Support for XParticles SDK?

Wed Sep 30, 2015 11:35 pm

Hello Aoktar,

I know there is a tremendous amount of work on your plate, but I was wondering if you have any plans to support XParticles? I mentioned how Octane is my go-to rendering engine for Cinema now, and that it would be great if Octane and XParticles could work together beyond the basic particle support that is in there at the moment. He suggested that Octane would need to support the XParticles SDK in order for that to happen. I do not know if that would be at the plug in level or the standalone render engine level. XParticles is the preferred particle system for Cinema, and I suspect that many Octane users may use XParticles as well. A solution to this would be brilliant!

Thu Oct 01, 2015 11:53 am

That's what i do actually. Let's talk what do expect more.

Thu Oct 01, 2015 4:24 pm

Wow, that is exciting! I think you should open a dialog with Mike Batchelor at Insydium and Jashca at Jawset if you have not already done so. Supporting these plug ins will pretty much like in Octane for anyone using these products, as any other rendering engine is just too slow in comparison. XParticles can render at decent speeds with standard render in Cinema, but if you want motion blur, you have to use the Cinema effect, and that really slows it down to unusable, in my opinion. Others may want to chime in with their experiences, as I am just getting started with XParticles. I have a bit more familiarity with TFD, but not much more. TFD can use the graphics card (limited to one at present) and that is a huge benefit in simulation times. It is memory-bound, however, and will fail if it maxes out on card memory (which is very easy to do).

Supporting the structure and materials of XParticles would be awesome. I have read that currently Octane does not see the Groups structure, and therefore complex effects created using groups do not translate over as expected. Also, supporting the XParticles Material and XParticles Gaseous would pretty much cover the shading as far as I can tell.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you are doing!

vhannon · Thu Oct 01, 2015 6:42 pm

Hey Aoktar,

I understand that more access becomes available to you with Octane 3. I'm sure you a thinking about how to integrate TFD and XP3. I'm wondering if you plan to transfer XP3 attributes across. Will we have access to point Age, Temp, Speed etc? What about spline rendering? Will Octane support millions of points? I hope you consider these essential features. I look forward to the release of Octane 3.

As a side note. I also use Octane in Maya. I so enjoy the C4D implementation. Happy to come back every time.

Thu Oct 01, 2015 6:55 pm

Of course i'm in contact with these guys. About tfd, we haven't had any volumetric stuff until 3.0. We will hopefully see a direct integration to TFD. About using materials which comes from XP or TFD is a different story. We have to use own materials at first stage. I don't know the future. Currently we haven't a texture type to give own colors/values to indivual instances. Random texture is a good example what i mean. But we need some controllable type. This is biggest limitation to improve the particle support.
In short i'm making a particle slot in object tag. Which is automatic section and will be activated when over a proper object type like TFD volume, xp emitter or some custom volume objects. These system will provide fastest access to particle data. Also scatter object works in same way. I'm not allowed to give more details or images.

Thu Oct 01, 2015 7:00 pm

vhannon wrote:Hey Aoktar,

I understand that more access becomes available to you with Octane 3. I'm sure you a thinking about how to integrate TFD and XP3. I'm wondering if you plan to transfer XP3 attributes across. Will we have access to point Age, Temp, Speed etc? What about spline rendering? Will Octane support millions of points? I hope you consider these essential features. I look forward to the release of Octane 3.

As a side note. I also use Octane in Maya. I so enjoy the C4D implementation. Happy to come back every time.

Please read my other post.

Yes plan is to use some features. But we have limited functionality for painting the instances. I'll do it when i have this support. Also Octane has not particle rendering. But we can use instancing to do it. I did some tests with 2 millions trees. Worked great. I think that can go higher with small spheres.

In short, I'm the one who wishes to get all features out of box.