Octane/Lightwave Surfacing

[johnkarner]

Trying to surface in Octane but finding it impossible to do anything nuanced. One glimmer of hope I saw was that Octane had a Diffuse material input which would accept a Lightwave Material as an input but I find it does not work. Ideally if we had a complex surfaced object made into a LW material, it would be so amazing to just plug this node into the Octane material and we are off to the races. What are the challenges for getting this to work?

[BraceMedia]

The challenges are huge.
GPU rendering handles things very differently to CPU rendering.

That node input in LW nodes for the LW material is more to do with letting existing LW materials continue to be rendered by native LW CPU renderer.
You normally switch between LW renderer or Octane. With Octane materials configured, and nodes enabled, LW renderer doesn't understand these, and so will just render those objects 100% black. So using that LW material input node inside Octane nodes allows LW to 'remember' what it's supposed to do!

It is not a material/node converter of any kind.

It took me a littl while to get my head around Octane materials but once you do, it starts to click. But basically you take most of what you learned for native LW renderer, and ignore that, instead re-learning the new surfacing required for Octane.

[dereksdigital]

What types of surfaces specifically are you having trouble with?

When I first started using Octane for LW, I was bummed because I had a lot of fairly-complex surface node setups that were now useless. After using Octane for a while, there are definitely some tools and functions I miss but in the end I've always been able to get the surface I want out of Octane. Like BraceMedia said, you just have to re-think how you surface. One thing to keep in mind is that Octane isn't as good at "cheating" a surface, whereas LW is basically GREAT at cheating. If you're comfortable with the LW "energy-conserving" material nodes, then you should be able to apply a lot of the same workflow to your Octane surfaces-- they both have similar processes and similar limitations.

Also, just in case you didn't know, there is a LW-specific forum and the plugin developer (juanjgon) is very responsive and helpful if you have any technical questions!

[johnkarner]

Adding dirt layers for example, I could apply them using easy cubic maps or planer maps and added them by 20% or multiplying by 20% Using the multiply node in Octane appears to be all or nothing? I can't finesse the amount applied, adjusting power or gamma just seems to give me odd results.

Hard on my brain.

[johnkarner]

Apart from one processor on the motherboard vs a graphics card, they're just processing math operations, right? Why would that make any difference applying "Lightwave" nodes vs "Octane" nodes?

I'm obviously not a programmer but was wondering why the conversion would be complicated?

[grimm]

I'm assuming you are using some kind of procedural texture function in LightWave? I'm not at all familiar with LightWave's renderer so I'm guessing here. The main difference might be that LightWave's renderer is a biased renderer, whereas Octane is an unbiased renderer. Even with those differences Octane can still use any diffuse, bump, displacement, normal, or specular image map that you would use in LightWave. But if you are generating those maps procedurally, than Octane is not going to have those same functions built in like LightWave.

One way to get around this, if the LightWave renderer supports it, is to bake the texture to the object and just use the resulting image map in Octane. I do this with Blender and with 3D-Coat which works well, even though you have an extra step.

[gordonrobb]

If you want to add dirt layers (I'm assuming you mean images or procedural, rather than using a dirt node), you still can. You just use to use the camera projection node, plugged into the texture node and tweak the projection. Box is an option. You can then tweak the power/strength of the image, or put it through a multiply node to reduce it. You are experiencing problems because you are not sure how to do something in Octane, not because Octane can't do it. I would suggest posting a real example of what you're trying to achieve, and how you're trying to achieve it, then people can/will advise.

The only real problem I've found between Lightwave and Octane nodes ist here is no way of having a Lightwave style gradient node based on angle of incidence.