Any news about an update for the exporter ?..

[galford]

Hello everybody,

I bought Octane to use with Lightwave...I can say this is an excellent renderer, easy to learn an quick fo rendering....
BUT unfortunately, after spending some days to test and see how I could use it in my pipeline, I was very desapointed about the export plugin !

There is a big bug with the smooth when enabled !!
I tried everything and there is no way to have a good smooth pixel filter for polys...lot's of artefacts at the moment.

Any news about an update to correct this ?? This is very important, because actually I just can't use Octane with this bug....
Very frustrating for me, and surely for every 3D artist here.

Please tell us if you are working on the problem...

Regards,
Franck.

[scratch33]

Another unfortunate guy...

We are here... waiting... We have have an excellent renderer, but we can't use it because of plugin...

[hmk]

I know some lightwave users using Octane Render without problems, am not a lightwave user myself, but maybe you are doing something wrong?

[galford]

I know some lightwave users using Octane Render without problems, am not a lightwave user myself, but maybe you are doing something wrong?

Yeah maybe....I hope this is not a bug....but I would like to use Octane as soon as possible....

If this is not a bug, we need more informations about the process....
Can a Lightwaver, or Holocube, make a video to show the good method...This will be very appreciated.

Thanks for your help guys.
Franck.

[hmk]

Maybe tyrot can give you some help here, hope he will read this thread.

[scratch33]

Nothing wrong. This is a bug.

You can use octane but you must export from modeler with standart lw obj exporter.
But, in lightwave, you setup the scene in layout...
And to export from modeler, you must save all the objects in 1 object in layout then send in modeler then export manualy. And forget the animation...

Impossible to use in production.

This isssue must be fixed as soon as possible.

But two months we do not see here holocube...

[galford]

Well, I did a few tests again today....and it seems that finally, for me, the problem is not the exporter, but Octane itself....

Let me explain...
I tried an export of my character .obj from lw 9.2, lw 9.6 and lw 10, directly from the modeler, and the problem stay the same...bad artefacts !
A friend of mine tried to export it directly from maya (not with the exporter) and nothing changed...
We tried Zbrush .obj export with different meshes....no ways...

Octane seems to not be able to perform a good smooth pixel filter on polys when meshes are low def :
With my character low def : 2240 polys, the result is bad.
BUT with the same character high def ( 57326 polys ) it works very good !! no more artefact on it...
so, OK it works, but...

The problem is that usually, we animate with low def characters which are polysmooth when rendering...
But with Octane...have we to animate with high poly character !?...this is no good for production.

So, why can't we have a good smooth pixel filter result with a simple organic low def .obj ?
Or may be Octane could do a polysmooth on the mesh when rendering, like in other software....

Radiance, please, any idea to resolve this ?..

Regards,
Franck.

[radiance]

Hi guys,

We have again tried to contact holocube and have not gotten a reply from him.
I will try to call him by phone on monday and see where we can get.

I do believe there is a bug in the exporter script, it does not export smooth normals propperly.
The trick explained above by using LW's internal OBJ export may work, as it will probably write smooth vertex normals correctly to the OBJ file, but then again, you can't use this workflow for an animation production...

Regarding the post by galford, I think you're mixing 2 things here.
If you export very low poly objects, and turn on smoothing, it's normal you get incorrect results, and black bands around edges.
This is a normal result with ray-tracers.
You cannot smooth meshes which have very high angles between polygons.
Try enablind smooth on a simple cube and you see the effect clearly, as you cannot smooth between 2 polygons at a 90 degree angle.

Exporting a low-poly mesh and then using subdivision works, as it splices up your mesh into hundreds of thousands of triangles before rendering and as a result the angles between polygons are all very small, giving a correct result.

Octane does not support subdivision during rendering at this time, so you need to export high-poly meshes for quality rendering.

Radiance

[galford]

Thanks for the infos Radiance, very instructive about low polys.

With this new informations, I gave another try today and...I'm very happy because I found how to use Octane with Lighwave for animation !!

My pipeline is Messiah Studio for rigging and animation, export .mdd to Lightwave, then add an displacement mapping to use my Zbrush sculpt and finally use the holocube's exporter....and it works very well.

So, this is possible...
If somebody is interested, I can make a little video demonstration of it.

Bye.
Franck.

[vipvip]

yes but try to stop animation after launching... you must force lightwave to shut down (i'm workin on win7 64)...
and all reload after lw, sacene, re-parameter exporter ans so on...
Unusable for serious prod. works...

+ all other bugs ( normals & more....)