development update...

[t_3]

what is currently going on:

done or almost done:
- separated oc<>dz focal distance, aperture (f/stop) and dof switch
- additional oc f/stop slider, for those who prefer a real world value
- additional option to manually get the current focal distance from the daz camera

- much better preview in the image menu (pinned to the hovered entry, left or right wherever is space)
- additional current image view on selection ddbox mouseover
- open folder (windows explorer) of the current image
- directly open a map in an image editor of your choice
- reload current map (or multiple maps) from disk ... this was/is not quite as straight forward as i thought
- remove unused maps from the image menu
- unused maps will also be removed on save (so the image menu isn't that cluttered on open)

- "highlighting" of pins about to connect in the nge
- del key captured in the nge and in the octane mats tree = triggers the natural deletions there and leaves scene stuff alone
- animation forward working again

still in the works:
- saving/loading back of environment settings (the reason causing this to fail is however identified)
- there is an issue which "eats up" threads - this leads sooner or later to problems because things stop to work if they can't create new threads - this one needs to be completed before another update can be released.... i'll keep you posted.

[SimonJM]

Splendid! You deserve a break and some coffee and cake!


Ok, break over ... back to work!

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[larsmidnatt]

development has been good, thanks for the updates. A particular favorite recent addition was the camera lock function. Plugin is awesome

[bluerocket]

Thanks t_3.

Nice work...keep going

Regards

[t_3]

since the octane 1.13 plugin version was out just 2 days after this post, i decided to also include it; here are some features added to octane itself, which will be in the plugin also (copied from the standalone updates):

- The sky color in new daylight system can be customized.
- The sun radius can now be controlled in the daylight environment.
- Added Render priority, so you can slightly throttle down rendering on one or more GPUs. This improves system responsiveness when rendering on the GPU used for your display.
- Glare and bloom from the sun retain correct brightness while rendering more samples per pixel.
- Added control to make the bokeh in out of focus areas less smooth.
- Fixed transparent patches on glossy materials with bump or normal mapping.
- Fixed subsurface scattering for diffuse materials.

apart from that, there was some bigger change in how things work internally. this should take away quite some opportunities for octane to crash, if some things happen to fast or a little bit out of order (which may always be the case in DS).

last but not least a few changes to the list in the above post:

- texture reload will be in, but rather limited; currently the only way to reload texture maps is, to replace the map by something else, and load it back after that; this is rather inefficient, and also fails if the same map is used in more than one node (here it would be needed to change all occurrences to something else first, and afterwards replace all back to the map in question - this is of course even more inefficient). this will be addressed by octane itself, hopefully soon.

- cameras created from lights will be no longer created as octane cameras also; in addition such cameras will be cleaned out of the scene data on load (which was another possible crash issue).

- and in addition to the image editor button: an option to create a copy of the current texture on the fly (before loading it in the image editor); should save some clicks doing that manually, since the original image should be preserved in most cases.

i'm currently in testing mode, since there were quite some changes to the code (esp. because of octane 1.13 implementation) - which will need about another day...

[Sighman]

That's great news for the 1.13 integration. I was hoping for the SSS fix but I didn't want to ask... Great job!

[orion_uk]

Thanks for the update t_3, keep up the good work and thank you for your continued efforts

No mention of the animation (frame fwrd timing) there though, hows that going?

Looking forward to the next release/test

[SimonJM]

Oh, the teasing ...!
Sounds like an update that will be well worth the wait, however long that is (assuming it's not more than a few days )

[t_3]

No mention of the animation (frame fwrd timing) there though, hows that going?

that is sorted out since a week or so - apart from real world confirmation of course. since there were steadily issues dropping in (plus the 1.13 update) i didn't get to a point where an intermediate update would be feasible.

Looking forward to the next release/test

yes, me to. apparently we will see another octane sdk update tuesday .nz time...