OTOY Forums

When I set up an animation in DAZ Studio at 30 FPS does the Octane plugin use these settings or do I need to specify FPS in the plugin "animation" window? In the plugin animation window the sec/frame is set to 60. Do I need to change this to 30 or will the plugin use the DS project FPS setting?

The reason I'm asking is that 60 FPS is going to take twice as long to render as 30 FPS. I'm creating an animation that is 1920 x 1080 at 500 maxsamples. The DAZ default 30 FPS is more than enough FPS for my animation so I want to ensure Octane plugin renders that many FPS and no more or no less.

I'd also like to know what the different animation image saving settings mean. I've been saving animations as PNG16 but would EXR offer any benefits over PNG? Does the type of file I save affect render times?

this setting is actually not meaning "frames per second" but "seconds per frame"

means if you activate this setting, the plugin renders a frame not to the set amount of maxsamples but a fixed time instead; c<n be used to get predictable render times if the frame content/time to reach maxsamples is very different.

the fps setting from studio is just taken as it is; if you set it to 60, render out the animation, you'll need to playback (or encode) the sequence with 60fps (otherwise id would be slow motion for example). the only thing the plugin does is to recalculate cue point frame numbers, if you change the fps in studio.

regarding file formats: png16 is pretty slow when saving (can take a couple of seconds depending on the image size), exr is faster but much bigger. to save 1 minute 1080p/60fps in exr, you will need approx. 18gb space with png16 around half the size, 100% jpegs will take only ~2 gigs.

because of space concerns, and because final encoding into mp4/wmv/whatever video format will reduce the size by about another factor 10-20 (given you did output jpegs already), i'd say a 100% jpg is pretty ok as "raw" master for editing/encoding...

Thanks for your detailed explanation. I'm not too concerned atm about how much space the files take up. What I'll do is decide on the format on a case by case basis. If I plan to do a lot of compositing with the animation after render then I'll save in a higher quality format. If not then 100% JPG will do.