Advantages of using standalone?

[electric_eric]

Hi,

I've been using Octane for Lightwave for about a year now and have so far not rendered a single thing in the standalone version.

There is often talk of people exporting scenes to the standalone so I was wondering if there are any differences or advantages in using the standalone over the Lightwave plugin?

Cheers.

[mdharrington]

not really....

I started with the standalone....lightwave integration is way easier.

The only benefit is being able to use the community presets, and possibly more stable then Lightwave.

[geo_n]

Integrated renderers are always better to work with since you don't have to export scenes and redo almost everything in the standalone version. If it weren't for Juanjo developing the lw plugin I would not have used octane again because all my animation tests years ago was not successful and would hang at some point when rendering image sequences.

[BorisGoreta]

Stability wise LW is the same as Octane standalone because it uses the same dll. If something is crashing your GPUs the exported scene rendered in Octane will crash them too.

I don't get any GPU crashes with Octane. Only when I overclock them too much then maybe.

LW on its own is very stable also. Only sometimes modeler crashes while I work in Layout and that's about it.

[FrankPooleFloating]

Eric, there are certain types of jobs where SA will smoke the plugs, in efficiency and speed. When you have a good handle on graph editor, texturing and doing everything with nodes, you can zoom thru crap that would take way longer in LW or other plugs.

A really good example is if you needed to render a bunch of different versions of the same product, in different colors etc and with different lighting using multiple HDRs. In SA, everything is either right in front of you or at your fingertips. And being able to lay out tons of material nodes (etc) and plug them in as needed is huge.. It is a very, very well made and efficient/speedy interface, imho.

Edit: Oh yeah - add some LUA automation, and you are now making money, whilst taking a nap in your hammock... I haven't done this yet, but you bet your ass I will.

[mdharrington]

Stability wise LW is the same as Octane standalone because it uses the same dll. If something is crashing your GPUs the exported scene rendered in Octane will crash them too.

I don't get any GPU crashes with Octane. Only when I overclock them too much then maybe.

LW on its own is very stable also. Only sometimes modeler crashes while I work in Layout and that's about it.

I agree on the render side they are both just as stable, but there are a lot of things that can crash lightwave...I have never ever had the standalone crash...
Layout... probably 10 times a year

[electric_eric]

Thanks for the info guys. Sounds like SA is definitely worth a look.

How is SA with exported animation from Lightwave? Does it support FBX with morphs etc?

[mdharrington]

alembic exporter built into the plugin....
the only real option