OTOY Forums

Hey Guys,

We are working on our First VR experience. We have a couple questions on work flow, specifically on the Material Converter.

Questions:

1. How do you convert a material to octane correctly?
(Note)
We understand going into the live db tab and we see the list of supported materials.

2. What is the standard workflow for creating your materials from scratch within the Octane Plugin?

We are experiencing some errors in doing this.

3. Can you build your materials in the standalone version and import them into the Octane Plugin for 3Ds max?

Thank you sorry for basic questions we have some area to cover for sure?

We figured out how to properly convert the materials but now are having issues.

We are converting planets, the Materials for the planet are converting over. the Issue is the atmosphere converts over into a default material.

In the slate editor the Nodes are all there for the atmosphere but it is being recognized as a default material.

The atmosphere are gradient maps and falloff maps it's pretty simple and are on the supported materials list under the conversion tab.

Let me know if anyone knows how to fix this issue.

Hi darcfusion, those materials that Octane cannot straightforwardly convert will usually appear grey (default) and these will have to be set up manually using Octane-natives, Octane support for max's atmospheric effects is limited and at this stage, and it has its own workarounds for fog volumes, for example, please check this scene here http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 81&start=2

You can build materials via the standalone and upload/share them to the LiveDB (online asset database, note though that everything in the LiveDB can be seen by all users, so use with caution). The materials in the LiveDB are available to all the plugin editions.

abreukers,

Thank you for your speedy answer sir. In our scene we will see earth from outer space looking and the glowing atmosphere:
This is our base Earth Render. The Other Material Converted nicely.


So in other words we have rebuild through Octane? That is not a problem, we have already started that process. The issue we are having now is that the soft outer edge of the atmosphere is not feathering properly in the Standalone edition.

The Gradient map seems to be leaving a hard edge and not feathering the outer edge. Here is an example:



The outer edge is hard and looks pretty bad. We got it a tad smoother by messing with Falloff skew factor on the falloff map.

I am confused because it should not be this much of a pain in the neck to feather a gradient. Would you mind helping us on this as well.

Can you explain how to upload to the LIVE DB? And access it through 3DS max Octane Plugin?

Thank you sir very much, you are saving our skin. I hope this helps others as well running into similar issues.

hi darcfusion, there may be various ways to explore this. maybe its worth trying a specular material with a scattering medium and then control its opacity via the gradient texture. It needs some more tweaking but hopefully you get some ideas. also, you can always simulate this via 3ds max plugin, but if you find it easier to build the material via the standalone and then upload it to the liveDB where the plugin can access it, you need select the nodes and put them in a group. Right click the group, and you should be able to save it to the live DB. (If you don't see the the livedb option you need to make sure that there is a material output pin (where the material is connected to) in the group).

It seems none of the procedural wave textures import into 3ds max Octane Plugin from Octane standalone? We uploaded through live DB and no dice we tried local too. Any suggestions? This has become our newest bottle neck

hi,
with OctaneRender is not possible to use the old CPU based procedural shaders, you need to convert them to the native Octane GPU based procedural shaders or backing the CPU procedurals into grayscaled images.
Some integrated plugin like C4D and Lightwave, for example, can bake on the fly any native procedural without conversions. Maybe I am wrong, but i suspect that 3Ds Max doesn't have this option
ciao beppe

Hey bepeg4d ,

Thanks for the response. The Procedural wave textures we cannot import into 3DS max are native to the OctaneVR Standalone edition. The dirt and other procedural textures work fine it's just the wave textures that are not working. All three of them to exact.

Hi,
could you bake the wave procedural to an hi-res 2d grayscale texture paying attention to the tiling effect?
ciao beppe

bepeg4d wrote:Hi,
could you bake the wave procedural to an hi-res 2d grayscale texture paying attention to the tiling effect?
ciao beppe

Hi Beppe,

Thanks for helping out.

we checked the 3dsmax plugin and found that indeed there are no octane wave textures available there. I will ask Jim.

In the meantime, maybe there is a workaround to create an atmosphere on 3ds? unfortunately am not a master so still looking.
(Apparently, the intention was to use the wave texture to separate the dark side and light side of the object, like the moon).
Do you have some suggestions?

Kind regards,
Abby