Adding New Objects Undoes Materials Settings

[Spectralis]

When I add new objects to a scene (Predatron's, 'Loft 4 Lease') it completely undoes changes I make to the scenes materials. For example, I lightened all the walls by adjusting gamma and changed the wooden floor to glossy and altered its gamma and colour. As soon as I added a table to the scene every change was undone back to its original settings. Aaaargh! Is there a way to fix the changes I make so nothing can change them back? I am using the latest builds of OR plugin and DS 4.6.

Honestly, I spend twice as long fixing problems like this than I do actually creating and rendering a scene. I have given up assigning OR materials to objects because they are all undone when loading new items or merging figures into a scene. Originally, I spent ages assigning OR materials to 'Loft 4 Lease' only to find they all disappeared when I loaded a new object. Hours or work wasted! So I tried just lightening/recolouring the original materials and this still won't stay fixed. Atm I can't rely on this plugin to work consistently.

I must find a solution otherwise I can't load objects or merge sub-scenes into this scene (or I'll have to reset every single material change each time I adjust the scene.) Either I'm doing something wrong or this plugin is unreliable. Please enlighten me!

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[birdovous]

I can definitely confirm this.

It happens to me time to time and it is quite annoying, especially after I finish creating some more advanced material using NGE and then I add for instance a primitive plane, or import an OBJ geometry and boom the material I created before is gone replaced by default values.

I think it is a bug, but at the moment I have no assured way, which I could pass to T_3 to reproduce it

And yes, I have automatic material update after content load enabled.

[Spectralis]

I'm finding that this problem occurs randomly with different scenes. Sometimes everything plays nicely and other times the textures revert back to their original settings. It doesn't seem to make much difference whether auto mat update is on or off.

It's possible to reduce the size of textures but not the number in a scene. The only way to reduce the number of textures is to delete objects. My GTX 780 maxes out at 144 textures which is a shame because I have plenty of VRAM left.

[Spectralis]

After reading about the v2.1 update, the texture number limitation has been removed and the only limitation now is the amount of VRAM. Can't wait for v2.1 Perhaps the texture dropping phenomenon is related to having too many textures in a scene even when there is plenty of spare VRAM? My GTX 780 maxes out at 144 textures. Not sure if a Titan or 780 Ti do a lot better?

Does anyone have any advice about how to reduce the number of textures in a scene. Switching off objects in the scene doesn't help because the textures remain loaded in Octane. One solution might be to remove unneeded textures from the scene first before opening OR. Or have objects share textures a lot more. But this work is all pre OR. I can't think of any way to reduce the textures in OR except delete the objects or the unneeded textures. Either way it's a lot of extra work.

[Jazbee]

You can save a lot of texture space by optimizing how you use the texture maps. Here are a few things I do:

1. Make sure every single map/texture you use it set up the same in all of your materials. For example, when you have a texture that is used in one material as "image" and as "floatimage" in another they are treated as two separate textures in Octane. In some materials a diffuse map is also used as a bump/spec map with the only difference being it's set up as "floatimage" in the bump/spec node. It is better to change this map to "image" (an RGB map) rather than "float", because this way the texture doesn't need to be loaded again into the system.

1. When you have an object on which you use a diffuse map and a bump map you can try using your diffuse map also as a bump map (both set up as "image") instead of a dedicated bump map and use gamma, etc. to adjust it.

2. When you run out of available greyscale texture space (this happens to me a lot), change your transparency maps to "image" instead of "floatimage". Transparency maps don't take up much more vram when changed to RGB texture.

3. Some people also use things like DAZ Texture Atlas to combine several smaller textures into one larger one and thus reducing the number of textures used in a scene.


As far as I know CUDA 5 has the same number of textures available, and so all Maxwell-based GPU will bring nothing new in this regard.

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[Spectralis]

This is a good strategy linvanchene if someone is confident about texturing a scene but what if I want to keep some of the DAZ materials? Is it easy to locate the original DAZ textures after loading an untextured scene? Perhaps you've explained this but I'm still not sure how to do it without searching through loads of runtime files trying to find the right ones.

Another problem I have with Octane materials is finding the right ones. In an attempt to replace the wall textures of the DAZ scene I used I spent ages trying to find an Octane texture that looked like painted plaster. It's quite a lot of trial and error and in some cases the Octane texture uses as much or more VRAM and texture slots as the DAZ texture. I couldn't emulate the original old and distressed look of the walls with an Octane texture which changed the look and feel of the room.

I realise this isn't an exact science and by nature texturing is partially trial and error but for a noob at texturing like me it's a bit daunting and time consuming.

[linvanchene]

edited and removed by user

[Spectralis]

Thanks linvanchene that was a very clear and comprehensive reply. I think I've been spoiled by the DS/3Delight setup. I'm going to experiment a bit more with textures. I think I understand the difference between diffuse/glossy textures but not bump and normal maps or subsurface scattering. Textures seem quite a complex area to get to grips with so maybe I need too look at a few tutorials/books about this subject.