OTOY Forums

Many render engines use proxies (Vray etc). Now this is a very useful feature, but can this be done on a GPU renderer like Octane?
Is it supported by the engine somehow or would it be a plugin specific feature?

Nobody knows about this?

what kind of advantages that you are expecting from that? You can use render instances

Yes i know render instances work, but i am thinking about the memory usage, performance and export from C4D. Loading a pre-exported static proxy directly from disk in Octane without having the heavy geometry loaded in C4D. That's how VRay/Coronas proxies can work, right? Would be good for large meshes, tree's etc.

When you are using instances the object only have to be loaded once in memory, I often render out scenes with trees and grass and instances are the way to go. I don't know about reading directly from disc, the GPU (or CPU) can only process things in the RAM.

Proxys are about the same as instances if you compare to Vray only that you have a fake (proxy) object to work with in the viewport. I remember Vray generated those automaticly.

aaaand I just realised what you ment.

I did some test just now with Xrefs, wich you can load a proxy object to and it would still render the high-poly object blabla.

It seems that it makes no difference at all in memory consumpion when the actual render is taken plae either when I have the hi-poly on or off in the viewport. This applies to both liveview and the proper render even if you can clearly see that when the proxies are disabled in the viewport the GPU memory increases.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/1013 ... 4219177086

Yes, normal XRef's probably wont work. Because you still have to load and export through c4d. Let me try to explain what i mean..

When you have a highpoly mesh in C4D and you click render, the mesh needs to be exported out of c4d, loaded by octane and uploaded to the gpu right? .. If this mesh is very high density it will take a lot of memory in c4d and the export time will take some time, because it will need to do the exporting every time you click render...

Now if we had a proxy system here, it could pre-generate the export (one time only) and save this output to disk. Then the highpoly mesh could be exchanged for a superfast proxy container (for instance a simple pointcloud like corona renderer (https://corona-renderer.com/blog/wp-con ... isplay.png), and this file could be loaded directly from the disk when the render starts instead of doing the expensive export every time. Ofcourse, position, scale, rotate transforms could still be applied, but i guess the proxy would be limited to a single material? .. Anyway, this way you would save a lot of time and memory in c4d, (and much faster viewport updates). So you could in theory load many large meshes and start the render quite fast.... Like how V-Ray does it...

My real question here is... could this be implemented using just the c4d plugin? Or would it require extra functions in the octane core itself?

Hmm I don't know, After hitting render, almost mediately, the GPU memory clock maxes out. I'm not super sawy but I translate it as 95% of the export time is octane trying to fill the GPU?

Sorry, but why do you want proxy so much? We have better, partial update engine. Neither renderer has it. If you cannot use it efficiently please ask how to use it or check some videos and sample scenes.