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Hi, I am very new to Octane, I didnt even run it till now because I wait for new GFX card. I just try to know as much as I can from this website and forum. As far as I know, there is no hair/fur/grass shader in Octane. Maybe it is exact word - I dont know the terminology, so it may be hair/fur/grass node

I mainly do archviz renders, and good grass is difficult to create and has very big impact on exterior scenes.
There are several ways how to create grass for final image, but most beatiful and amazing is true 3D grass with visible blades and light dancing on it... Most easy and fast how to make it is special material. Very good example is Vray - it is used mainly for archvizs, so it have two possibilities: 1) Renders huge amounts of polygons veeery fast and without heavy RAM usage and 2) has new Fur shader. It is simple shader without many options but can do its purpose very well. Unfortunatelly I havent new Vray, so I only saw how it works, but I have new Octane

I use Sketchup or Archline or Allplan (long time ago) for creating 3D, and this kind of apps dont have and will never have grass modelling.
I can export to Blender or C4D and create grass there, but for example C4D has hair module only in the most expensive pack. And integrating this apps to my pipeline between (e.g) Sketchup and Octane would only make problems - like more I/O issues to solve.
Another thing is that rendering Blender or C4D grass without creating mesh can be done only in the same app - Blender or C4D.
So only 3D option how to create true grass for me is to make it in Blender and somehow (I dont know how by now) export it as polygons via OBJ to Octane. BUT this will create huge mesh and polygon count with big impact on VRAM and speed I suppose.
Another option is make fake gras... only a few planes with texture at some places... But this is so time consuming and doesnt look good - texture doesnt fit often to rest of grass areas etc... And I dont like fake solutions
Last option is to make blades in post production in Gimp of Photoshop. But it has disadvanteges too and not easy.
Of course I can use texture , but it looks bad, especially on boundaries, and even great texture and scale wont save it.

I want to ask: Is there any way how Octane can help in making grass? Will be there something like hair/fur/grass shader in future? It doesnt have to have many options, only a few. Anyone who wants make complex hair simulation with dynamics and hair styles will use Blender, C4D or Modo, I think, and will export only a few heads , not biig gardens of hairs .

Thanks,
Tomas

hi mayan,

good news is that there's an upcoming version of octane that is capable of instancing.
bad news is that we don't know when that version is due.

colin wrote:hi mayan,

good news is that there's an upcoming version of octane that is capable of instancing.
bad news is that we don't know when that version is due.

Hi Colin,
I look forward to instancing, I use instances in C4D with VrayforC4D heavily for trees. But back to Sketchup -> Octane. I cannot imagine, how it will work - how to say to Octane that this is an instance of that . I cant imagine how apps like Blender or C4D will tell that this blade of grass is instance of that blade and there are millions of them... Will we have to create instances manually or export plugin will create instances or Octane will try to find that these meshes are identical and will render them as instanes? Maybe I dont understand exactly what is instancing in terminology of modern renders.
Unfortunately it doesnt solve the problem that (AFAIK) any of archviz 3D app like Revit, Archicad, Archline, Allplan or even Sketchup doesnt create grass physically. So using of intermediate app will be necessary (maybe only because of grass) and this means more problems and slower workflow than to say to Octane that THIS material should be rendered as grass blades with some given variability.

My guess is that the exporter for each of the 3D apps will know what object is an instance and it will tell Octane that. The exporter will also tell Octane the orientation, scale, and position of each instance of that object. It shouldn't be that big of a deal I think.

I don't think instancing for octane works the way you guys thought it would. I believe it's for achieving true animation and seperate obj into one scene instead of loading an entire scene as 1 obj file. Someone more knowledgable please shine some light on this. And I don't know how they can achieve the kind of instancing you guys are thinking on GPU.

i don't know about other application but with c4d it's already possible to render hair stuff without any conversion.
obviously there is the polycount limitation but with instances it could be a lot more easy

ciao beppe

bepeg4d wrote:i don't know about other application but with c4d it's already possible to render hair stuff without any conversion.
obviously there is the polycount limitation but with instances it could be a lot more easy

ciao beppe

But instances mean, every hair is the same, if the SRT is ignored...
It would be nice for Particles...

face

bepeg4d wrote:i don't know about other application but with c4d it's already possible to render hair stuff without any conversion.
obviously there is the polycount limitation but with instances it could be a lot more easy

ciao beppe

Hi bepeg4d,
it is good to know that octane support C4D hair without any conversion (via exporter I suppose), but it means that for grass I should have to buy Cinama 4D Studio which is veeeeery expensive, almost 40x more than Octane. I think I can say that grass is one of essentials in exterior arch renders and using any other big app mainly for grass is something I would like to keep off in production. Even if I could use free Blender instead of expensive C4D. I have older C4D 10 without Hair module and dont want to upgrade. I would like to use mostly archmodelling app and Octane except for works when I must use some 3D libraries that are suitable for Blender/C4D.

Please make a grass shader

face wrote: But instances mean, every hair is the same, ...
face

in terms of geometry, but can be different in scale, rotation and position
ciao beppe

SRT = Scaling, Rotation and Translation;)

face