OTOY Forums

With the recent change in octane licencing it's become more affordable, therefore more users are going to consider it as an option to iray. The problem I find is when you load a genesis character the default conversion is not that impressive. Even when you remove the filters for the eyes on the main page, the eyes still seam pretty dead compered to iray or redspec. So someone trying octane out for the first time, will be impressed with the speed, but turned off with the quality. I've attached 3 version of the same render using the same HDRI file. The first is iray, seconds is default octane linear response gamma 2.2 and 3rd is RedSpec also linear. We've got to get closer to what iray can do with skin otherwise even for free octane won't be worth it, and i think with this new octane pricing it's a great opportunity to build the octane / daz user base. Redspec is very good but that red tint it applies to all files kind of kills it for me.


Iray Octane Default linear gamma 2.2 Octane RedSpec linear gamma 2.2

Just to clarify, I can tweak both octane version to be much better, I'm familiar enough with Octane to do that. The point I'm trying to make is that someone not familiar with octane won't know what to do and just give up on it.

Skin isn't the only thing that would need to be updated. Lots of materials have poor auto conversion, and I'm not sure how much work it would take to make them more accurate. I've made my own templates and stuff for common materials though so converting isn't so bad anymore.

The reality is that PAs use a variety of totally different shaders in DS (even if you call it iray) that have different setups, node names etc etc etc. There is only so much that auto can do. All these unique setups have to be treated differently, and even then personal tastes and lighting setups are going to be key.

All I use the "auto" conversion for is to get over the diffuse, bump and transparency maps. I do wish that transparency maps came over more reliably. But I've found that sometimes daz doesn't even have these visible in the daz surfaces tab somehow, but the native renderer knows what the maps are. When daz has tricks like this going on, there isn't much I really expect a third party to do. (i tend to use 3delight hair presets if they exist since they tend to have the transparencies working right)

I think Iray will always be strong for people that want the instant gratification that Daz sells the majority of its users. But I never want my renders looking like what is in the promo images anyway, and I really enjoy lighting and making my own materials. So I'm not exactly the typical user.

While there is some overlap between the iray userbase and the octane one, is not that big really. for a variety of reasons.

Redspec is very good but that red tint it applies to all files kind of kills it for me.

We used that, in order to circumvent the shader-design-layout for Iray skin shaders, where you have a heavily yellow-tinted Diffuse over a blue-/reddish-tinted version of that very diffuse, simulating subcutan skin layers.
Since Octane cannot target these Iray node-channels at the same time, we had to utilize a little bit of color-filtering in order to get the textures looking as close to a blended version of the yellow / red-Iray mix.

You can easily revert that filtering, by setting the RGB color above each texture map back to 255/255/255, which reverts that filtering.