Proxy, LOD, Alembic Cache...

[ivankio]

Is there a workflow with octane to have an object light version on viewport and complex on render like Vray's proxies?
Maya Reference and Assets proxies have be loaded manually, distance LOD is not quite useful and wouldn't work anyway, and Alembic (although I've never touched it) is said to work only with MR and Maya Software. Am I missing something?

[TBFX]

Alembic works just fine with Octane within Maya but it doesn't really give you what you are after as it still loads the full geo into the viewport. The only thing you can do right now, to the best of my knowledge, is turn the display setting of your objects to bounding box, pretty useless for layout and visualization though.
I haven't yet had a play with the new scene assembly tools in Maya 2014 but these theoretically can help do this but at the moment I suspect you would still have to manually hit a switch somewhere to load all the hi-res geo before sending it to render in Octane.

T.

[ivankio]

Ah, I confused Alembic Cache with GPU Cache. But yeah, Alembic per se won't improve Maya scene interactivity with vegetation and hi poly furniture. There would also be the missing shading group hassle.

You made me think an alternative... set the HIPOLY OBJECT to bounding box and remove the LOWPOLY PROXY connection to the shading group. In mentalray, vray and maya render, objects without a shading group aren't rendered although they are visible in the viewport (also those objects with unsupported shaders are not rendered - like renderering octane material with mentalray).
That cheat would work with those renderers, but Octane's scene translator put default gray in every object that is not with an octane material.
As I understand, the only ways to make an object ignored by Octane is to set it to template, reference or invisible but then I wouldn't be able to easily populate and position such objects.

I don't see you guys struggling with this topic. How do you cope with it? When working with house plans, I populate them, put the design to test, and improve. These changes of design that troubles the interactivity of Maya.
I grew very found of vray proxies (even though they were not exactly visible as a lowpoly, it was much better than a bounding box - and they also suffer with the material link hassle).

As I understand the new GPU cache in Maya 2014 tries to approach this very problem. Has Octane something in the works for this matter, or am I unaware of a workaround that doesn't trouble you guys?

[TBFX]

You made me think an alternative... set the HIPOLY OBJECT to bounding box and remove the LOWPOLY PROXY connection to the shading group. In mentalray, vray and maya render, objects without a shading group aren't rendered although they are visible in the viewport (also those objects with unsupported shaders are not rendered - like renderering octane material with mentalray).
That cheat would work with those renderers, but Octane's scene translator put default gray in every object that is not with an octane material.
As I understand, the only ways to make an object ignored by Octane is to set it to template, reference or invisible but then I wouldn't be able to easily populate and position such objects.

That's a good idea. Could it work if you put your proxies into a non renderable render layer? I don't use render layers myself and can't test this right now but I believe Octane respects Maya's render layers. Could be worth a try.

T.