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Sorry if this has been answered but I couldn't find anything when I was looking around...
I have a large (~700Mb) obj file of a furnished apartment with a camera that moves through built in 3ds Max 2011. When I attempt to use the plugin to render the animation in Octane, it exports and imports the obj every frame, which typically takes an hour a frame if it doesn't crash first! I tried "Camera Only" but it doesn't seem to change anything. So I guess my question is, is it possible to just have the camera update and not re-export/import the obj every frame?
Thanks in advance!

Windows 7 64-bit, 4 x intel i7 [email protected], 6Gb Ram, GTX-580
Octane 1.024 beta 2.46b Cuda 3.2
Max2Octane 1.022h

Unfortunately at the moment Octane has to export the scene from your 3D app. Create the required Data with the CPU and then send the output to the graphics card where it's rendered.

Change the camera position and it has to do it all over again.

The Question has been raised.I think this will be on their list once they have sorted V1.0 of the software.

I've been thinking how this might be accomplished.The only way I can think of is that they will try and create some sort of Tweening algorithm inside Octane to re-arrange the X,Y,Z co-ordinates of all the objects in the scene when ever the camera position is moved.

This would eliminate the need to import every frame to create the new set of X,Y,Z co-ords for all the data.It would then of course be able to re-use the materials in the file.

But this is just a guess on my part.

Ah, I was afraid of that. Amazing software though! Blown away otherwise! Hopefully something will be in the next release or someone can find a work around. I'm not much of a coder but it seems like if you can pan, rotate, and zoom in Octane there should be a way of connecting the Max camera position to control that one without closing, opening, and reloading. Especially if there i no animation in the OBJ. Maybe some elaborate external script/hack? For now we'll just split our scene into each individual shot and erase all unseen geometry. A bit more labor intensive but it'll get the job done. (hopefully) Thanks!

The camera only checkbox does what you want. It updates the cameraposition only, and skips the exporting of the obj.

first hit render and setup your scene in octane, then save and quit octane.
Back in max2octane choose "use existing project" and hit render animation with camera only checked.

The "Camera Only" option does help in a scene with no animation since Max doesn't export the OBJ every frame. The bottle neck is really when Octane closes, reopens, reloads, and re-voxelizes the scene. The voxelizing is taking from 2-10 minutes a frame which is killing me on a ~8,000 frame animation set. I was hoping there was a way to connect the cameras in a way where Octane would just move (pan, rotate, zoom) and save the new image as the next frame.

This is how they should do it:

Export a list with camerapositions per frame, load the mesh (once) and step through the positions in octane.
I've asked them twice about it, very strange they haven't implemented something like this for flythrough animations.

Updating Camera...must be THE TOP priority... (keep losing jobs because of this (