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Otoy® is proud to announce the availability of a new version of OctaneRender™ for Maya®
The world's fastest and most feature-rich unbiased render engine that integrates completely into Autodesk® Maya®.

Maya® Version Requirements

This release will work with Maya® Versions 2013, 2013.5 / 32-bit & 64-bit, 2014 64-bit and 2015 64-bit on MS Windows operating systems.

Notes regarding features/functionality

OctaneRender™ for Maya® implements almost full functionality of OctaneRender™ standalone inside Maya®.

COMPATIBILITY AND OCTANERENDER STANDALONE REQUIREMENT

To run OctaneRender™ for Maya®, you need to also have an activated OctaneRender™ Standalone copy activated on the machine you wish to install the plugin onto.
You cannot purchase and use only the Maya plugin and use it without also owning an activated copy of OctaneRender™ Standalone on your machine.


HOW TO PURCHASE LICENSES

Go to our online shop here: http://render.otoy.com/shop/

If you do not own an OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition License yet:
You can purchase both the OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition and the OctaneRender™ for Maya® Edition as a reduced price bundle, purchase the bundle priced at 459€

If you already own one or more OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition licenses you want to pair the plugin with:
Purchase an "OctaneRender™ for Maya® License" priced at 199€

You can also purchase a 3, 5 or 10 pack of OctaneRender™ for Maya® licenses, just like OctaneRender™ Standalone Edition packs.


OCTANELIVE

Just like OctaneRender™ Standalone, the Maya® plugin product also needs an additional OctaneLive license and be activated on a machine.
This has to be done in the plugin interface panel in Maya, and is covered in the included PDF manual.
It can only be done after an OctaneRender™ Standalone license is already activated on the machine in question.


CHANGES AND FIXES SINCE LAST RELEASE:

• New 2.04 engine.
• Fixed textures network paths bug.
• New "GI clamp" attribute in kernels.

DOWNLOAD

OctaneRender for Maya 2.04 - 4.5 (30.3MB autoinstaller file)
OctaneRender for Maya 2.04 - 4.5 Demo (28.5MB autoinstaller file)


Yours,
The OctaneRender™ Team.

Hi Jimstar

i have noticed a huge bug that doesn´t seem to have been fixed in the recent updates.
every time i open an old scene with octane materials on, my shading-networks seems broken. what it seems like, is that the mix material is not working. i keep getting gray materials.

i hope you will have time to look at it before the next update
thanks
Andrew

Andrew88 wrote:Hi Jimstar

i have noticed a huge bug that doesn´t seem to have been fixed in the recent updates.
every time i open an old scene with octane materials on, my shading-networks seems broken. what it seems like, is that the mix material is not working. i keep getting gray materials.

There are two long standing bugs that could cause this. The first one is that sometimes the first time you start an IPR after opening a scene mix materials will not pick up their connected shaders properly and render white or grey. In this case if you stop the IPR and restart it everything should work fine (or at least it always has for me) This bug has been there since day one and I probably haven't mentioned it since the very early days as I've just become used to the work around.

The second bug this could be has been there since I think the first 1.5 test builds and it means that when any Diffuse shaders that were created before a certain version are loaded into a new version they are not recognised as an Octane shader and are instead converted to grey (it doesn't matter if they are part of a mix material or not) The only fix for the moment is to recreate the shader by creating a new Diffuse shader and reconnecting it's inputs. It's easy to see if this is your issue as you will get feedback in the script editor saying something like Warning: Octane: Material "OctaneDiffuse1" is not Octane material, changing to "Gray"... //

I still run into this one from time to time when loading an old scene and it would be great to have both of these bugs addressed at some point.

T.

TBFX wrote:... sometimes the first time you start an IPR after opening a scene mix materials will not pick up their connected shaders properly and render white or grey. In this case if you stop the IPR and restart it everything should work fine (or at least it always has for me) This bug has been there since day one and I probably haven't mentioned it since the very early days as I've just become used to the work around.

I can't reproduce it on any scene I have... Do you have the sequence how it can be reproduced?..

JimStar wrote:

TBFX wrote:... sometimes the first time you start an IPR after opening a scene mix materials will not pick up their connected shaders properly and render white or grey. In this case if you stop the IPR and restart it everything should work fine (or at least it always has for me) This bug has been there since day one and I probably haven't mentioned it since the very early days as I've just become used to the work around.

I can't reproduce it on any scene I have... Do you have the sequence how it can be reproduced?..

It's one of those horrible intermittent issues that doesn't happen every time, that's why I've never made a big noise about it as I cannot supply you with a definite reproducible scene. When it does happen I have just loaded an existing scene that already has mix materials applied and then the first time I start IPR it may happen, If I stop and restart the IPR everything will render as expected. I have had it happen in many different scenes over time but never consistently.
I have never had the first frame of a batch render do this so it seems to be limited to interactive, but then again I'd start a lot more interactive renders than batch.

T.

Hi guys

thanks for the quick reply
as TBX mentioned it is something that sometimes happen. often if i have a simple shader setup, everything works fine. but sometimes if i got a complex shading setup, some of the shaders gets broken. and yes sometimes it is easy fixed by recreate the links or simply replace the old shaders.

but not in this situation, for some reason if i delete my old mix material and replace it with a new mix mat, i still get the gray material.

perhaps i should try and recreate the whole shading network. it´s a shame, i really liked my old shading network.

thanks guys

oh and by the way, does anyone knows why displacement mapping is soooo GPU memory expensive ?, i got a scene which render fine at 8 mpixel before diplacement and drops to 1 or 2 mpixel after applying displacement mapping. also my memory consumption goes from around 300 mb to 1000 mb after applying displacement.

cheers
Andrew

Andrew88 wrote:perhaps i should try and recreate the whole shading network. it´s a shame, i really liked my old shading network.

Just check to see if any of the shaders in your network are of type diffuse, I suspect these will be the culprits and all you need to recreate. Recreating the mix material won't help as it's only diffuse materials created in older versions that have this issue.

T.

Hi i am not sure if this was the issue, but found that my old shaders were actually a mix of glossy and diffuse shaders. what was causing the trouble was that i had a color value in my transmission slot but apparently there was no RGB texture assigned ?
So after assigning a new fresh RGB texture node to the transmission slot, my shading network worked again

now, sorry for asking about displacement mapping again
i find the displacement mapping to be somewhat confusing. i don´t really understand what the correct settings are for adjusting the displacement factor. recently i have been working on some landscapes from world machine. the heightmaps read just fine but i fail to understand how much displacement i need to achieve the same height as in world machine. If using the default settings my terrain gets displaced more than ten times the amount necessary.
The only way i have found to get somewhat correctly displacement values, is to apply an texture deformer, and then manually tweak the displacement until it roughly matches the imported terrain mesh. and then use that value in the displacement node.

kind regards
Andrew

Would it be possible to add layer overwrites to the octaneSunSky_type? I would like to a texure environment on my foreground objects and DayLight on the background.
If I use sunsky on the foreground I get too many fireflies in highly reflective and transparent objects.


EDIT:
Nevermind...
It's possible with:
editRenderLayerAdjustment "Set_octaneSunSky.Type"

Just not when it's already animated.

I'm having some troubles with commandline rendering. Not sure if this was in ealier versions already since my previous renders were always submitted from within maya using Render>Batch render so it might not something specific for this version/built.

Currently I'm using the commandline to start renders because that way I can build a queque and distribute them more easily over the different computers. The command i'm using to start my renders is:

"C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\bin\Render.exe" -r octane -s 31 -e 40 -b 1 -proj "P:/client/projectName/Creation/3D/MAYA" "P://client/projectName/Creation/3D/MAYA/scenes/TEST.mb"

The first frame of a render always looks the way it should. (left image) All the other frames in the bach don't have any lights other than the environment and show the lights as geo.(right image)
This doesn't always happen but it occurs about 50% of the time.


EDIT:
Just checked my overnight render. Unfortunately it's also happening when I render from inside maya. 1st frame is fine, all the others have no lights.
I started a new thread for this with a bit more in depth explanaition.
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=41470