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I know there is another post on these forums and some on the iToo website but they are not very clear at all in terms of what the current situation regarding getting these things to work together nicely regards materials. To save other people from pulling their hair out like we have been and to maybe help encourage a better solution for this to appear soon hopefully a post about our current understanding may be helpful to everyone.

1) We are using Octane 3dsmax v1.11c currently and ForestPro 4.0.2
2) Octane will ignore the materials that are assigned in the Forest Pro object roll out and that are applied to the whole ForestPro 3dsmax object (iToo has reported this as a bug to Octane and any status on this anyone?)
3) Octane will currently use the materials that are assigned to the source of your instance objects/template objects - if you are not using custom objects in Forest Pro and using its presets/built-in ones these instance source objects are in a hidden layer that ForestPro adds in 3dsmax
4) The Octane automatic material conversion (Button found in the Render Setup dialog under the Octane roll out) sometimes works on some forest Pro materials -(Again these are the materials on the hidden/frozen object layer Forest Pro adds). The main cause that causes the automatic material conversion to fail is the double sided material nodes that the Forest pro materials commonly use - if you remove them and just rewire them to use the front facing material and then use Octane's material conversion you will usually at least get something that is a usable start.
5) Given Octane not supporting double sided materials maybe it would be a good idea for Octanes' material conversion to choose the front facing material in double sided material nodes as at least a helpful hack (Could be an option in Octane's material conversion roll out perhaps to globally choose front or back facing material)
6) Of course it would be great if Forest Pack Pro shipped with awesome Octane material templates for the objects it ships with.


It would be great to hear an update from the Octane team and/or iToo on any progress in these areas if they could?

Hi, thanks for putting all info together. I will reply the questions directy related with iToo:

2) Octane will ignore the materials that are assigned in the Forest Pro object roll out and that are applied to the whole ForestPro 3dsmax object (iToo has reported this as a bug to Octane and any status on this anyone?)

That's it. Octane takes the materials directly from the Custom Objects, ignoring those defined in the Geometry list. This is a feature of the current engine, you can find the reply from Karba here: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 40#p128740

6) Of course it would be great if Forest Pack Pro shipped with awesome Octane material templates for the objects it ships with.

We should it for the other engines as well, so this may take some time. We also must solve some technical issues: e.g. in the current library there is a Max scene for each preset and engine, this is not efficient in terms of disk storage. We should find an alternative, before adding more engines.

Just a note that this has all got a lot better with the latest Forest Pro update

cybernoid wrote:Just a note that this has all got a lot better with the latest Forest Pro update

Thanks for the update.. Do we still have to do any work-arounds for the materials?