Question for Octane Render plugin users
DustRider
Posts: 2,788
I have a couple simple ...... well hopefully simple ... questions for Octane Render plugin users. With the announcement of the upcoming Carrara plugin for Octane, I downloaded the demo for Poser to see if I'd be interested in Octane and Carrara. WOW, am I impressed! Even with the texture map limitations on my 670M Card (fermi), I'm still very impressed with the capabilities, render quality, and of course the speed!!! I've decided to go ahead and take the plunge now to start learning Octane. I think I'll get Octane and the DS plugin since it's still at the reduced beta price, and it would make working with Genesis soooo much easier.
Before I make such a big investment, I wondered if anyone could give me an idea about how the DS plugin compares to the Poser plugin. I really like the ability to change the focal point "on the fly" in the Octane view port, and the ability to select materials via the Octane view port as well. In the only screen capture of Octane for DS that I've been able to find, I can't see anything that looks like similar functions. Are these features available in the DS version, and are there any things that are significantly different between the two that I should be aware of in advance?
Of course with the prossible beta updates next month, any missing features now could be a mute point in the next couple of weeks.
Thanks in advance!
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Comments
Yes, whilst rendering you can select various tools to alter focal point and material (to open up NGE), amongst a few other things.
From L-to-R ...
Select an object
Select a surface/material
Open an Octane Material <--- what you want<br /> Focus to an object <--- what you want<br /> Let focus follow an object ...
Select white point ...
Reload an object
Thanks Simon! That makes my decision pretty easy. Looking forward to playing with DS & Octane.
You're welcome and I hope you enjoy playing with the plug-in and Octane - they can be fun! :)
I can second Simon's comments. Octane has really revolutionized my workflow and I can't imagine doing animation now without it. It's well worth the investment.
One bit of advice though. If you are looking at using Octane, VRAM is your best friend. I upgraded to an NVIDIA GTX680 4GB from a GT530 2GB and it made a huge difference as to the complexity of scenes allowed and to render speed. Even so, I will sometimes have to convert textures down to 1000 pixels x 1000 pixels (4K textures, while nice, suck up way too much VRAM) and remap objects. There is an update planned for the Daz plugin that will automatically downsample textures.
Where I have had to downsample textures manually, I have exported the entire scene as an OBJ file and collected the materials together. Then, I've used Photoshop's batch processing to resize the texture maps in one go, and then remapped the downsampled textures onto the scene assets. I also use Octane materials to save on VRAM and texture slots.
The reward for doing this? You can see on the raw Octane renders I've attached. The corridor took about 5 minutes at 720p, I think, and the SUV took 22 minutes at 1080p resolution. Dropping the render size down to 720p reduced render time to 10.5 minutes. These are unretouched renders right out of Octane.
Actually, I should clarify. Those are unretouched renders out of DAZ|Studio using the Octane plugin to render.
Thanks for the tips Posemocap!
Unfortunately, upgrading the graphics card isn't an option because I'm running on a laptop. Fortunately, I have a full 3Gb of video RAM for the Nvidia GPU (670M), and a second intel GPU to use while renders are running, so that should help. The down side is the video card is it"s fermi based, so i'm a bit limited on the number of texture maps. But after putting the Poser plugin demo through it's paces for the past few days, I'm definitely willing to put up with the restrictions of my GPU for the incredible speed and quality of renders from Octane. Another big plus is that running Octane actually keeps that laptop a lot cooler than CPU rendering. The machine was designed for heavy duty gaming and has extra cooling fans that really keep the GPU cool.
Oh - by the way - Great Renders!.
I just wanted to say thanks for your words of encouragement. I got octane and the DS plugin, and I'm very happy with it (actually, I haven't had this much fun rendering in quite a while). Attached is my first render with Octane ... well actually my second, the first one was sans blouse (posted it in my gallery at rendo if you interested).
Octane is really amazing! Thanks again.
Very nice render! Glad that you're happy with Octane. Wait until you get playing around with it a bit more :)
Octane changed my workflow, and I'd be interested in hearing some of the tips, tricks, and discoveries you make. The more knowledge built up around Octane, the more we all win.
i've heard about probs with Animation
does that work well with dazstudio 4.6 and animate 2 ?
There was an issue with animation where an animated render would stall after a handful of frames. That issue has been corrected and it is working nicely.
I think there may be another issue with smoothing when used in animations and, if memory serves, the current suggestion is to check the 'real-time update' for smoothing in DS on any objects that change pose to ensure that Octane is passed the correct geometry.
thx Simon
is there a demo for the dazplugin ?
There was an issue with animation where an animated render would stall after a handful of frames. That issue has been corrected and it is working nicely.
I think there may be another issue with smoothing when used in animations and, if memory serves, the current suggestion is to check the 'real-time update' for smoothing in DS on any objects that change pose to ensure that Octane is passed the correct geometry.
The solution I've found for smoothing is to turn mesh smoothing off on the clothing item that you have attached to the character. That fixes the issue of the clothing item "jumping" back to its start position.
The Octane for DAZ Studio plug-in is still in beta, but requires a full Octane license to function (though you do not need to install the standalone version of Octane as the plug-in delivers/uses it's own version). What you can get is a demo of the standalone to see how it works. To use that you'll need to export your scene in .obj format and load that into Octane and then adjust the camera position (carefully!) to get the PoV you want.
The plug-in makes things easier as it 'copies across' the PoV from your DS scene and gives immediate access to Octane materials before you start the render process (much like Reality/Luxus if you have used those).