OTOY Forums

Hi All,

Im having some problems with strange shadow banding and general weird results in dark areas on several different projects. In the frame buffer, the shadows look perfectly fine, and when I save them out, they show the strange banding problem. Does anyone have a guess as to why??

Yes, youre right about exporting a PNG, but they were 16 bit PNG's. I wonder if that made any difference? Its interesting to note that for other older versions of Octane I never had this issue.

I will give the EXR 16 a try. Thats what I would have exported had this been an animation for After Effects. My only reservation about EXR's is that they dont play nice with Photoshop.

I tried EXR and get the same banding as the PNG's. Could this be a bug specific to this version of the Max plugin?

I started a brand new empty scene, and imported my 'problem' Max scene to erase any weird settings that might have gotten checked. I also deleted and defaulted all settings, even with the camera.

The exported EXR from the new scene had the same banding problems.

Lets see if this zipped EXR works as an attachment:

And I might have to supply my Max file to see what's going on? And I should mention, if I open a Max file that worked and rendered with no banding in previous versions of Octane, it renders in the current version with banding. Im thinking of rolling back my plugin.

Hi brianzero,
your file looks good opening with photoshop.
Are you sure that it is not an issue in AE?
Regards
Paride

Paride, take that image and flatten it. Youll instantly see the banding better. I can see the banding on that image as I type. Not only that, the shadows are much darker than in the VFB.

I am also getting this exact error on another project. I am ONLY getting these errors in the newest plugin, again more banding, shadows extrememly dark, shadows separating.

Ive used Octane for since it was released, and Ive never seen this error in any of the 1000's or renderings Ive created.

And, even in the most simple test project, Im getting banding. This same banding is not seen on the Octane VFB.

Max file attached. Open it, render it, save it, and see if the error persists? Could this be a GPU driver error on my end?

Hi brianzero,
try following my setting.
Regards
Paride

These setting seem to fix the problem, thanks Paride. My question is to the developers, why set the LDR as 'Default Active Viewport' when it creates problems like this? If I save any file when the LDR mode is enabled, the results have errors. Why not have HDR 'viewport mapping tone' set as a default?

It took countless hours to figure this out. I recommend strongly that the developers set HDR as the default value in the next release.