OTOY Forums

I cannot figure out how to export materials and lights from C4D to Octane.

Where are they? Is this a limitation of using C4D with Octane?

Thanks,
Rob

ozmo3d wrote:I cannot figure out how to export materials and lights from C4D to Octane.

Where are they? Is this a limitation of using C4D with Octane?

Thanks,
Rob

Lights are not exported yet. I will add this in the next release planned for this weekend. As Octane supports only area lights only area lights will be exported. And because OBJ/MTL doesn't support lights, area lights will be exported as normal objects with their own special material. You will then have to change the material to an emissive material in Octane.

Materials are exported, but no shaders and only the color/image textureof specific channels (color, reflection, specular, bump, alpha), as a lot of the functionality of C4D materials can't be exported via OBJ/MTL. The current workflow is that the exporter tries to export the materials of the 3D application to Octane as good as possible, but this is usually only a placeholder as you have to setup/tweak the materials in Octane (which works quite differently than say C4D).

Cheers,
Marcus

Is all this info documented anywhere?

I really don't think I would have bought a license just yet if I had realized the limitations to this extent

Unless I'm missing something, the videos within the video section of this site certainly don't portray these limitations.

I guess I should have played with the demo a little more. That will teach me

ozmo3d wrote:Is all this info documented anywhere?

I really don't think I would have bought a license just yet if I had realized the limitations to this extent

Unless I'm missing something, the videos within the video section of this site certainly don't portray these limitations.

I guess I should have played with the demo a little more. That will teach me

The info is documented all around the forum, and probably all of the reviews done by others, like on vimeo and youtube..

Usually when you buy a product, first thing people show you are the limitations, come one, what do you think, still you can get results you see in the gallery..
Make the best of the program, arion render has the same limitations and is slower, and costs 799euro, and most of the unbiased rendering engines don't have lights, only light emmiters only area lights..
Make the most of your 100 euro, and learn how to use it because it's going to be a huge asset when the software gets "polished" and up to speed with inovative technology..
And this c4d to octane plugin is one of the simplest exporters for c4d to external renderer that I have used and it's fast and simple..

About the shaders: it only exports textures made from pictures right, but you can do this nice little trick, just open your preview material box inside c4d, right click on it and open in new window, then expand it to full screen and change the material preview object to "plane" so you'll have the shader rendered accross the screen, then just do the old window capture alt+prt scr button press, and load it inside photoshop or whatever and crop it out, and re use it in octane - it works nicely, tryed it with some materials of people that were default in c4d, and there were no seam marks or anything..
See octane c4d exporter does a pretty good job anyway, I know other exporters are so shitty and tyresome to convert, but inside octane you can convert all materials in a couple of minutes, it's faster to do it than in c4d..
Enjoy it man.

Thanks for the lengthy reply acc24ex. Also thanks for the C4D screenshot tip

I see now that I did jump the gun. After taking a little time to work things out I now see what a wonderful thing Octane is and will be.

Thanks again,
Rob

abstrax wrote: Lights are not exported yet. I will add this in the next release planned for this weekend. As Octane supports only area lights only area lights will be exported. And because OBJ/MTL doesn't support lights, area lights will be exported as normal objects with their own special material. You will then have to change the material to an emissive material in Octane.

FYI, the Maxwell Render plugin for C4D exports omni lights as spheres with an emissive texture. (I never got it to work though, they would just show up as black balls messing up my shadows Just an idea.

This is easy to implement into the render plugins for octane as well.
User makes his lights the places he wants and the exporter handles emitter generation as well as export.

Ill bring this up in the proper area.

[gk] wrote:This is easy to implement into the render plugins for octane as well.
User makes his lights the places he wants and the exporter handles emitter generation as well as export.

Hi gk,

Are you suggesting this is easy for the Octane developers to implement?

Or am I missing something?

thanks,
Rob

colorlabs wrote:

abstrax wrote: Lights are not exported yet. I will add this in the next release planned for this weekend. As Octane supports only area lights only area lights will be exported. And because OBJ/MTL doesn't support lights, area lights will be exported as normal objects with their own special material. You will then have to change the material to an emissive material in Octane.

FYI, the Maxwell Render plugin for C4D exports omni lights as spheres with an emissive texture. (I never got it to work though, they would just show up as black balls messing up my shadows Just an idea.

+1 that's what I noticed, I think all of the unbiased renderers work that way, they export lights as orbs with emmissive materials..

Hey abstrax, why don't you make the "illuminance" channel turn into light emissive material, that seems like the most logical choice when I turned my on hoping it would transfer to octane. You get the same result when you set the illumination to a high number and turn GI on..