings without it restarting the render. You can increase the max sample size too but most other settings would result in the render restarting.

[larsmidnatt]

That would make at least two people, as I posted earlier that I was wondering if anyone else had this issue (it was at the end of a wall of attempting to be helpful text, so don't feel bad if you missed it). I reported it to t_3, but no info on cause as of yet. At least I know it's not just me now, lol.

I am also having that issue.

[t_3]

Final render is when you are done making changes and want to leave the render alone to process.

thanks for putting it together!

there will be an additional thing with 2.16: it has a new kernel parameter "coherent ratio" that speeds up direct lighting and pathtracing kernels by another 5-15%; the (only!) downside is strange color artifacts during the first few s/pix, so you usually will keep that off while tweaking. in the next version final rendering will also turn that setting on automatically - for the knowing it'll still save the clicks to adjust that parameter manually (or to forget about it), for ppl that don't care that much about kernel settings it just gives a nice speed boost.

the next version is also going to have simpler (and more fine grained) performance throttling for the gpus, and simplified setup when using final; in other words you can choose to disable throttling when doing final renders, and get another speed boost in return.

so, like larsmidnatt already said, the idea is to have a switch that sets anything up for best possible render performance with one click - when doing the final render...

[DrHemulen]

Hey t_3!

Larsmidnatt and I have been doing some digging into the geografting issue here: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=40978
There's a workaround which might shed some light on some of the issue, as well as new problems introduced with 2.1

I can't figure out when to use the error reporting form, and when to post here? The reporting form seems a lot more structured, but often we're not even sure if what we're describing is an issue, and the discussions here are useful.

Is there a place where we can see reported and confirmed issues?

Would it be possible to have a subforum for bugs, so we can have a subject for each?

[larsmidnatt]

Hey t_3!
Is there a place where we can see reported and confirmed issues?

Would it be possible to have a subforum for bugs, so we can have a subject for each?

I thought about something like this too, but more organization means more time devoted to management. But I agree if there was a simple way to see what is on the bug list I would know whether to open certain tickets up.

[kraken]

Under the system tab, there is an array of import/export options

That worked great for imports, but too "verbose" for exports (as in it export all materials - even the extraneous ones). Would be nice to export just the few that are worth saving instead of 184.

I was working on a SSS material in OCSA and came up with a neat looking material and tried to import it into OCDS. It imported just fine, except it doesn't render properly. I assume that will be fixed in the future.

Thanks again for the suggestion, I forgot all about that tab.

[larsmidnatt]

BTW While 2.x pre-release 5 has it's quirks, I'm starting to migrate to it over 1.0. Which says a lot...I'm sure I've spent more time in 1.0 than anybody at this point.

1.2 just didn't work out for me, not enough new features to offset the new issues and learning how to overcome them. But 2.x has tons of new great features and for many of the issues I am successfully finding workarounds or ways to avoid them happening(which is basically why I survived with 1.0 so long). So While I don't have all my character materials I did spend the past week+ making new characters to get familiar with the new verbose and very dense plugin. It's great in a way t_3 is packing all the Octane features into the plugin but it does become hard to read and an eyesore(materials don't have a good visual hierarchy for example). But I'll have to deal lol.

I'm going to try recreating one of my old character materials from 1.0 in 2.x. I had issues with the results matching when I tried this in 1.2 so maybe I'll have better luck this time.

Oh and I spent some time this week reading about many of the other plugins...and was surprised at how much we get compared to some of the others. I mean there are at least 2 of them that don't even display the gpu temperatures...And while we may want instancing to work, other plugins don't support some core features of the host software either. So just something to consider...

[sikotik13]

I won't lie, I was adamant about 1.2 until this pre-release as well for similar issues (missed the 1.0 boat). I do find that materials convert from 1.2 to 2.15 just fine, not that that helps you, with the exception of pretty complex templated things, which are often easily addressed in NGE (it likes to create phantom nodes and link that to the output, odd, but kind of expected from a conversion). I have yet to really find myself in need of instancing, but I could see where some people might want it for certain scenes, like kraken. I have also similarly noticed that we really do get a lot more features (even just counting ones that actually work as intended) than a lot of the other plugins. Quite pleased with all of the thought that's gone into features available, and wish I could be more helpful in fixing some of the more troublesome ones.

I seriously still wonder what the hell Daz changed in geografts to make them so different between Genesis and G2. Given that in every version of OcDS I've used this problem has been persistent in only affecting G2 so severely, they had to do something to mat zones or something, or none would work on any figure. The part of my brain that refuses to accept there is no (likely simple) reason nags me about it constantly.

[DrHemulen]

Yeah it's odd. They can't have changed geografts globally or it would hit everything. It's not in the way the grafts are created either, it's exactly the same procedure.
Maybe there's some kind of autoupdate in DAZ that only kicks in with G2, that messes things up?

[Spectralis]

Didn't DAZ rename all the material zones in G2? Could that have had an effect on geografting?