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I currently use Daz Studio for scene setup and obj export for some of my Octane tests but I'm kinda interested now in trying some animations. I have access to Blender, DS, and Sketchup, which can all animate to some degree, but of the three only Blender and Sketchup currently have plugins in development. While I will probably learn how to animate in Blender at some point in time, I also noticed that the RIB file format is on the todo list for Octane 1.0 full release. DS can animate and render to RIB and so, assuming DS exports animations in its RIB export, would this mean that I could use DS to animate and then get those animations into Octane via RIB? I'm kinda curious what the pro's and con's would be to this approach over using an animation package that already has an Octane plugin. RIB file format is an industry standard but I'm kinda curious how it would fit into a pipeline that renders in Octane when most of the big name animation packages will have plugins.

Hi,

RIB will follow later on and will replace a part of the scripts.
It will just replace the OBJ part as a RIB part with all the additional features it supports (better materials, instancing, transforms, etc...)

Radiance

Obj import can take standalone files and do still renders without a plugin but not animations. I guess what I really wanted to know was whether RIB import would do both stills and animations without needing an Octane Plugin for the program that generated the file.

Would a standalone RIB file be limited to just stills in this case or would it be able to render the animation by itself? I noticed in one of the demonstration videos for using Octane with Maya that Octane seemed to be turning itself on and off after every frame was finished and I was kinda wondering if the reason it did that was because of the Maya plugin.

The reason it does that is that the host application exports each frame as a new obj file. The octane file needs to close and reload in order to reload the obj file into the same scene.

Whether or not animations will be supported through RIB, or collada, or whatever, is still up in the air. We are on the bleeding edge of gpu rendering here. I would imagine that loading an RIB or collada file in, with animation data, would greatly increase the file size being loaded into the GPU, thus lowering the amount of room for textures and geometry and whatnot. Don't get me wrong, I want to see it too as I generally render long animated sequences and the exporting or each frame, and loading of octane, over and over eats away at the great render times I get.

I hadn't thought about that but had been thinking that Octane would be dynamically loading only what it needed from the RIB file. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what they can do with it.