C4D's Net Render?

[cslayden]

Hi,

I run an animation studio, and I've been looking for a solution like Octane to upgrade the farm.

I have ~20 machines on our farm currently. Let's say I equip them with CUDA-enabled cards and a license of Octane on each one. Will Cinema 4D's Net render be able to take advantage of Octane, to have each machine render its own frame stack segment of the whole? Because if so I'm ready to drop the cash to do it.

Also, does Octane come with the plugin for Cinema 4D, or do I have to find that somewhere else?

[abstrax]

Hi,

I run an animation studio, and I've been looking for a solution like Octane to upgrade the farm.

I have ~20 machines on our farm currently. Let's say I equip them with CUDA-enabled cards and a license of Octane on each one. Will Cinema 4D's Net render be able to take advantage of Octane, to have each machine render its own frame stack segment of the whole? Because if so I'm ready to drop the cash to do it.

Also, does Octane come with the plugin for Cinema 4D, or do I have to find that somewhere else?

To your second question: Yes, there is a plugin available for CINEMA 4D:

To your first question: Unfortunately this is not possible. At least not yet. The current render plugin allows you to render animations on one Octane license only. I really haven't thought about distributing the rendering of animations similar to NET Render. -> I have to think about a bit more first.

Cheers,
Marcus

[cslayden]

Thanks for the response. The thing is, we create 10-15 minutes of High Def animation in a month sometimes, and the high throughput frequently requires high-speed turnaround on individual animations, thus the need for a 100-core farm. Octane looks the most promising of any C4D-compatible rendering engines out there, and I definitely want to try it out because C4D's native render just can't make things look real. The only problem is that if I can't work it into a studio pipeline, that's a deal-breaker.

I have to ask myself: if we get a feature length film, can I just say "yes", and know that I can split up 5-minute HD scenes amongst my whole farm? Or will each cut absolutely have to work on a single node, thereby drastically decreasing our efficiency.

I know there are multi-GPU processing options out there like the NVidia Tesla-- again another thing to consider now with Octane. But if I can incorporate it into my current system, there's simply no question about it. I have to get it.

[abstrax]

Thanks for the response. The thing is, we create 10-15 minutes of High Def animation in a month sometimes, and the high throughput frequently requires high-speed turnaround on individual animations, thus the need for a 100-core farm. Octane looks the most promising of any C4D-compatible rendering engines out there, and I definitely want to try it out because C4D's native render just can't make things look real. The only problem is that if I can't work it into a studio pipeline, that's a deal-breaker.

I have to ask myself: if we get a feature length film, can I just say "yes", and know that I can split up 5-minute HD scenes amongst my whole farm? Or will each cut absolutely have to work on a single node, thereby drastically decreasing our efficiency.

I know there are multi-GPU processing options out there like the NVidia Tesla-- again another thing to consider now with Octane. But if I can incorporate it into my current system, there's simply no question about it. I have to get it.

At the moment the connection CINEMA 4D -> Octane is quite limited. The exporter tries to export C4D materials as good as possible, but OBJ/MTL is a major bottleneck and there is not much we can communicate to Octane via OBJ/MTL. After exporting, you usually have to setup/tweak lights and materials in Octane. On the other hand, the Octane materials are becoming more and more powerful now, so I guess there will be a solution in the future for this problem.

Anyway, for now the workflow is: Is export to OBJ/MTL (via the exporter), launch Octane, tweak/setup lights and materials and save the scene. After that you can change the geometry and the next export will relink the already existing Octane scene file (with all the nice materials and lights) with the new OBJ/MTL file, i.e. the materials of the Octane scene file override the materials of the MTL file.

What that means for distributed animation rendering: At the moment I can think 3 potential solutions:

1. A script based solution, where the frames are pre-exported as OBJ/MTL combos and the according batch scripts for each render node are generated. Each batch script is then distributed to the corresponding render node
2. Maybe it's possible to write a plugin that runs on the NET render clients and hooks into the render pipeline and does the rendering in Octane and then reads the rendered image file and feeds it back into the render pipeline.
3. Maybe there is also a way to use the new Melange library that is available with C4D R12 for distributing the C4D-to-Octane export.

All the above are just ideas and none of those might work. I guess, for now it may be still a bit too early to think about feature length films via Octane, but I will have a look into distributed animation rendering. Sounds definitely like an interesting task

Cheers,
Marcus

[cslayden]

Marcus, I really appreciate your attention to my post.

1) So from what I can gather from the gallery, it looks like morph states, displacement and deformers all come out geometry-baked on a frame-by-frame basis and are rendered faithfully (based on the materials settings within Octane) to frames for animations. Is that so, or is there another step involved? The real question is, can I animate my geometry any way i want within Cinema 4D and have Octane render it, or are there limitations, such as particle emitter, displacement deformers, bends, spline-wraps and the like that don't survive the transfer?

2) is motion blur/depth of field something that can be adjusted and rendered out in Octane or must they be achieved as post-effects in photoshop or aftereffects, etc?

Thanks, Cameron

btw our studio is called Cosmocyte;

www.cosmocyte.com

[abstrax]

Marcus, I really appreciate your attention to my post.

1) So from what I can gather from the gallery, it looks like morph states, displacement and deformers all come out geometry-baked on a frame-by-frame basis and are rendered faithfully (based on the materials settings within Octane) to frames for animations. Is that so, or is there another step involved? The real question is, can I animate my geometry any way i want within Cinema 4D and have Octane render it, or are there limitations, such as particle emitter, displacement deformers, bends, spline-wraps and the like that don't survive the transfer?

2) is motion blur/depth of field something that can be adjusted and rendered out in Octane or must they be achieved as post-effects in photoshop or aftereffects, etc?

Thanks, Cameron

btw our studio is called Cosmocyte;

http://www.cosmocyte.com

During the export the scene geometry is exported as it would be used by the C4D internal renderer, i.e. all deformer objects, all generator objects, object render visibility and layer render visibility are evaluated. All render effects like displacement, shaders, post-effects and so on are not exported. It's not possible at the moment. So, yes you can animate your geometry as you want and the exporter takes care of it. The exporter also splits up multi-material objects and converts non-UV texture mappings to UV texture mappings. The resulting texture mapping is similar to the UV texture mapping in the viewport. Explicit vertex normals of normal tags or split edges are also exported correctly. On the Octane side of things, there basically arrives a big polygon soup with each polygon having one material assigned. So all objects, groups, hierarchies and other things get lost, as they are not needed anyway.

During an animation export, the plugin exports one frame, launches Octane, waits until Octane finishes rendering and closes itself, then exports the next frame and so on. Actually the export of the next frame is already started 5 seconds after Octane has been launched. If there exists already an Octane scene file with the same name and directory as the OBJ/MTL file combo, Octane will relink the materials of the scene file with the OBJ/MTL file.

I hope that answers your first question. To your second question: DOF can be set up in C4D and exported, or you set it up in Octane. Motion blur is exported only as camera motion blur and at the moment you can't adjust the strength of it (for now the shutter is open 50% of a frame interval). Object motion blur is not supported. Mantra did some animations with a motion vector pass, rendered in C4D to full geometric motion blur. I don't know good or bad it works and how good or bad it works together with DOF. He can probably say more about this.

Cheers,
Marcus

[cslayden]

Thanks for the details, that definitely helps me with my evaluation. I'll definitely give octane a try once I get a CUDA card-- the renders are spectacular and if the learning curve is shallow enough (looks like it is) and I can get it into our pipeline, this could be a game-changer for my studio.

Cameron

[kubo]

..., this could be a game-changer for my studio.
Cameron

It truly is a "game-changer", it actually feels like playing instead of working (and I've always enjoyed my work)

[cslayden]

Slightly different capabilities question:

I know it's a little simplistic to ask, but does octane support subsurface scattering? I figured it would, but I couldn't find any outright statement that it did so I thought I'd make sure.

[kubo]

did you try the search? http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... ing#p16390 word from the man himself