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Hi!, just a simple question. I dont have enough time to find all the tricks in the octante into maya integration.

So could someone tell me how is it? Its a good workflow?

Im comfortable with octane in c4d but as Im trying to migrate into maya this information is very useful to me.

Thanks!

My experience has been somewhat disappointing; the Cinema 4D plug in feels far more refined and capable. Now, part of that impression is due to the fact that the Maya plug in handles Octane attributes in a completely different manner than the C4D version (which is to be expected, as each tends to follow the UX rules of the host app, which is a good thing overall.) But certain issues I have been having have been offputting. The biggest one has to do with textures that reside on a network drive. Everything will render fine in the IPR, but when I go to batch, I get gray shading. It took me awhile to track down that it had something to do with the textures. My solution was to go through the shader building process again, and then it settled down. Not sure if that was a Maya thing or a plug-in thing. But that leads me to the next issue:

Batch/Slave Rendering. This part is the roughest in the Maya plug in. Again, this could be a Maya thing more or less, but it was still a disappointment. The only way to reliably assign slaves to a render job is to render from the command line or the OS (right click-render from the desktop on the scene file). If you do not do this, the plug in will assume that the slaves that you have previously allocated are busy, and not available, even though they clearly are available. That really kills that portion of the workflow. Now, if you are rendering locally, you probably won't have this issue, but it is really ugly, especially when compared to the LightWave version of the plug-in. In fact, my hats off to Juanjo regarding network rendering. LightWave was the only plug-in that I have used to date that just sees the available slaves, and renders to them. No BS, no hiccups, it just goes out and does it. The Cinema version is far more picky, to the point to where I never really got it to work for slave rendering. Otoy tech support went so far as to state that the Cinema version does not support the Octane network rendering directly, and instead you must you the Cinema Team Render, and buy another copy of the Cinema plug in. Now, I know whoever wrote that is clearly misinformed, and I was able to migrate my workstation over to my render box, but I should not have had to have done that.

As far as materials and the rest, the Maya implementation seems fine, as does the IPR. Hope this helps!

Hi Jagger

Here is my experience with the Maya plugin.

In general, the integration is pretty good.

I haven't had issues with textures or render nodes, but my setup is just 2 pc's, using the second's GPU's on the network (I haven't tried using a render manager like Jayroth).

All of the main features from standalone are supported in the Maya plugin.
The only issue I've had on features is when comparing to C4D or Lightwave. Both programmes implement some nice features like procedural displacement, procedural volumetrics (in Lightwave vs3) etc.

The other note, would be on the forum support (which you can check by looking at the number of replies to queries - this is often '0').
Unfortunately, this is where the plugin suffers the most, for me, at least. There really isn't a great deal of activity or presence.
If there is a bug or similar, the support seems pretty good, but as far as general support on queries, feature requests, user error, even, then don't expect a great deal of activity. Again, take a look at the other forums to check this.

Overall, the plugin is great, but it's hard to convince people and small studios to adopt a new render engine, when there is not a great deal of support.

One developer for one plugin would be my vote, but the opposite, with developers taking on more plugins seems to be the approach for now.

Cheers

My overall experience with the Maya plugin is good, but there are some things that need improvement and yes, I have to agree the forum support is very poor.
I want to make the Pros and Cons a bit more specific:

Pros:
- My experience with the network rendering are very good (but sometimes you have to wait or restart for the other nodes to join).
- The plugin is very stable with Maya2015+

Cons:
- Build updates: Compared to C4D the build updates are late.
- The support in the forum is very bad. Sometimes posts are never answered.
- Advanced features. Yes, often goodies exist in other Programs but not (or later) in the maya version (for example ORBX files / proxies).
- Sometimes things work differently or give cryptic failures that are hard to understand for new users of the plugin. For example many file formats are not supported (because of limitations in the engine), so maya will choose a different file format my itself. Or the motion blur causes trouble because of missing keys.
- Some basic things are causing problems. For example will Octane crash with Maya2014 when you save a scene (on Winx64) during IPR render.

If you are happy with the Cinema Plugin I would stay with it but if Maya is gererally something you like or want to extend your skill set then go for it.
I didn't have problems with missing file textures during network rendering yet.

Here's another tip:
There's no 32bit exr format in the pull down menu. I use the 16bit Tif format, which outputs a 32bit exr.

I would definitely agree about the forum support. I have gotten spoiled by Aoktar who runs the Cinema forum. He is great at answering questions, even if you don't always like the answer.

From what I understand, the Maya plug in is internally developed and managed by OTOY. If that is the case, then there is even less of an excuse for the poor Maya support, either in the plug in or here in the forums. Please, OTOY, get it together.

Thanks guys. Im very happy with the c4d implementation, the problem is the c4d itself. Im always getting problems with the slow viewport, and the lack of proper modeling tools and uv mapping is a pain. Thats why I want to jump to maya but I have seen that there are a ton of questions in the forum but few answers, and that makes me think in problems with the plugin.

Im freelance with just one machine and Im not going to use network rendering, never. So that wont be a problem

So I assume that the implementation in Maya is good, the problems are the forum support and the late releases....

Cinema's modeling tools are actually rather good, so I am surprised to see you have that opinion -- far better than Maya's in most cases. You do have a point with regard to the UVs, as they can indeed be a pain, and its true that Maya's viewport performance is superior to Cinema's.

jayroth wrote:Cinema's modeling tools are actually rather good, so I am surprised to see you have that opinion -- far better than Maya's in most cases. You do have a point with regard to the UVs, as they can indeed be a pain, and its true that Maya's viewport performance is superior to Cinema's.

Most packages have good modeling tools these day. I've modeled a fair bit in modo, Lightwave and Maya and they are all on a par as far as poly modelling (and I'm sure Cinema is similar, from what people say). Some tools are more 'obvious', as far as a tool might sit on a menu shelf as an icon, but most of the tools are available in each app.

Viewport performance in Maya is pretty good when working with high poly count and textures, and the UV tools are getting better with each release.

I am still a little confused as to why certain 'features' are accessible to Octane, within certain 3D Applications, but not others, but I've banged on enough about this already.

I saw some opinions saying that octane wasnt´t very integrated in maya, and those people were jumping to redshift.

I have never used redshift, but seems like an vray (because of the lot of settings to tweak) but in gpu.

And some people are doing really interesting addons for maya and redshift: https://vimeo.com/149367376

More renders engines to the game, this never ends!!