OTOY Forums

I would be very interested in Octane, but I do most of my modeling in ZBrush and Vue Infinite for my scenes with characters. Therefore, I was wondering if anyone is developing a plug-in for both ZBrush and Vue Infinite? If not, does anyone know of when this might happen?

Otherwise, I really don't have a use in my pipeline without them.

Thanks.

ZBrush doesn't have a plugin API (that I am aware of), so I doubt it would be viable to do an Octane plugin for it. However you can ZBrush to Octane Standalone reasonably easy (via OBJ), and if you tweak the mesh in ZB, reload in Octane Standalone (I'm sure you've tried this already).

Your desire to have Octane shows exactly where it would fit into your pipeline. Allow me to illustrate how...

Cull all of your creations into Octane. Using the Live DB, get re-surfaced rather quickly for those things without a uv. UVs just map (said another way: they just work) And since ZB and Octane both only like one uv per object, all is good on that front.

Haven't used Vue in a long time. However, since you do, it is easy to surmise that you have a LOT of patience. Rendering out a skybox for Octane would be beautiful in lighting your scene. Exporting the terrain, uv mapped, ought to be easy enough, too.

Octane is a really easy renderer. And it starts from a very good spot for getting good images quickly. I wonder if you could get a cloud shape out of it for the fog stuff in Octane...

Oh yeah, give it a go for thirty days.

I am certainly going to try it, but I know others that are heavy ZBrush and/or Vue users that say it's a bit complex and not worth it unless it is supported.

The issues I have is that I import my characters into Vue Infinite in order to place them in the setting. While I can import some things from Vue manually, it's not the same as having the whole scene setup and bringing that into Octane, which is why I REALLY need a plug-in for native support.
Vue has really improved, especially the past couple of years and is much better to work with. In fact, if you are doing character scenes like I do, it does better than anything I have seen.

Right now, the only work around may be if you had Vue Extreme, which has a Maya plug-in for doing Vue native in that program. If I could get the characters into Vue inside of Maya, then possibly I could use the Octane Maya Plug-In for the render instead of VRay. But on the other hand, I am quite partial to VRay.

As I see things now, Octane may be really nice but I would need to buy an upgrade for Vue Extreme even if that method would work, which is yet unproven on this site. I just wish there was a lot more support for ZBrush and Vue since they are badly needed for those that rely on them like myself.

Depend of the polycount ZBrush can/must use to sculpt i would say a plugin for ZBrush isn´t practicable.
Sure, you can bake a normal map to a lowres mesh, but this workaround only to make a render is a little bit heavy.
So i think, an Octane plugin for ZBrush can only use 33% of the users.
And people which need a lowres mesh for games or others, make it to import it to another 3D application.

face