OTOY Forums

Hi,


Firstly, I love using Octane - It arguably has some of the best technology available and has a very promising future. However, I find when I bring it up in conversation I often hear rebuttals about it's poor production integration and especially it's incredibly slow development process, along with an unrefined UI/UX between standalone and plugins. I'm lucky that my clients are output focused and don't care what I use or how I do it, however this is simply not the case when working at a studio.

I understand that this is generally a cost/benefit type of situation and I'm unsure of the internal workings, requirements or future changes at Otoy. I'm hoping I could gain some clarity surrounding Otoy's future plans so I can be assured that continuing to use and learn Octane will be a safe(ish) bet.

I have a few questions:
- Does Otoy believe the current Octane development process is sufficient and effective?
- Is there a plan to evolve/restructure/modify the current development process or will it remain as is?
- How does Otoy's development process differ to an alternative engine like Redshift?
- It feels like some parts of Octane's UX/UI get set in stone as they are developed, rather than being subjected to a rigid and overarching set of design standards, is this true or untrue?
- Does Otoy believe the current Octane UX/UI is sufficient and effective?

As a paying and happy customer I'd love to see Octane really decimate it's competition and it seems to be doing that on the technology front with no problems. If the development and UX/UI can catch up I'm certain there'll be no other choice but Octane soon enough.


Cheers!

Goldorak wrote:https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=69461

That's great, congratulations on the release, 2018.1 looks awesome. This isn't a post about features or upcoming versions, more about ensuring what we've got has been refined to a production ready form, including a unified and considered user experience wherever possible.

Just to back this up with some good UX/UI practices.

I recently saw this video of Matthäus Niedoba from Maxon talking about the development and optimisation of workflow when adding new features, in this case Volume Modelling.

https://youtu.be/coLAWYJ1Jjc?t=1055

tim_grove wrote:

Goldorak wrote:https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=69461

That's great, congratulations on the release, 2018.1 looks awesome. This isn't a post about features or upcoming versions, more about ensuring what we've got has been refined to a production ready form, including a unified and considered user experience wherever possible.

We have 21 DCC integrations - many of them have their own UX and APIs which impact how Octane works within each one differently - often times well beyond the control of the plug-in. The pieces that are consistent in across all integrations are the core rendering engine and all UX it provides, as well the ORBX interchange system between the various DCC tools.

I can understand that in some ways developers would be held ransom to particular API's and that you have an insane amount of plugins to oversee, however developers and UX/UI designers are very seperate roles and there can be a dramatic improvement in the usability and efficiency when these two workloads are split into their specific channels. I don't only think this is relevant to plugins though, there are definitely design choices that could improve the standalone efficiency.

Maybe this is a business decision about what plugins to continue supporting (diminishing returns) and possibly focusing resource on where the majority of users are.

I'm not a UX designer, but I consider myself a reasonably objective user no matter what the platform. I just think this is something Otoy could work on to really bring Octane in line with it's very serious level of technology - it's talking the talk, but not walking the walk.

tim_grove wrote:Hi,


Firstly, I love using Octane - It arguably has some of the best technology available and has a very promising future. However, I find when I bring it up in conversation I often hear rebuttals about it's poor production integration and especially it's incredibly slow development process, along with an unrefined UI/UX between standalone and plugins. I'm lucky that my clients are output focused and don't care what I use or how I do it, however this is simply not the case when working at a studio.

I understand that this is generally a cost/benefit type of situation and I'm unsure of the internal workings, requirements or future changes at Otoy. I'm hoping I could gain some clarity surrounding Otoy's future plans so I can be assured that continuing to use and learn Octane will be a safe(ish) bet.

I have a few questions:
- Does Otoy believe the current Octane development process is sufficient and effective?
- Is there a plan to evolve/restructure/modify the current development process or will it remain as is?
- How does Otoy's development process differ to an alternative engine like Redshift?
- It feels like some parts of Octane's UX/UI get set in stone as they are developed, rather than being subjected to a rigid and overarching set of design standards, is this true or untrue?
- Does Otoy believe the current Octane UX/UI is sufficient and effective?

As a paying and happy customer I'd love to see Octane really decimate it's competition and it seems to be doing that on the technology front with no problems. If the development and UX/UI can catch up I'm certain there'll be no other choice but Octane soon enough.


Cheers!

Are you talking about the Standalone, the plugins, the functionality, or all of them?

All of them, standalone's overall UX trickles down to plugin level and then each dev deals with the quirks of the given API. I think the plugin dev's (while doing an unbelievable job) have a herculean task interpreting the massive amounts of changes with porting Octane features, keeping abreast of changes with nvidia/technology/industry, talking with users, bug checking, writing and maintaining documentation, let alone some free time to consider what the best way to implement a feature into the UI is, or that a previous feature needs revisions based on new data.

You only need to look across the forum to see posts buried with no answers, repetitive questions that devs (understandably) find very frustrating, devs making new threads for user requests or specific bugs hoping that some of the userbase sees it. It feels like if you don't spend a lot of time on here then you'll never find out whats going on or in some cases just the right way to use the software.

I understand there are a lot of use cases that you develop for but not only is there room for improvement with this aspect of Octane but this is where it lags behind it's competition.

Honestly, I'm sure it sounds like I'm just whinging but I've thought about this for a long time now and I really actually care about the future of Octane, I'd feel more of a fool if I didn't mention these things.

tim_grove wrote:All of them, standalone's overall UX trickles down to plugin level and then each dev deals with the quirks of the given API. I think the plugin dev's (while doing an unbelievable job) have a herculean task interpreting the massive amounts of changes with porting Octane features, keeping abreast of changes with nvidia/technology/industry, talking with users, bug checking, writing and maintaining documentation, let alone some free time to consider what the best way to implement a feature into the UI is, or that a previous feature needs revisions based on new data.

You only need to look across the forum to see posts buried with no answers, repetitive questions that devs (understandably) find very frustrating, devs making new threads for user requests or specific bugs hoping that some of the userbase sees it. It feels like if you don't spend a lot of time on here then you'll never find out whats going on or in some cases just the right way to use the software.

I understand there are a lot of use cases that you develop for but not only is there room for improvement with this aspect of Octane but this is where it lags behind it's competition.

Honestly, I'm sure it sounds like I'm just whinging but I've thought about this for a long time now and I really actually care about the future of Octane, I'd feel more of a fool if I didn't mention these things.

So basically you are saying that Octane lacks in every area, like core development, plugin development, documentation, support, everything?

I as a developer see a lot of issues, and there are a gazillion things we would like to improve and we are trying to tackle them one by one. Since we don't have unlimited resources we have to prioritize, so it would be great to hear first what you think are the most important issues in those areas I have listed above.

I'm gonna chime in and agree with Tim_Grove.

I am also Octane Team all the way, but recently trying out Redshift really opened my eyes as to how much Octane lacks in several areas. I'm not super tech savvy so i'm going to speak from my experience as a motion designer.

To answer Abstrax's questions:

* First and most important to me is lack of documentation. In this aspect I think Otoy could reference Maxon. The convenience of right clicking and getting help is invaluable. I know there's a manual from Aoktar out there, but as more updates for the plugin roll out, this is not updated, and I understand because it's all on his shoulders...I'm not even sure if he has any support from other developers.

* This brings me to my second point. If there are not already, there should be teams of developers focusing and stress testing versions before they roll out. I personally prefer to wait for a stable release than get several releases full of bugs and having to go back and forth between versions.

* A customer support system with tickets would be great, again, having to rely on the forum is not up to date with today's practices, it's just backwards, frustrating and quite honestly it's not efficient at all.

* On the UI/UX side (I don't use standalone, so this is my opinion of C4Ds plugin) - using RedShift felt overall like a more finessed and premium product, with thoughout branding and cohesiveness and integration with C4D's layout and I hate to admit this, because again, I'm all about Octane, but it's disappointing to see swarms of people switching to RedShift and praising it on Social Media and version after version we don't see the UI/UX getting some love.

And I do know that as V3 customers we got V4 upgrade for free, but honestly. I rather pay for an upgrade that's taken care of on all angles than get it for free. Look at Insydium and all the success they've had...how well it integrates with C4D and how happy people are with it.

I do want to say that the Node system in C4D's plugin is great, this is a place where I think Octane has the upper hand over Redshift, and I agree with Tim, this is not a thread to trash talk Otoy, it's developers or the software. We truly want to continue using it and we care about the product and it's future, it just feels like it needs some serious attention to stay in the competition.