OTOY Forums

Hi JimStar,
first of all thanks for your great work with the plug-in. It's really great to work with it.

I have a question for you:
is it possible to get Carbon Scatter compatible with Octane for Maya?
Since they don't use native instances, at the moment it's only compatible with MR and VRay.
Since, as i know, this is the only professional plugin that allow to scatter vegetation in Maya (there are few scipts that allow to scatter instances, but they have limitation when things get too complicated) it would be great to have it compatible with Octane.

If i can remember right, there was a similar issue with Forest Pro for 3ds Max, and Karba made this plugin compatible with Octane for Max and now there are some beautiful images of a forest in the blog session of the forum.

It would be really great if we Maya user can also have a tool to realize such images with Octane for Maya.

Hope this can be possible.

I think Carbon Scatter should rather use maya instances than render specific proxies. Its more a Carbon Scatters fault to be that renderer specific implemented.

Is any form of instancing at all available inside maya that translates into the scatter geometry equivalent inside Octane stand alone?

I tried particle instancing an transform instancing and got no change in memory usage. Isn't it implemented yet or did I miss something?

The meshes in Maya after creation become "Global" type by default. In this case all the objects are loaded into Octane core as one big common mesh. In this case you get big GPU memory usage, but the fastest rendering speed.
If you change the mesh type to "Scatter" - this mesh will be instanced inside Octane core. In this case the memory usage will be much less (if you have a lot of these instances), but the more scatter meshes you have - the slower will be the render speed.
The "Movable proxy" mesh type - is the same as "Scatter". It is usable for "Movable proxy" animation mode. In this mode only "Movable proxy" meshes will be reloaded into Octane core every frame.

Thanks for the info! For future reference if anyone gets curious as I got...

As far as my tests went:
- A 10k poly mesh scattered 100 times is equally fast as
- A 40k polymesh scattered 25 times
- The whole field set as global would render only about 10% faster.

A happy day for CG grass and me. Never before had really the chance to trouble with the scatter of it.