OTOY Forums

Hello, two days ago I released an image of my current Ranger station project made with Blender, and now I am rendering it with Octane. Colors are much more vivid, but I encounter two bad problems with 2.52 :

1 - The come back of the old problem of Octane refusing to relink an obj when working on a big scene (1247.7 MB : less than half of my available memory and I relinked 2.85 3GB scenes previously, though) and freezing requiring the program to be killed in the task manager.

2 - A weird problem of Ambient Occlusion making black spots in some areas (on the right of the house, just before the window, and over the wood heap). Can be reduced a bit in direct lighting, but can't be fixed in Pathtracing.



Larger resolution and Blender image here : http://3d-synthesis.com/48-Mountains.html

The smoke is made in Particle Illusion, and added in Photoshop. I plan to add it on a plane to be rendered in Octane (I got the same result in a file with just some trees), but currently, I can't add anything in the ocs scene, because Octane refuses to relink a new obj and crashes !

Those black areas are smoothing problems I think. Do you have smoothing enabled for your material. If so uncheck and see if the problem goes.

That is some really nice snow, especially on the car roof. The "ice candles" should be more specular though, they are too diffuse looking.

Nice touch with the details! (shovel, axe, frost on the windows, snow on the car behind the wheels..)

@MaTtY631990: Yes, smoothing is enabled, because the trunks used to build the house are not subsurfaced, to limit the polygon count. Without smoothing, the polygons are visible. I should try with a subsurf level, but I fear I'll have to remap some parts. Anyway, currently, I'm stuck, because relink obj doesnt work, and Octane freezes (maybe because of my cold weather scene !)

@matej: In a first version, the ice candels were too smooth and glossy. i made them more specular with some bump to create a frost effect on surface, and I added some alpha (0.8 or 0.9)... I have still to work on that point.

MaTtY631990 wrote:Those black areas are smoothing problems I think. Do you have smoothing enabled for your material. If so uncheck and see if the problem goes.

I bet You made 2 planks and then You copied them all over the place....

....if You are duplicating them like in a mirror... its getting the minus (-) value on some axis...

objects in the scene in scale ( X:1 Y:1 Z:1 ) after mirror duplicate will get You something like that ( X:-1 Y:1 Z:1)

it will look correct in your 3d main app. but Octane will not render it properly.

and if You will not recompute normals... You ll get the black spots.....


I have already some solutions for it... at least in SOFTIMAGE XSI.... I can try to help You... showing You how to get rid of that.

Hmm, Thank you. I have just disabled Smooth on the two materials showing black spots, and they disappeared. As I suspected, the polygons are visible now. Axis problem sometimes occurs in Blender, and it shows the objects dark in the 3D view. Reseting the normals or the axis references solves the trouble. It is not this kind of problem here. It is only that Smooth doen't work well on low poly and non subsurfaced meshes. I have hesitated, but as the scene still has to grow (I want to enlarge the landscape), I decided to keep the house low poly... bad choice...

very well executed, love your work

Some images of my current work, while still working on the landscape.

The lack of shadow caster material is a problem for billboard trees : I use two crossed billboards to get right shadows, but it disturbs the view of the image itself.

really nice job Roubal, I like more the sunset/sunrise ones. Nice detail. Once we get instances, no more billboards

Yes, I put much hope in instances, because I tried to export real trees, and the obj weights 3.6 GB and is still growing ! I kill the export process...