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First results and experience with Octane

Posted: Mon Jul 22, 2013 4:46 pm
by DIO
Hi everyone,

I downloaded the demo of octane at the beginning of last week and bought it two days later.
I really like octane and the workflow with my GTX 260 for desktop and a GTX 570 2,5 GB solely for
rendering is very fast although it is not the fastest card out there.
I would like to show my results and talk about the problems I had and the questions I didn´t really find enough about here in this forum.

The picture with the litte toy-scifi-soldier under the table was the first scene I tried. It is lit with a HDRI map rotated so that the sun is shining through the windows and additional simple plane emitters using diffuse mat with blackbody emission. There is no glas in the windows. Here I first found out that Path Tracing doesn´t need to look better. The picture on the left side is rendern with PT using 2500 samples(8 max depth) and
on the right side Direct Light with Ambient Occlusion. I think the right one looks much better with nicer contrast overall and the shader on the soldier looks more shiny and more like metal than in the PT picture. Both rendered pretty quickly, PT didn´t take so much longer than direct light. I think about 1/2 hour for PT and 15 min on Direct Light on Full HD. I had no problems with fireflys at all.

The second scene is the dawn scene reading corner. I really had problems with this one.
The lighting is made by a octane sun/sky and the interior lamp is using a blackbody emission material assigned to the bulb mesh. There is a weak octane rectangle light behind the camera giving some basic lighting.
First of all I had to learn to set up glas with the right amount of opacity to still let the daylight through and on the other hand have some reflections on it.
I had massive problems with fireflys in this scene. They were all around the left side. But interestingly not in the areas where glossy reflections happend, so caustic blur had no real effect. The only way to get rid of them was to set hotpixel_removal to 0 and to render on PMC. It took about 6 hours on 1200x900 with PMC and 15000 samples to get this result. I was really wondering, what exactly caused the firefly problem. I don´t think it was because the sunlight had to get through the glas, because the fireflys were only in the area lit by the lamp.
It is a very long rendertime compared to the other two scenes an I still haven´t figured out why exactly I needed PMC here.

The third picture was a test of making a studio lighting. I made this car model a few years ago and just threw it into octane lighting it with octane lights and emitterplanes, which are also
used für reflections. The picture took about 2 hours on Full HD with PT with 5000 samples and 8 maxdepth.

Questions:
First of all: I´m using only 3dsmax plugin so far.

Is it somehow possible to prevent the Planeemitters used in the windows from blocking the HDRI light?
3dsmax object properties didn´t work. The only workaround I found was to reduce the opacity of
the emitter-material to geht both, HDR Light and emitter light mixed.
I tried portals in the windows but the had no effect at all ?

Where is the architectural glas in the 3dsmax plugin? Also I don´t have the fake shadows setting in specular material?

Is there a way to offset and rotate maps in the materials? There is only the scale function
in the image-texture map.

Why can´t I see the maps in the material editor preview?
I can see the final result of the material on the preview-sphere, but when trying to take a look
at f.e. a color corrected map it renders only black.

I can´t find the render elements in octane/max. Is this feature only in the standalone?

Will there be an exclude/include option für lights?

And finally ... can and will there be a region render? :)


I really love octane so far, and thinking about buying a used 580 GTX with 3 gb in Addition to
my 570. Both together will be fast enough for now. Need to check my cooling first though ;)

Thanks and cheers.

Cyril

Re: First results and experience with Octane

Posted: Mon Jul 22, 2013 5:42 pm
by MaTtY631990
Hi DIO, I will try to answer your questions best I can.
Is it somehow possible to prevent the Planeemitters used in the windows from blocking the HDRI light?
3dsmax object properties didn´t work. The only workaround I found was to reduce the opacity of
the emitter-material to geht both, HDR Light and emitter light mixed.
I tried portals in the windows but the had no effect at all ?
Are you using the octaneLights with the visible option off. This may help. To work with portals you need alphashadows enabled, but otherwise I don't think it might work. It Depends on the scene.
Where is the architectural glas in the 3dsmax plugin? Also I don´t have the fake shadows setting in specular material?
Are you using the latest plugin version. Fake shadows option will be their.
Is there a way to offset and rotate maps in the materials? There is only the scale function
in the image-texture map.
At the moment no rotation on image maps, but will most likely be a feature that will get added at some point.
Why can´t I see the maps in the material editor preview?
I can see the final result of the material on the preview-sphere, but when trying to take a look
at f.e. a color corrected map it renders only black.
Not to sure. Would you mind taking a quick snap and attach so i could help as I have not had this issue before.
I can´t find the render elements in octane/max. Is this feature only in the standalone?
Under kernel type their is an option to choose info channels.
Will there be an exclude/include option für lights?
At some point in time. I think depends on how many are after this feature.
And finally ... can and will there be a region render?
No mention from the team according to the feature request thread for this feature but based on the many people asking, it will with full certainty be added. Eventually.


And by the way some nice renders you have done. ;)

Re: First results and experience with Octane

Posted: Mon Jul 22, 2013 6:25 pm
by DIO
Hi,

thanks for very quick the help :)

Are you using the octaneLights with the visible option off. This may help. To work with portals you need alphashadows enabled, but otherwise I don't think it might work. It Depends on the scene.
Actually I used plane meshes with emiiter material. I don´t know why I didn´t use just octane lights for the sky portals in the windows. There shouldn´t be a difference or is there?
Are you using the latest plugin version. Fake shadows option will be their.
I have installed octane for max 1.10. I can´t find a newer one in the download section.
There is no fake shadow option in my specular or glossy materials.
Not to sure. Would you mind taking a quick snap and attach so i could help as I have not had this issue before.
Sure, I attached a picture. On the right side it should show the VizPeople_....jpg, but it just renders black. If I press the show end result button it works. But sometimes I would like
to see the result of my mix and multiply maps and not only the final material.
Under kernel type their is an option to choose info channels.
Ah ... nice. But that means, that I cannot render the final beauty image and the render passes
at the same time? I have to render my final image, let´s say with PT and afterwards the pass I
wish to use in post extra?

The exclude/include feature isn´t so important in my opinion, I somehow got used to it using
different renderers. Region Render would be very nice though. I mixed up to materials by accident and found out after rendering for 2 hours. It was only on one corner of the picture,
but I had to render the whole thing again. What I´m doing now is checking things in my scene from close distance using a flythrough-camera before rendering the final perspektive. Would
be nice to have 2 Titans for that ;)

Re: First results and experience with Octane

Posted: Mon Jul 22, 2013 10:16 pm
by MaTtY631990
The octaneLight has a visible option to turn on/off so you still the light from the emitter and the HDRI light which is what you want, you can try this. For the plugin just go straight to the forum for 3dsmax and you will see the latest release added there which is now 1.18. About the render passes, the answer is yes in that they are separate from the main render but we will probably see a new format in the future which be a single container with beauty + any passes we wish to use which would a lot better. Lastly the material showing black is a bug, as I just did a quick test in 3dsmax 2011 with the 1.18 release and it happens the same.

Thanks
Matt

Re: First results and experience with Octane

Posted: Mon Jul 22, 2013 11:18 pm
by DIO
Ahh .. the 3dsmax forum was somewhat hidden ;)

Thanks a lot. All questions answered :)
1.18 will be installed tomorrow.

Cheers