OTOY Forums

OctaneRender 3 announcement, April 5, 2016 - 8 months ago

Native plugin ecosystem: OctaneRender will enable easy loading of plugins through ORBX modules that continuously update the host application with new features. New plugins will also enable support of different shader languages beyond OpenSL, including support for Nvidia’s Material Definition Language (MDL).

Source:

https://home.otoy.com/octanerender-3-an ... ap-update/

My hope was that support for MDL would make it possible to read most Iray shader setups.

compare:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/material-d ... guage.html

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Will that only work in OctaneRender standalone with some basic import options for MDL shaders?

or

Will one day the OctaneRender for DAZ Studio plugin be able to read Iray shaders directly from the DAZ Studio scene and render them?

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We are exploring making it a module after OSL is done.

after OSL is done.

Any ETA on this, Goldorak?

Specific to the DAZStudio plugin - the ability to send MDL shaders to Octane will also rely on the DAZStudio SDK being able to provide the MDL text for a material. I cannot currently see how this would be done - however there is potentially a property attached to a DAZMaterial which provides this. But you are right - the ability to render MDL shaders in Octane will open up some pretty amazing possibilities.

Paul

That support would definitely makes things so much better ! Guess got to wait for after 3.1 version is released.

This would be incredible. The IRAY MDL settings is currently the only thing that Octane lacks vs. Iray.

Automatic and truly accurate iray conversion is a critical issue. Why is it on the back burner?

Honestly, at this point, I feel like I was hoodwinked out of $600. OTOY does not make it clear that Octane doesn't support iRay materials. The autoconversion results in scenes that are lifeless compared to the totally free render system that comes with DAZ.

There should be a disclaimer.

Can I fiddle? Yes, but it seems like Octane is all but unusable for any DAZ users creating anything more complex than a portrait (Redspec handled that for us, thank goodness). When we have a scene with hundreds of materials how are we supposed to replicate the precisely created iray material settings without going absolutely crazy?

When we came from the Poser plug-in developing RedSpec SSS looking to port it to the DAZ Studio plug-in, I can't even name you the countless hurdles we had to take on our way.
Back then the plug-in was in a really horrible state (that was before Paul took over).

I went back to the Poser plug-in a couple of days and was quite surprised how much slower it was - particularly with the viewport open. (Might have been my priority settings in "System" though).

All in all I'm quite happy what Paul did with OCDS and how much be brought it forward and was already able to iron out bugs. Most of them are actually not a coding error in the plug-in itself but often enough also coding errors in DAZ Studio itself, which nobody ever reported.
As the matter of fact, the most recent problems solved often were DS bugs...

Regarding material conversion I think this is something that will come with MDL eventually.

I'm not blaming Paul. He is responsive on the forum and seems like he genuinely wants to help. However, I don't think "eventually" is good enough. I think this needs to be the issue being worked on for the DAZ plug-in.

Like I said, I'm new, but Octane isn't and neither is Iray. It has been packaged with DAZ since early 2015. Why isn't MDL support the critical feature that Paul is working on? Instead, he is not sure when / if it will be implemented.

I doubt most new customers know that after shelling out $600 they'll be spending hours adjusting hundreds of material on the new DAZ scene they downloaded. Because if they don't, they'll get a flat, uninteresting textures.

This small dorm room scene has 139 materials. I'm really supposed to go in and edit each one until it looks as good as the FREE rendering program does? What the heck, guys?

Some may say that Octane is for the professional who wants to fiddle with his materials. I disagree. Octane is for anyone who paid for the promised speed and quality. It's certainly not made clear on OTOY's website that you'll be required to put hours of work a scene's materials to even get a result comparable to the default render engine.

While I do agree with you to some degree, when it comes to the fact that some converted materials don't look as good (right away) in OctaneRender as they do in Iray I have to break a lance here for Paul and his work.
A lot of the Iray materials carry settings/meta that isn't even present in OCDS at this point (e.g. glossy layered weight).

And because there are still some - more critical - bugs to fix in the plug-in, Paul has his priorities straight.

Fixing things will always come before adding new features - I also had to learn that the hard way, believe me

Besides: Converting one material from another one will always result in quality differences. It has been like that, and will be like that in the future.

Leonides02 wrote:This small dorm room scene has 139 materials. I'm really supposed to go in and edit each one until it looks as good as the FREE rendering program does? What the heck, guys?

But DOES it have 139 discreet materials, or is it 5-10 materials with different textures applied to them to make 139 "different " materials? This is a very fundamental question to ask when looking at this, and can make an impossible seeming task a lot more manageable. A key task when converting the materials is to identify the materials that are REALLY differnent, find a good base material and template that. Then you can apply the same templated material to all the surfaces.

For instance, a scene may have 10 different types of wood in it, but have all of them use the same basic wood shader. The same goes for glass, plastic, fabric and people. Genesis characters have like 15 materials, but you basically just need skin, eye and mucus membrane materials. I normally use exactly the same templated material for face, legs, torso and so on.

Iray really put a dent in the valuse of Octane. Instead of being an alternative to 3Dlight (which isn't unbiased or even in the same league as Octane) it's now a slightly better unbiased renderer for DAZ, which is a lot harder to use, especially for beginners. There's just no way around that.

What we need are some good basic materials, that are calibrated for DAZ. The LiveDB materials are often scaled wrong or weird in other ways (have fun getting the TonySculpor skin materials running well). For crazy good skin and hair you can just buy Redspec, but it would be nice with a small library of skin, wood and so on. I haven't had time to really play with Octane lately, but when I get started again, I'm going to start sharing my basic materials for this kind of stuff.