OTOY Forums

Hi to everyone
I am new here and I have a few questions to Ocatne users. At the moment I can not use Ocatne, because I do not have Nvidia card (just ordered 2Gb GTX 460 {I have been always ATI fan}). Mostly I use as my tool Solidworks which is a such a brilliant tool for engineer, rendering process is not bad and quality is good, but to achieve satisfying results I have to spend long hours setting up scenes and rendering process (CPU based) takes very long time. I want to change to GPU based rendering (seems to be almost realtime) and after seeing some great renders on this website I would like to purchase a licence. But before I will do that can some one help me out and answer two main questions:
1. Mostly I do underwater scenes and I wonder if there is any way to do it in Octane? (can I apply fog to simulate water or if not then maybe placed scene and model in huge cube and apply blue glass material to it?)
2. Can you do animations in Octane or I have to use external software?

I'm no mermaid expert myself, but I've seen a couple of underwater scenes done with octane, if I recall correctly there was one animation with an action Bear, check the forums. I guess the easiest way of achieving that look would be using an hdri enviroment of an underwater scene, but I'm sure there are other tricks.
For doing an animation (for now till we get collada and RIB suport ) you set it up in your modeling software and then you use the exporter plugin to conect to octane, export one frame and tweak materials, light and general features, then save your scene in octane, go back to your app, export again the whole animation and let octane do it's magic. That's it, easier to do it than to explain it

Thnaks for a explanation. I can not wait to get my Nvidia card to try out Ocatne. Do you know the best and cheapest software to do animation, beacuse as such there is no plugin for Solidworks in Ocatne, which I could use to do animation?

stl or vrml out of SW (or even .dae with SWlabs plugin) --> open source and free Blender --> Octane