Octane exporter for C4D version 0.03
Posted: Sun Jun 06, 2010 11:47 am
Hi all,
as already announced, this is version 0.03 of the exporter to Octane. It adds a material conversion to MTL materials, which will be imported by Octane
As OBJ/MTL materials are a very old standard there is only a few things that can be stored in those materials. That means, many parameters of the C4D materials don't get exported. It's just not possible. Octane has also a lot more material parameters than OBJ/MTL materials. That means, to get really nice results you will probably end up tuning most of your materials in Octane. But this shouldn't be a big problem as relinking allows you to change your C4D scene and then update your Octane scene.
So we have two conversion processes here: One from C4D to MTL and one from MTL to Octane which will result in these rules:
- If the C4D material has no reflection, no specular channel and no transparency, it will become a diffuse Octane material.
- If the C4D material has a reflection or specular channel, but no transparency, it will become a glossy Octane materials.
- If the C4D material has transparency, it will become a specular Octane material.
- If a bitmap texture is selected in a C4D material channel, it will be exported using relative image paths. If not, the color of the channel gets exported, if available.
- The color channel of a C4D material becomes the diffuse channel in the Octane material.
- If the reflection channel is enabled, it will be exported as specular channel in the Octane material. If no reflection channel is enabled, the specular channel is used as a fallback, if available.
- OBJ materials can only store a transmissive filter. The transparency color of the C4D material will be stored there. No bitmaps are possible here.
- The refraction index of the transparency channel of the C4D material gets exported, too.
- Alpha channel bitmap and bump channel bitmap will exported, if available.
The plugin does also a reverse gamma correction to compensate color desaturation in Octane due to gamma correction during tone mapping.
There is more to write, but I guess, give it a try. If you have Riptide Pro, I would be very interested in a comparison of the exported materials of the two plugins. The reason is, that the MTL specification is very crude and "unprecise", which made me guess a lot of things. As everyone seems to be happy with the Riptide Pro material export, I would like to use it as a reference.
These are the PC builds of the plugin:
CINEMA 4D R9.6 (32/64bit): CINEMA 4D R10.1 - 11.0 (32/64bit): CINEMA 4D R11.5 (32/64bit): These are the Mac builds of the plugin:
CINEMA 4D R9.6 (32bit): CINEMA 4D R10.1 - 10.5 (32bit): CINEMA 4D R11.0 (32/64bit): CINEMA 4D R11.5 (32/64bit): Tomorrow I will do no coding, but after tomorrow I plan to fix any material export problems that have popped up and then start with the animation export.
EDIT: As a lot of people still need support for polygon selections of texture tags and an automatic conversion of non-UVW mapping types to UV mapping, I will focus on this, before I start with animation export.
Happy rendering,
Marcus
as already announced, this is version 0.03 of the exporter to Octane. It adds a material conversion to MTL materials, which will be imported by Octane
As OBJ/MTL materials are a very old standard there is only a few things that can be stored in those materials. That means, many parameters of the C4D materials don't get exported. It's just not possible. Octane has also a lot more material parameters than OBJ/MTL materials. That means, to get really nice results you will probably end up tuning most of your materials in Octane. But this shouldn't be a big problem as relinking allows you to change your C4D scene and then update your Octane scene.
So we have two conversion processes here: One from C4D to MTL and one from MTL to Octane which will result in these rules:
- If the C4D material has no reflection, no specular channel and no transparency, it will become a diffuse Octane material.
- If the C4D material has a reflection or specular channel, but no transparency, it will become a glossy Octane materials.
- If the C4D material has transparency, it will become a specular Octane material.
- If a bitmap texture is selected in a C4D material channel, it will be exported using relative image paths. If not, the color of the channel gets exported, if available.
- The color channel of a C4D material becomes the diffuse channel in the Octane material.
- If the reflection channel is enabled, it will be exported as specular channel in the Octane material. If no reflection channel is enabled, the specular channel is used as a fallback, if available.
- OBJ materials can only store a transmissive filter. The transparency color of the C4D material will be stored there. No bitmaps are possible here.
- The refraction index of the transparency channel of the C4D material gets exported, too.
- Alpha channel bitmap and bump channel bitmap will exported, if available.
The plugin does also a reverse gamma correction to compensate color desaturation in Octane due to gamma correction during tone mapping.
There is more to write, but I guess, give it a try. If you have Riptide Pro, I would be very interested in a comparison of the exported materials of the two plugins. The reason is, that the MTL specification is very crude and "unprecise", which made me guess a lot of things. As everyone seems to be happy with the Riptide Pro material export, I would like to use it as a reference.
These are the PC builds of the plugin:
CINEMA 4D R9.6 (32/64bit): CINEMA 4D R10.1 - 11.0 (32/64bit): CINEMA 4D R11.5 (32/64bit): These are the Mac builds of the plugin:
CINEMA 4D R9.6 (32bit): CINEMA 4D R10.1 - 10.5 (32bit): CINEMA 4D R11.0 (32/64bit): CINEMA 4D R11.5 (32/64bit): Tomorrow I will do no coding, but after tomorrow I plan to fix any material export problems that have popped up and then start with the animation export.
EDIT: As a lot of people still need support for polygon selections of texture tags and an automatic conversion of non-UVW mapping types to UV mapping, I will focus on this, before I start with animation export.
Happy rendering,
Marcus
