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Hello there,

i would like to ask few things regarding Octane for Unreal. I am sort of considering giving it a try, but have no experience in Unreal, or any clue how all of this works, so i figured it would be better to ask first about it, if its even worth trying.


First of all, i have the regular Octane Studio Subscription for 2 GPUs with 3DsMax plugin - if i wanted to try this Unreal plugin, do i need to purchase it separately, or do i have access to it within my subscription or is it free? I presume Unreal itself is free, right?

My interest in this comes down to my ambition to learn how to do animations for my archviz projects. Some camera flybys or walkarounds and whatnot. I was looking into this (Unreal) sometime ago, found some nice paid tutorial about how to export your geometry from Max to Unreal, then import it, set up the materials, the lighting and everything in it - the tutorial itself was like 30 hours and stuff looked rather complicated. I guess if i could find the time and will, i could learn it, but naturally i would prefer easier solution, using some skills i already have. Like working with Octane. Thus my question is, can i set up my scene in Octane, then export is as ORBX and import into Unreal and it will automatically convert all the materials and lights into Unreal ones? So i dont have to deal with all that within Unreal, which i am not familiar with? Is this what the plugin does, or its intended to be used for different purpose?

Thanks in advance for your responses.

Timmaigh! wrote:Hello there,

i would like to ask few things regarding Octane for Unreal. I am sort of considering giving it a try, but have no experience in Unreal, or any clue how all of this works, so i figured it would be better to ask first about it, if its even worth trying.


First of all, i have the regular Octane Studio Subscription for 2 GPUs with 3DsMax plugin - if i wanted to try this Unreal plugin, do i need to purchase it separately, or do i have access to it within my subscription or is it free? I presume Unreal itself is free, right?

Im not fully familiar with licencing. You can always use the free tier, but you can test the studio version and see if it works.

Timmaigh! wrote: My interest in this comes down to my ambition to learn how to do animations for my archviz projects. Some camera flybys or walkarounds and whatnot. I was looking into this (Unreal) sometime ago, found some nice paid tutorial about how to export your geometry from Max to Unreal, then import it, set up the materials, the lighting and everything in it - the tutorial itself was like 30 hours and stuff looked rather complicated. I guess if i could find the time and will, i could learn it, but naturally i would prefer easier solution, using some skills i already have. Like working with Octane. Thus my question is, can i set up my scene in Octane, then export is as ORBX and import into Unreal and it will automatically convert all the materials and lights into Unreal ones? So i dont have to deal with all that within Unreal, which i am not familiar with? Is this what the plugin does, or its intended to be used for different purpose?

Thanks in advance for your responses.

There are two ways to work with orbx files in the Unreal Plugin. One is ORBX proxies, where you just place the ORBX in the scene, but on the unreal side you only see
The other is ORBX importing, which tries to convert your scene to unreal assets. This process is far from perfect, as it is a suprisingly hard problem.
It will convert materials, meshes, textures and rendertargets to unreal equivalents, but will do so somewhat lossy.
The octane materials however are near losslessly converted an Octane Material type in unreal. So atleast on the octane side your materials should be identical almost always.

which i am not familiar with? Is this what the plugin does, or its intended to be used for different purpose?

There isnt really a specific thing the plugin is supposed to do. The plugin does quite a lot atm.
The plugin can convert unreal materials to octane materials.
It can import ORBX files, unpack them and create unreal assets out of them and create an unreal scene (lossy process).
You can create octane material in the unreal node editor.
Octane materials, rendertargets and ORBX proxies are integrated with the unreal sequencer via node parameters.
Octane materials, rendertargets and ORBX proxies are integrated with the blueprint system via node parameters
There are octane render protocols for the sequencer that allow you to either render out your sequence, or export it as an animated ORBX file.
It supports unreal hair, spline meshes, unreal BSP models, geometry cache and a bunch more.

Many thanks for your elaborate answer. i guess i will have to try to see after all.