Applying Octane Materials/Shaders

[buenoexcellente]

Sorry about an exceptionally n00b question, but I was unable to find out some pretty simple information in the documentation.

How do I apply materials to things in a scene? I can look them up in the Live DB. I can select the surfaces that I want, but when I double-click the material from the DB it's not applied.

Gimme a hand here please.

[buenoexcellente]

I never thought it would be as simple as drag and drop.

Now that I've made everything in my scene gold foil though, I now need to know how to REMOVE materials. ;p

[SiliconAya]

Right click a surface or material and select unlink, or delete if you don't want the material at all, or drag and drop a different material. Drag and dropping a material over another material will link the new material to all the surfaces the old material was linked to.
It also works both ways, so you can drag a material to a surface or a surface to a material.

[buenoexcellente]

Thanks for the reply. It was exactly what I needed.

[buenoexcellente]

Unfortunately I now have another problem. I'm trying to make the Iris, Sclera, and Cornea into glossy material. I've created the new material, but it's really unclear to me how I can link a texture to it in the node thingamajigger (technical term).

I've gone over the manual, and I suspect that it's written for somebody more familiar with something like the DAZ Shader Mixer, which I never put time into. Is there some sort of node I have to link to the glossy node? If so what's it called? Am I completely off base?

[DrHemulen]

Just changing it to glossy is easy Right click the material and select "Change material type" and set it to glossy
I agree that all the shading stuff has a very steep learning curve, and that the Octane manual isn't written for beginners. I felt exactly the same way, and I'm still confused by a lot of stuff. The only thing that helps is just messing around with it, and asking here

[SiliconAya]

You have to do it in the Nodegraph Editor (NGE). Select your material then click the Nodefraph Editor button at the top of the Quick Edit colum, should be above the diffuse color. Once in the NGE lot more options show up, what you want is the button/drop down menu next to the diffuse color, it should say RGBspectrum (or part of it), from the menu that pops up, you want to go up and select image.

Under the new image button/menu you should have another blank one, click that and from there you'll get a number of different ways to pick textures. Browse, recently opened, etc... Or at the bottom of the menu there will be a list of objects in your scene, if you applied Daz materials in DS you'll get a list of all the textures applied to all the different surfaces of the object, so you don't have to browse/search through your HDD/runtime to find what you want.

Or if you want to do the full nodes, pins and squiggly lines thing, on the right of the NGE is a slide out menu called Octane Node List, from there you can pick an image node from under Imagemaps sub heading, just drag and drop it to the grid area. Then click and hold down on the hollow green output pin on the right hand side of the image node and drag the line to the solid green input pin next to diffuse on the left hand side of the glossy material node. Click back on the image node and you'll see the same blank menu under it as you do in the other method and it's the same from there.