OTOY Forums

Hi Everybody.

After playing a while with the standalone i decided to bye the package of the standalone and the autodesk package. After byuing it i read the whole forum, watched tons of tutorials for the standalone version and i think i am quit fit in it.

But playing in 3DS is a horror for me. It is COMPLETELY different than the standalone version and i cant find ANY tutorials! Are there any? I read hours in the forum but......are there any? After reading 3 hours i am no step forward in working in the 3ds plugin!

Sorry i cant understand it. Why does a develepoer not sit 4 hours in front of a computer, start camtasia and make some really good basic tutorials like the one georgeous guy did in the standalone version. 99% of all questions would be answered.

How to place hdri, how to make textures and combine them, how to set light, how to make different lightformers, how to move in scenes, how to play with materials, how to combine hdri with other lights...and so on.

please put some tuts on here...i get crazy cause of reading and reading.
it is sutch a great program, cause of this i baught it............now let me use it!


one really very important questians i have and please, please help me:

Is there any way to save the materials i download over the openliveDB?
When i download it, it makes me a folder in C:\Users\........\Documents\3dsMaxDesign\materiallibraries and the foldername is called like the materials. but inside these folders, are only PNG files.

When i click in the materials tab in the command line on : Material and ther on: put to library - it puts the material to a socalled Temp Library. When i right click and wanna copy it, copy to is greyed out! So is there any way to permanently download and save the Materials?

And how can i save Materials i made myself? Please help a newbie. I have to make a lot of renderings cause of christmas and i need some knowledge!

Have a nice weekend - Chris!

Anybody?..........Anything?........Hello?

It's rather logical that you have to know Max in order to work with Octane.
If you know Max then you really don't need any separate tutorials for Octane.

Those sub-folders Octane creates when downloading materials are for textures only. You can save Octane materials (like any other Max materials) to local material libraries (files with *.mat extension). Those libraries contain your material parameters and (for downloaded mats) textures will be taken from those folders Octane makes. So if you change the location of those folders you would have to re-assign every texture inside your custom *.mat library.

In order to save your temporary library you need to:
* Open "Material/Map Browser" from "Rendering" menu
* Right Click on "Temporary Library" and pick "Save As..."
* Save your library.

Suv

Hi Suv!

Thank you so much for your answer! I got it now - did not know that there is a right click on Temp Library...now everything is clear and i am now on to make myself some prepared Librarys for all Octane Materials. Thank you so much!

I work 1/2 year now in Max and switched from rhino. i use both, but max i normaly just used for modelling and rendering with vray. for vray i had a completely prepared material database, so i never had to make my own. So handling materials in max is very new to me. i am just used to drag n drop.

Knowing max does not mean knowing how to render. The plug in is good, but i wished some tutorials, cause of showing what it is really capable of. What can do direct light, what can do path trace, what can do PMC and whats the difference. how to adjust cameras, dof, aperture, angle. what is rayepsilon, what is rrprob, how does each and everything work together? how to make alpha channels and zdepth and reflection channels for post production in photoshop. how can hdri be used? how can work hdri light studio and octane workt together? how can hdri and emitters be combined....and so on and so on and so on. Somy many points - so many questions!

Of course you can all find out, if you experiment and play and try. But at least if there were just 5 or 10 good tutorials so many questions would be answered and everybody, even a newbie could start to work immideatly.

i am a jewelry business and have to make quick designs and good renderings of jewelry in a very short time with very good results. combining gold(metal), gemstones and a environment is very hard to render as you know, much more difficult than an interior. I have baught octane and played with it. it is a great tool and now i need to use it .

if you look at rhinogold, keyshot and other companys, you see everywhere a tutorial section where the customer can log in and learn. basics - normal user, experts, professional. i wished sutch a section where here too. the videos from the person who explaned the standalone version were super...perfect. 2 hours watch....play beside....aaaaaahhhh effect....work. worked erfectly. i just wished someone could do this to this plugin too, cause that would help o lot of people, i am sure.

Thank you again for your great help, i really appreciate it!

Kind regards Chris!

I'm glad I could help.

In your 1st post you wrote that you know how to work with standalone version.
Max plugin has the exact same parameters. Everything you've read about the standalone version goes to plugin too.
You can find the explanations from Octane help file.
Only thing that's different is, that you don't have to build your scene using nodes, but can render directly from Max.
Also there's a pdf file that comes with max plugin. It's a bit old, but it explains the things nicely.

Suv