OTOY Forums

[--UPDATE--] you can download the scene file here, if anyone is interested: http://www.mediafire.com/download/9jj7v ... _scene.rar

https://vimeo.com/180872689

[vimeo]https://www.vimeo.com/180872689[/vimeo]
(sorry, I can't seem to get the vimeo embed tag to work)

Hey guys, this is the first project I've done using octane (other than quick experiments and test renders).
I animated and rendered it in one weekend so please excuse the noise in a lot of the shots; I was trying to keep down to about 350 samples/ 35-40s per frame and I figured the amount of noise was acceptable considering I was going for an old film look.

Because of the tight turnaround I had on this, I also didn't end up doing any post compositing or colour adjustments on the renders; these shots are all just straight out of C4D/octane (the post processing tab in the camera tag really helped there), so it was pretty nice to be able to get final shots that I was totally happy with straight out of the renderer!

One thing that I was kind of having trouble with was the SSS material I was trying to build to make the cactus' look like little miniature wax/vinyl figurines, I had a look at Tony Sculptors sss skin material in the LiveDB to try to figure out what I was doing but that network seemed more complex than what I needed in this instance. Does anyone know of a good explainer tutorial for simple single-material sss?

I actually made this for an Ident competition entry into a local festival down here in Melbourne, Australia (If anyone on the forums is from Melbourne, you should definitely come to Node fest, one of the speakers is Raoul Marks, who has done some amazing work with Octane on The Night Manager title sequence and Halt and Catch Fire).
I'm not sure how you guys feel about people posting to try and rally support/votes like this on the forum, but if you think my ident is alright, you should totally vote for it on the competition page (it's just a quick one-click vote system):
http://woobox.com/5rycma/gallery?web=1
A few other entries in the ident competition have also done some pretty nice stuff using Octane as well.

Thanks!
Kyle

This is very nice! I didn't notice any noise btw.

Thanks Terry! That's good to hear that the noise isn't too noticeable.

One other problem I noticed I was getting when I let the renders run a but longer was; lots of hotpixels in the sss materials (which, counter-intuitively, seemed to be getting worse with more samples).
Is anyone able to tell me if it's fine to just use the camera imager "hotpixel removal" slider to fix this, or does that have some sort of adverse affects on your renders?

Hi khdownes,
congrats for your competition entry, I like it and I have voted for it
About sss and noise, is difficult to say without something more about the scene.
Which kernel are you using?
In general, tweaking materials and lighting and kernel settings greatly helps with hot pixels.
Alternatively, you can use the Hot pixel removal with values not under 0.65, otherwise you risk to lose too much details.
Another old trick, always useful with unbiased render, is to render at double size with a quarter of samples of the original size, and then downscale the final render in post.
In this way you have roughly the same render time but the hot pixels are killed by the reduction.
ciao beppe

Thanks Beppe!
I used the pathtracing kernel. I think I cranked the hotpixel removal down to like 0.25, so I probably was losing a lot of detail in doing that.
That's interesting to hear about the double size/quarter samples trick; I'll play around with that in the future...

I've uploaded the scene file here, for if anyone is interested in poking around in in it:
http://www.mediafire.com/download/9jj7v ... _scene.rar

(If anyone is wondering why the background mountains/ plateaus are massive translucent/sss materials: I just thought it looked cool and created a nice effect in the final shots...)

very nice work! are you also freelancing alot @khdownes?

Thanks mitviz!
Yeah, I started freelancing just recently after a long stint at a full time gig.

o ok, look me up online, i might need someone good at rigging soon