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Hello,

I'm quite new in Octane and I'm currently using the version 1.55.
My problem is: how can you hide a part or a material? For instance I'm working on a watch, I have a glass on my model, but I want to make it disapear in the render windows, so I can work on the materials that are behind this glass and see how to adjust them.

Thanks for your help
Laurent

lweisz wrote:Hello,

I'm quite new in Octane and I'm currently using the version 1.55.
My problem is: how can you hide a part or a material? For instance I'm working on a watch, I have a glass on my model, but I want to make it disapear in the render windows, so I can work on the materials that are behind this glass and see how to adjust them.

Thanks for your help
Laurent

Hello Laurent

Maybe this example may help:

A light emitting cube is placed in a cylinder.
You may want to hide the cylinder temporarily to adjust the position of the cube inside of it.
Moving the cube up or down will change the light situation a bit.
This is how it looks like if the cylinder has General Vibility and Opacity at "1".

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I know of two options to hide surfaces or objects in OctaneRender:


If you want to hide a surface set Opacity to zero in the material settings.
Example:

In this example I set the opacity of the cylinder to zero to see the cube inside of it.


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If you want to hide the complete geometry the quicker way may to be to set "General Visibility" to zero in the "Object Layer Map".
Note: In this example I did not set General Visibility to zero but left it at 0.602 so you can still see the "hidden" cylinder partially.

- - -

Side Note:

There seems something strange going on when looking at the image with opacity at zero.
The same happened when setting General visibility to zero.

Why is there still a circle shaped shadow where the hidden cylinder used to be?

bug with emitters and hidden surfaces maybe?
Or is it just the light reacting with the surface creating a circle like shape that just randomly is about the size of the hidden cylinder bottom?

I'm not positive, but I know in OcDS, there's a specific option to turn off shadow casting. Making an object invisible by whatever means you choose (including its specific option to make the object and surface hidden by a button), but not turning off shadow casting for that same object/surface leaves shadows in place, as the geometry is technically still present, and casting a shadow. I don't play in the standalone nearly enough to know if it's the same there, but I'd imagine if there's an option specifically added just for Octane in the plugin, it's because the same thing applies in the standalone. Worth checking anyway!

sikotik13 wrote:I'm not positive, but I know in OcDS, there's a specific option to turn off shadow casting. Making an object invisible by whatever means you choose (including its specific option to make the object and surface hidden by a button), but not turning off shadow casting for that same object/surface leaves shadows in place, as the geometry is technically still present, and casting a shadow. I don't play in the standalone nearly enough to know if it's the same there, but I'd imagine if there's an option specifically added just for Octane in the plugin, it's because the same thing applies in the standalone. Worth checking anyway!

All true.
For "Global Visibility" settings this makes sense and may normaly work exactly as intended.
In some cases you want the object hidden but the shadows should still be cast.

But then when you would just reduce "opacity" to zero different rules normaly apply.
Basically the shadow strenght is reduced at the same amount as you lower opacity.

- - -

I did try again today and in the posted example "light emitting cube inside a geometry" adjusting "Shadow Visibility" of the Cylinder in the Layer Map node has no effect at all no matter if opacity or Global visibility is used to hide the cylinder.
The "shadow" on the ground remains the same.

- - -

Guess I just managed once again to create a special case scenario in which things don't work as one would think.

Usually this happens when I experiment with volumes like fog volumes in combination with other elements like portals and in this case light emitters.

Guess there is not much point in worrying further about this now since volumes may get some updates in OctaneRender 3.