Material definition standard

[danvica]

This is not properly Octane related but not so off-topic I think...

Is there any material definition standard ?
Think having lots of materials already definited in (for example) Luxrender and you want to move to Octane. Would be usefull to just use the same material definition files.

At least in unbiased renderer.

Just a thought.

[bepeg4d]

in my opinion Octane is too young, we must wait at least till v1.0 final.
anyway interesting thought

ciao beppe

[PhilBo]

As the OctaneLive material database gets filled out, it will be very helpful to all users to quickly add materials to scenes and to also see how some cool materials are made. Is this what you are talking about?

[jakchit]

isn't that what Collada was supposed to accomplish? I'm not sure it's working

[danvica]

jakchit : Yes, I knew Collada (very little) but I was thinking something limited to material definitions.

In general, it would be usefull to mantain untouched them when moving from one render engine to the other.

There are several "common" standard (step / iges / stl / slp / obj ) to describe the geometric components that you can, more or less, easily use to move from one software to the other... but what about the materials ?

Can the .mtl file format used in Octane be exchanged in other render engines ? And the opposite ?

But really, it's just a tought...

[Chris]

Mtl files only contains texture locations for the materials in an obj i think.

[danvica]

I don't know what exactly is the mtl file for. I thught was material related but, you're right, I controlled and there're too few info inside.

Actally it contains data for un-textured materials too... anyway my main idea is the same.

[matej]

.mtl is a very basic description of a material. Just some colors, indexes and image names - not very usable in Octane.

What Octane needs is a good an robust scene & material definition files in XML - an own format that would completely replace the current .obj workaround step. When this will be done and the file specification released, converters from other material specifications into Octane .ocm could be written (by anyone).

[danvica]

I agree.

Is there any standard that Refractive software could follow in order to implement the scene + material definition ?
Or every company has a propretary format ?