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Hi everyone, I'm trying to render world/object normals like I do with the VRaySamplerInfo render element.

Does anyone know how can I do this with Octane in 3DSMax? I see the tangent normals/vertex normals et cetera render elements for Octane, but none of them give me the correct output.

Thanks!

Hi Reality4,
The Info Channel kernel evaluates scene data and renders the data as color images that you can use in compositing.
Geometric Normals - The vectors perpendicular to the mesh's triangle faces.
Smooth Normals - Shows information on the integrity of the model's geometry in terms of the normals perpendicular to the mesh's smooth underlying surface.
Shading Normals - The interpolated normals used for shading. This does not take into account the object's Bump map. The result is less faceted and smoother than Geometric Normals.
Tangent (Local) Normals - A color shows the Tangent (Local) Normal in tangent space at the position hit by the camera ray.
Z-depth - An image that's shaded based on the distance between the objects in the scene and the position of the rendering camera.
Position - A color-coded image that shows the position of the objects in the scene, often used in compositing to help position 3D-rendered images from different renders.
Texture Coordinates - A color-coded image showing a Gradient map based on the direction of the object’s UV texture coordinates.
Texture Tangent - The first tangent vector. This determines the Normal map distortion's orientation.
Motion Vector - This renders the 2D motion vector in screen space. The X-coordinate shows pixels set in motion to the right (stored in the Red channel), while the Y-coordinate shows pixels in the up motion (stored in the Green channel).
Regards
Paride

Hi Paride,

Thanks I'm familiar with these, that's not what I meant. Please take a look at the attached screenshot.

I can only get Octane to output the same type of normals.

But what about e.g. world/object space?

Thanks!

Or is this ANOTHER one of those very basic features that Octane is missing...?

Hi Reality4,
About the z orientation, it must be set in your compositing software.
Said that, could you tell me which pass you need but not available?

1) Position - A color-coded image that shows the position of the objects in the scene.
2) Tangent (Local) Normals - A color shows the Tangent (Local) Normal in tangent space at the position hit by the camera ray.
3) Texture Coordinates - A color-coded image showing a Gradient map based on the direction of the object’s UV texture coordinates.
4) Geometric Normals - The vectors perpendicular to the mesh's triangle faces.
5) Smooth Normals - Shows information on the integrity of the model's geometry in terms of the normals perpendicular to the mesh's smooth underlying surface.
6) Shading Normals - The interpolated normals used for shading. This does not take into account the object's Bump map. The result is less faceted and smoother than Geometric Normals.
7) Texture Tangent - The first tangent vector. This determines the Normal map distortion's orientation.

You can do this with a normal texture and global texture AOVs. The normal (and position) texture have a coordinate system option, so you can choose camera, world or object.

I don't use 3ds max, but see this post for an ORBX example using the position texture. You can replace this with a normal texture: viewtopic.php?p=423563#p423563

Thank you guys for the feedback and sorry for the late reply.

I had to stick with VRay on this, there was no time for additional research...

It's always like this, I really want to do projects with Octane, but there's always, always something missing that messes up the pipeline.

I'm not surprised Octane is only used for specific title sequences, but not largely for entire productions.

Such a pity because I prefer and love the Octane render look and it seems all core elements are there.

So funny how many SD/MJ prompts use "octane render" as the 'preferred' render engine haha! I guess everyone agrees on the look, but not on the tools...!

And that means it's just a business management issue. But yeah, keep playing with your NCC-1701.