OTOY Forums

Hi,

Been playing around with Octane and suitably impressed with its functionality and SPEED..... The reason for my post is that from my tests, I like the 'feel' of the standalone rather than the max plugin. At this time, as I am more familiar with Max, I set up a max project (a small house), assigned the materials and exported it to try it out it in the standalone.

The problem I seem to have, when I bring in the exported file I seem to lose all the materials that I spent time allocating in max. Have I done something wrong?

Further, when I work in Max elements are place on layers, but again, the imported file seems to have all the elements listed individually instead of within their max layers. So for instance if I want to recreate the materials and assign them to say all the glass, there may be 49 glass elements in the list. Is it possible to select just those elements that were, in max, all on the same layer. It seems that the structured layers and materials that I have in Max are disregarded when exported.

Until I fully understand how Octane works, am I missing something? I really like this engine but just because I put things together in Max I don't want to be limited just to the plugin. So if someone could explain the workflow, any advice would be warmly appreciated.

Regards,

Gabriel N

Hi Gabriel,

Unfortunately these problems are part of the reason the fully integrated plugins exist.
The standalone has limited import capability (wavefront obj, alembic and recently the .orbx package).

Wavefront has very limited information storage, mainly just static geometry and some basic material settings.
Alembic is better, it can store animation and things like hair.
.orbx package is the best, it can package your scene (including octane materials data) for opening in the standalone.

The bottom line is every host application is different and the standalone is octane only, it knows nothing about host application specific stuff.
So there will always be some things that won't transfer - hence the fully integrated plugins being needed. Once you get your head around octane, it's nodes and where to find the same things/settings inside the plugin, it should be far more efficient than transferring to the standalone.
If it's not, then the plugin has somewhat failed to do what it is intended for!

Which format are you currently using to transfer your scene, .obj?

Hiya FooZe,

Thanks for the reply. I exported to the orbx format. I've sorted out the materials issue... they were transferring over, but some of them were still set as vray materials and it was those that weren't exporting. Noobie mistake I suppose.

However, the issue of the layers being disregarded is an unfortunate limitation of the export. I suppose it's something that I will have to get used to working around.

Thanks again,

Gabriel