OTOY Forums

Hi there,

I'm a new Octane user.

I'm converting a scene over from Mental ray to Octane.
Theres a couple of 3D trees that I'm trying to get the alpha for the tree leaf to work.
I've used the simple diffuse material for now, diffuse bitmap loaded and loaded a alpha image texture with the black and white jpg into the opacity slot.
I can't get it to work, theres no cutout, its rendering as if there is no alpha mask.

Just

An alphaimagetexture node uses the alphachannel of the image as a texture, which is what you need if you have a PNG image with transparency. If you want to use a grayscale image as the opacity you need a floatimagetexture.

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Roeland

Thanks,

I should have realised, that works fine.

Hi Roeland, I have some more questions if you don't mind answering them

Is there any way to set a time limit ? I can only find a sample ray count.
I'm testing Octane for animation.

I'd like to set a time limit, go off do some work, come back, adjust the time again, hit render.
Come back again see it looks about okay, take down the amount of samples and us that for each frame.
At the moment I have to stand around wasting time to see when the noise will resolve.


Is there any type of GPU manager ? i like to assign a amount of frames to each GPU, instead of using all the GPU's for one frame.
Is there a resume feature ? I've set off a render, had a look at it realise it could do with more render time, load them up and continue rendering.

Is there anyway to create an outline shader ? like a toon render ?

There is only a samples count limit. I don't see what you would achieve with a time limit—you would need to stand around as well during the first renders.

As long as you have Octane open for a frame you can resume a render by increasing the sample count, but you can't save a render for resuming later.

There is no toon shader feature planned in Octane, that more something for non-photorealistic renderers.

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Roeland

roeland wrote:There is only a samples count limit. I don't see what you would achieve with a time limit—you would need to stand around as well during the first renders.

Thats the thing you don't have to stand around waiting for the render to finish.
For example with a time limit: I set it to 5 mins, go to another machine do some work, come back see what 5 minutes gets me.
Set it off for 10 minutes, go to another machine do some work.
At the moment I have to set a timer in the office to remind that I have a test render going, other wise I get to involved with my work an for get I have a render going.

Doing it by time I can tell if the animation is going to be doable, I can set it to 20 mins a frame, if 20 mins isn't going to be enough I can start adjusting settings or try another renderer.

Samples just doesn't tell me how long a frame is going to take to render.

Resuming a render for a sequence of frames would be great additional feature, I see cycles and maxwell are doing this.
This way I can set a low sample limit to get the frames out for a rough draft to show clients, to show them we are on the right track and I can start comping on the draft frames too.

cheers