OTOY Forums

I noticed that when using Octane the "exclusion" option within Cinema does not work. For example, I have an object sitting on a flat plane with an Octane light. If I want the flight rays to hit everything in the scene besides my plane, I would just add the plane to the exclusion box. How do I achieve this in Octane?

This goes to my fervent desire for including whatever part is possible in the compositing tag. Aoktar said that a lot of this is un-achievable with the current unbiased design. But my hope is that bits and pieces of the compositing tag (like visible to camera, or visible to GI, and exclusions) might be possible.
Sadly I know very little about the trade offs and I'm so happy with the speed and workflow of Octane that i'm trying to find work arounds for the lack of a compositing tag.

One of the real bummers here is using the HDR Studio Light plug in which is awesome but very hard to work with in Octane. On a sound stage the camera will always see any lights in its view without the not visible to camera option. Also we can't "turn off" the ground reflection which limits how much light painting you can do. The work around is to do the lighting with no environment and composite the pieces in post, but that makes the speed gains worthless and it also makes it hard to pre-viz the final result.

Let's hope that Aoktar can figure something out.

As good as Ahmet is, I suspect this is something we need to voice to the actual Octane development team. It seems to be a fundamental design issue with the kernals themselves.

I understand that there may well be at some point a limitation where adding too much 'ray control' almost negates the usefulness of having an unbiased renderer, but having said that, there are a handful of absolutely 'must have' options I think we need that could work (according to my limited knowledge) .

Some may include...

- disable light receiving/emission
- disable shadows receiving
- disable reflections
- disable AO
- disable shadow casting - already done
- disable primary visibility - already done
??

My dream is of course to have a system where we can specify this per object-object exclusions for shadow/transparency/reflection/opacity and full light in/exclusions ala built in composting tag, but these are the things I fear may be impossible without compromising the fundamentals of path tracing speed...

Love to hear the opinions of an actual GPU developer on this stuff. It seems that a lot of people are reaching 'that point' in their productions where the need for this type of control is becoming a bit of a burden. There do exist workarounds, but they can be a pain in the butt afaik.

Thanks.