Giving up on octane

[AndyM1969]

Well, i have to say i am extremely disappointed with Octane, three months of playing and learning, getting nowhere near the results i expected.

Today came the final straw, after trying for ages to get some decent looking fog in my scenes and having been sent files that don't look the way the examples do I was sent a file which when i opened it just continually crashed Lightwave.

So on that note i will be selling my license shortly and i will stick to the native render engine.

A total waste of money!

[juanjgon]

I'm sorry to hear this. We always try to do our best to make Octane and the LightWave plugin as rock solid and full featured as possible.

Anyway, if you have a scene with a problem that you can reproduce, could be helpful send it (and the log file you get after the crash) to me to test it here and try to fix the issue.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[ristoraven]

You have no idea how many different 3d apps I have tried and ended up feeling "nah, this is not for me". If I had paid for all of those, I would feel a bit silly. Next time, use the demos first. Evaluate with the watermarked results.

I agree that the TFD is a bit tricky at the moment with Octane. If you are not doing 360 VR content, you can use the native renderer for fire and smoke and render everything else in the scene with Octane and then combine the results in photoshop, after effects etc.. You know the pros in the cgi biz renders unbelievable amounts of layers upon layers when creating smoke/fire/fog/mist/whatnot -effects.

Rendering anything else than TFD, Octane is out of the orbit when compared to LW native renderer.

[AndyM1969]

I tried the demo first and loved it but my main issue is rendering exterior scenes with haze or fog, I have seen images and videos with shafts of fog and light and I have tried the scenes sent by people and my results on rendering the scenes as sent to me are totally different.

Let me give you an example. i have a forest scene, lots of trees and through the trees i have the sun and I want shafts of light and mist, like this https://g4.img-dpreview.com/C8D7F829E61 ... 4660BD.jpg

Now I have tried everything i can and I'm no noob when it comes to 3d but instead of the results i want all I get is a very dark image with no visible details at all.

[ristoraven]

Check this out:

https://youtu.be/Y-tIAm2OVa8?t=1699

It should give the results you're looking for..?

[AndyM1969]

Not really helping for Lightwave

[ristoraven]

Well, there's the basics if you get just a very dark scene with no details, but have set up the volumes otherwise correct.. Ramp up the light source, fiddle with imager node etc.

[ryanroye]

Octane's volumetrics don't do it for me either, mainly because they do slow down renders and affect the overall composition of the scene (part of the brute force rendering mentality).

If you really want fast, flexible fog, volumetrics and mist in your scene I strongly recommend compositing workflows. Even if you decide that Octane is not right for you, this will benefit your ability to produce quality imagery greatly.

[juanjgon]

Well, build this kind of foggy environments is a matter of minutes in Octane. You only need to use the environment medium feature. The render times can be high, but the setup is really easy, and the quality really nice.

-Juanjo

[juanjgon]

Other render in the same scene.

-Juanjo