Octane help needed

LiquidWarehouse

Hi all

Picked up an Octane DS plugin subscription as I wanted to try a new PBR renderer that allowed for motion blur and other effects.

I'm pretty much used to Iray so having some difficulty moving across to Octane.

Fist off, I loaded an existing scene I had and fired up the Octane viewport but there are some textures that are displaying as white, I can't see why as they are listed in the textures tab.

Secondly I tend to only use Scenelights in my renders in Iray, avoiding environment. Is there any way to use the existing scene lighting setup in scene, they can vary from spot lights, point and emissivs or a mix of them.

Sorry if this is a bit vague, total Octane newb and for some reason I can't post in the Octane forums.

CGHipster

If you have white textures, go to the Octane panel and if it is not yet in your panes then add panel, select Octane.  Go to the Octane materials panel, you will see items in blue text, those are the ones which show as white and do not have an Octane material applied.  You can select them individual or select them in a group by holding shift and using the mouse left button.  Then right click over the blue objects and select "Create as New Material", then navigate to "Auto Material".  This will tell Octane to automatically match the materials and 99% of the time will fix the issue of materials.

This same place is where you can assign Octane Materials using the database, if you want to use an Octane Material from the database you can use the "live db" selection option in that same window and it will open the db, you can search for materials by name, then you would drag that material out and onto your item to have it applied.

For light sources in Octane you can use the live db and you can also manually assign items to be light sources from the "materials" panel in Octane.  You select the item that you want emissive and change the property by right clicking and selecting "Create as new light source" , Then you can adjust emissive properties to the right of it.

Note that Glass shaders do not always look good when Auto Material translates it in Octane, I found that it is best to use the Live DB and use a glass shader from the db for glass surfaces, same for things like liquids.  You can also tweak materials from this panel.

Word of caution, on the main Octane settings page be careful not to adjust the check marked options for "Auto Material after object loads", "Load OctaneRender materials from .duf", as I discovered that once deselected for some reason Daz does not save the selections if you re-check them and so while you can deselect those options and it will save you cannot reset those options and have it update the config for when you open Daz.  You basically end up having to uninstall the plugin via "add remove" programs in windows to get those selections back or suffer endless work having to go and repeat the above for auto materials.

LiquidWarehouse

I have the auto boxes checked. It looks like each object is assigned fine, and the material looks to be right but it's the actual texture missing in the render view. If I hover over the texture in the setup it shows a preview of the texture but it just appears as white in the viewport.

Should octane also be able to use Daz Iray shaders ok?

Octane is pretty bewildering compared to the Daz implimentation of Iray, I was kind of hoping to move across with little extra work and gain the extra camera effects.

CGHipster

Octane does not use the Iray shader but it converts it to an Octane Material.  can you take a screen of the material panel and your viewport?

CGHipster

What types of textures are you having trouble with? Can you give a product example? Are these textures from products from the store or are the issues with texture materials you have created and then applied to a figure or object?

LiquidWarehouse

CGHipster said:

What types of textures are you having trouble with? Can you give a product example? Are these textures from products from the store or are the issues with texture materials you have created and then applied to a figure or object?

Sorry didn't get around to the screenshots has problems with textures that came with products and also with applied shades. I uninstalled the plugin and the textures were missing in an iray render, refreshed the database and meta data which didn't help, had to reinstall Daz. Installed the plugin again but still the textures wouldn't load in octane. Thankfullyy it hadn't killed the database that time. I've uninstalled Octane now, will give it another go once v4 is released. Its just going to add too much to workflow to make it worthwhile at the moment.

CGHipster

Ok, no worries. My recommendation for Octane workflow is that I generally ignore Iray shaders if I know I will be rendering with Octane, and I stick to the Octane material db. When I use an object or figure and I am trying to have a dual workflow (Iray and Octane) if Octane gets a material it is a pretty quick fix with the material db.