OTOY Forums

This is the recommended thread for downloading, and posting any questions, suggestions or support queries for OctaneRender for ArchiCAD, build 1.11c (TEST RELEASE). This version is compiled against Octane 1.11, so see the requirements for that build regarding compatibility with your video card.

There is a substantial new feature in this release (saving rendertargets to a view), which has been complex to implement, so for the next week, pls only use this release for "testing" rather than "production" type work.

If you have a support issue, pls provide the following information:
- Operating System (ie. Win XP, Vista, 7, 8)
- 32 or 64 bit
- Amount of RAM
- Graphics Card(s) - model (ie. GTX 580, 3GB)
- Nvidia driver version
- ArchiCAD version (ArchiCAD -> Help -> License Information -> Version and Build Number
- OctaneRender for ArchiCAD version (ie. 1.02a)
- In the unlikely event of a crash, pls provide the dump report from the C:\Users\[username]\Graphisoft\BugReporting-[version] folder (on Win 7). Either post or email (to "paul at physicalc-consulting.com") the "ArchiCAD-XXXXXX-FATAL.RPT" file from this folder.

Change Log from release 1.11b
- Added ability to save a rendertarget to the current View (Additional Options menu item). Then whenever you render that view, that specific rendertarget for that view is used. The plugin only puts the custom rendertarget of the view into the Settings tab when you select the view in the ArchiCAD View Map. NOTE: This does NOT apply to photorendering (see next point).
- When photorendering, you can select the rendertarget to use via the Creative Imaging->Photorender Settings - where there is a new combo box that will give you the available views that have rendertargets (you need to have started the plugin in order to see these views). Selecting a view in this combo box will cause the photorender to use the rendertarget for that view. This applies when batch rendering too. Whilst it may seem odd to have this combobox in the Photorenderer settings - this was to only way to implement this functionality within the constraints of the ArchiCAD API.
- Cut/paste added to the Settings tab. You can cut and paste entire rendertargets - even whilst rendering.
- Adding export and import of rendertargets. Export you favorite IBL setups for later use. You can even import a rendertarget whilst rendering.
- Adding load status to indicate total scene loading progress
- New configuration item to set the maximum number of triangles. Increase this if you can a "too many triangles" error when loading a scene into Octane
- New configuration item which toggles scene refreshing when you change to a different 3d layout view
- NOTE: Due to configuration changes you will need to re-activate the plugin. My apologies for this inconvenience.
- NOTE: If you intend using the feature where if you open a scene in the Octane plugin, you can render a fly-through/sunstudy without needing to reload the geometry each frame....make sure you UNTICK the "refresh scene after view change" item in the configuration (since a photo render is effectively a view change)
- Added buttons on the Rendering tab to hide/show the Viewport whilst rendering

For more information...
- Read the manual
- Read the FAQ
- Watch the Introductory Tutorial Video
- Check the Facebook page
- Post your question on this forum thread

Troubleshooting
- GUI issues (lock-up/crash) on large scenes (ie. 4million polys) - potentially due to the Windows Vista/7 "Timeout Detection and Recovery" http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 87368.aspx. Settings can be changed using Regedit. The recommended setting for Octane are registry setting HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\GraphicsDrivers, TdrLevel = 3, TdrDelay =10 (if these settings are not already there, rightclick the right panel -> New -> DWORD). You will need to reboot after changing these settings.

Limitations
- materials selection (to auto-populate the "Select from Selection" combo box on the Materials tab of the plug, does not work unless you are viewing a 3d perspective window.
- Changing an element's material will not automatically select the new material in the Materials tab of the plugin. You will need to select another element, and then re-select the original element to get the "Select from Selection" combo box to populate the new material
- To use the material picker (Materials Tab -> "Select from Selection") on Curtain Wall objects, put the Curtain Wall in edit mode
- The ArchiCAD Perspective camera roll angle is not transposed to the Octane thinlens "up" pin. If you need to rotate the render, manually adjust the "up" vector.
- Image map rotation is not current supported by OctaneRender, so any rotation of texturemaps in ArchiCAD materials is ignored in the texture conversion to Octane.
- GDL materials of the same name, for different objects, are merged to be one Octane material
- On ArchiCAD 14, selecting from the "Select from Selection" popup is disabled (ie. you cannot choose from the materials of the currently selected scene element). Instead, you will need to select materials in the plugin Materials tab via the "Select from Materials" popup.
- On ArchiCAD 14, when doing a photorender, sun study or flythrough, the render viewport may not display the render as it progresses. This is a GUI display issue, and the render is working as per normal

Download Links
Download the plugin from the following links:
- OctaneRender for ArchiCAD 14 1.11c beta (32 & 64 bit)
- OctaneRender for ArchiCAD 15 1.11c beta (32 & 64 bit)
- OctaneRender for ArchiCAD 16 1.11c beta (32 & 64 bit)

Paul

Hi Paul,

In 11.1c when trying to change material with Live DB does not work.
Went back to 1.11b3 to check and it works.

greetings, Jeroen

UPDATE:
I got another problem in 1.11b3 and 1.11b2: the settings are not available and therefor the plugin does not work.
So I installed v1_10beta and same problem.

I deleted the octane.dll, gmx, apx and .dat file,
reinstalled 1.11b3.. did not solve anything.

Hi Jeroen (and everyone else!)

I have updated the installers from the first post in this thread to rectify the above issues.

1.11c2
- Fixed issue where LiveDB material was loading into the rendertarget instead of the material
- Fixed issue where clicking the Resolution Lock button was not resizing the render resolution (if unlocking the resolution)

Paul

Hi Paul,
Thanx for your quick response again, works fine again.
Greetz,

Hi Paul,

I got suddenly the same problem as Ruppet with the missing camera, environment, etc. in the settings; they're missing in only one project
and it happend from one day to another, before - it worked of course. I think I got a simple error massage like "No Texture" or something and
then saved & closed the project and did something different. After opening it again, the problem appeared.

Another annotation/problem relating to the material names I have:
Everytime i start "ocatning" at a new project I have always a bulk of materials to go through;
Octane delivers the error "Texture not found [Archicad material name]" and I have to reduce the chars of the name down to 31,
then the error massage shows the next material and so on. It's time-consuming and unhandy for me, don't know - am I'm the only one ?
The funny thing: when i rise up the char number in a material name then again, there's no error massage and all works fine.

And a little proposal: would it be possible to add "use alphachannel" (beside "alphaimage") at the node type, e.g. for opacity/bump ?
It should use then the alphachannel of the texture as defined in "diffuse".

I'm eager to hear from you...
Greetings,
A

I got suddenly the same problem as Ruppet with the missing camera, environment, etc. in the settings; they're missing in only one project
and it happend from one day to another, before - it worked of course. I think I got a simple error massage like "No Texture" or something and
then saved & closed the project and did something different. After opening it again, the problem appeared.

Can you pls tell me which version of the plugin you were using when you got this? 1.11c or 1.11c1?

Another annotation/problem relating to the material names I have:
Everytime i start "ocatning" at a new project I have always a bulk of materials to go through;
Octane delivers the error "Texture not found [Archicad material name]" and I have to reduce the chars of the name down to 31,
then the error massage shows the next material and so on. It's time-consuming and unhandy for me, don't know - am I'm the only one ?
The funny thing: when i rise up the char number in a material name then again, there's no error massage and all works fine.

The "Texture not found" message is not related to the number of characters in the material name. Could you supply a screenshot of the message pls?

And a little proposal: would it be possible to add "use alphachannel" (beside "alphaimage") at the node type, e.g. for opacity/bump ?
It should use then the alphachannel of the texture as defined in "diffuse".

I'm not absolutely sure what you mean here. Is this possible to do with Octane Standalone? I don't think you can pull just the alphachannel from a diffuse pin and use it in the opacity/bump pin.

Paul

New version posted - pls see http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 5&p=135390.

Paul

Hi Paul,

Can you pls tell me which version of the plugin you were using when you got this? 1.11c or 1.11c1?

It was 1.11c2.
I've Installed the newest now - 1.13a - same problem with that specific project (Shall I upload it perhaps, so you can check it yourself?)

The "Texture not found" message is not related to the number of characters in the material name. Could you supply a screenshot of the message pls?

For me it's not logical, too. But it's a "trick" for my to get rid of these errors and finally get it rendering (with all needed textures included etc.) in the Octane-viewport.









The alphachannel-thing:
That what I originally meant is in fact already implemented. It's the node type "alphaimage".
For some reason it didn't work at all up to now. I've made some tries now and it works - of course.
So it was my fault or just one of the last updates that make it run properly on my machine.
Sorry if i caused some confusion in it.

However it would be perhaps possible to automatically take-over the settings from Archicad ?


and if a alphachannel-option in the Archicad material is checked, let it takover as a "default" setting


(I used 2 different materials for the screenshots but I hope you get the point)

And unfortunately a new problem:
Almost non-stop at opening the viewport I get a "Render Fail - Cuda devices need to be Reset. Closing viewport"-massage.
Neither the Reset in the "Devices"-ribbon doesn't help nor restarting the computer.
How can I solve this ? Never had it before (till the update to 1.13a) !

I'm slightly starting to hate my computer

Nevertheless nice Greetings
A

BfPuVAK

Thanks for your detailed information.
I suspect that issue was caused by 1.11c (the version prior to 1.11c2) which have a LiveDB bug which could cause this. For the scene you are having problems with, did you have 1.11c installed at some point and did you possibly use the LiveDB?

Regardless, I would like to see the file you have having problems with pls. You can even delete all the geometry from the scene if you like. If it is < 5 Meg in ZIP format, email to [email protected]. Then I can code the plugin to handle that situation better.
I will look into this. Material name > 30 characters are supposed to be caught when the plugin starts, not when loading the scene into Octane - so I will fix that.

You are the second person who has found the 30 character material name limit too small. I can extend to 40 or 50 characters but that creates problems with previously saved .pln files (where the material name is 30 characters). Let me look into a resolution.
The quickest way to manually do this is to copy the "diffuse" texturemap and paste it to the "opacity" pin, and then change the node type from "image" to "alphaimage". I will also see if I can automatically do this for ArchiCAD materials which have the alphachannel effect transparent ticked. I am reluctant to change the screen format at this stage, but will do so if the automatic conversion does not work well enough.

Paul

I've made the change for the alpha channel transparency connecting to the opacity. Very nice! Should I also capture when the "bump mapping" is ticked and use that as the bump map source?

I will upload once I've received that scene from you BfPuVAK to fix the rendertarget issue.

Paul