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Hey everyone,

I am fairly new to Octane Render (for C4D) and I wanted to ask the community about a few workflow questions, to see if I am going about things the correct way.

01) When you adjust the projection of a texture, is it best to do it in the Object Manger, or in the Octane material?

02) Why don’t Spotlights and Omni Lights don't work with Octane?

03) Octane Environment Tag: If you set a color, then toggle between RGB Spectrum and Image Texture, it resets both the color selected or texture. Is this normal?

04) What is the best way to create a dark scene? Set the Octane Sky’s Power to 0. Or change the color to black or something dark in general?


Odd findings:

01) When I have a mix texture with two RGB Spectrum. Then I change the color for 1 value, it effects the second color. And there is no reference link etc. Why is that?

02) By default HDRI images show up dark because they are using the embedded value. Is there a way to set it up to Linear by default?

massiah81 wrote:Hey everyone,

I am fairly new to Octane Render (for C4D) and I wanted to ask the community about a few workflow questions, to see if I am going about things the correct way.

Hi and welcome massiah81 I try to give you an answer to each of your questions:

01) When you adjust the projection of a texture, is it best to do it in the Object Manger, or in the Octane material?

Start in the Object manager as usual and move to the Octane system inside materials when you have special needs, possibly using the node graph instead of the classic attribute or material editor.

02) Why don’t Spotlights and Omni Lights don't work with Octane?

Because in unbiased render this kind of light does not exist and the emission comes from materials assigned to geometry. But Area light is the exception and you can change its shape in the details or use it in planar mode and an IES file in the distribution channel to obtain anykind of spotlights. You can use the same technique with standard geometry and a diffuse material with emission active and a blackbody or texture emission node, but always try to use low poly geometry. Plane or cubes are more than enough

03) Octane Environment Tag: If you set a color, then toggle between RGB Spectrum and Image Texture, it resets both the color selected or texture. Is this normal?

sorry, I don't get, anyway you can create several environment objects and simply move on top of the hierarchy to make them active. Remember to always use firstly an octane image texture node when you handle images, especially with HDRI , so you can set the Gamma to 1.

04) What is the best way to create a dark scene? Set the Octane Sky’s Power to 0. Or change the color to black or something dark in general?

I guess it does not make any difference.

Odd findings:

01) When I have a mix texture with two RGB Spectrum. Then I change the color for 1 value, it effects the second color. And there is no reference link etc. Why is that?

I guess you are talking about the attribute editor while editing two nodes simultaneously, try to use the node graph editor instead

02) By default HDRI images show up dark because they are using the embedded value. Is there a way to set it up to Linear by default?

Always use the HDR environment preset button and use an image texture node and load the image inside it as said before, don't load the HDR directly like you do in c4d
The image texture node is crucial when work with octane, otherwise you lose a lot of options.
ciao beppe