OTOY Forums

I tend to have various, seemingly random problem ... I can't put my finger on what causes them:

- Very often, the material preview shows nothing .. just remains a black rectangle. But that already happened with the older version

- Sometimes, if I have a viewport set to "rendered", it won't update the rendered image. I can see the 3D cursor move, if I rotate the viewport etc, but the rendered picture itself remains the same, unmoving

- How can I easily update the LiveDB cache? Blend files from other machines try to access the local material with an obviously false path ... can this be autofixed (i.e. BOE should just download the used materials again and create the local DB)?

- Main rendering (F12) doesn't work if I have one viewport set to "rendered"

EDIT: Maybe BOE was unclear Anyone, please?

voon wrote:- Very often, the material preview shows nothing .. just remains a black rectangle. But that already happened with the older version
- Main rendering (F12) doesn't work if I have one viewport set to "rendered"

It is the same thing - OctaneServer can only do one render-job at one time. So either you render live-view or material-preview (or F12).

voon wrote:- Sometimes, if I have a viewport set to "rendered", it won't update the rendered image. I can see the 3D cursor move, if I rotate the viewport etc, but the rendered picture itself remains the same, unmoving

I need more info to make some conclusions about the reason... What is in Octane info-line, what is in console, perhaps some screenshots, etc...

voon wrote:- How can I easily update the LiveDB cache? Blend files from other machines try to access the local material with an obviously false path ... can this be autofixed (i.e. BOE should just download the used materials again and create the local DB)?

There is nothing to do with "LiveDB cache" here - LiveDB (on Blender level) caches nothing but material previews (that you see in LiveDB tree UI). This should be "fixed" in Blender's standard way - just pack the texture files into .blend file before opening it on some other machine... The same as with any other non-LiveDB material...

Or you can do one little trick which my wife uses in her work - she just creates shared disk "Z:" on all machines which connects to "<some path>/Textures" folder on main machine (even on that main machine itself which has this "Textures" folder locally), and in all scenes she always points the textures paths in nodes to files in that "Z:" disk folder (even on main machine itself which holds this "Textures" folder locally). So, when this .blend file is opened on any machine, it always has actual texture paths in any node, as all these paths go to "Z:/.../some_texture.png" path.
This makes these .blend files absolutely universal - it is just enough to create shared disk "Z:" on any machine to easily make this .blend renderable. So, if you have some new machine, it is just enough to create the shared disk "Z:" on that machine and point it to shared "Textures" folder on main machine - and voila, all works.

Hi,

I just bought the plugin yesterday so have very little experience with it. Great work and so far i love it! Money well spent. Seems much faster then cycles and the node set ups is much easier to understand. The render results so far i way better then cycles.

Anyway i have had a few problems. Quite often when i change a material i can not re-render. When trying to preview render black screen and an error message. If i re-start blender it works again. It is kind of annoying to have to re start blender every time i change a material. This seems to happen mostly when changing to materials in the live DB.

What could cause this? I have a feeling it has something to do with the octane server connection being lost?

igor73
Sorry, I can't guess the reason without detailed description of "what you do and what you get"... And what exact error messages you see is important too, not just "I see an error message"...

It seems to work better now for some reason. I now see a server restart message and after that the preview render loads. Don´t know why it started working. maybe just needed a re boot.