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I gave up and closed DAZ Studio - I couldn't see any activity that suggested anything was downloading. I came back and started DAZ Studio again after a while (not two hours) and all the icons were there.
Now I need to ask whether it is possible to save the Octane preferences? I looked at the manual pages but couldn't spot a way to do it. I want o change things like the default resolution and image size, etc. Also those path settings keep reverting to something other than the folder I select. I just don't see a "Save" button.
I am not sure myself as never changed the paths
there seems to be options under preferences
default size never sticks for me either next load but saves in a scene
Ok, figured it now. There's a "New" button next to the "Default" Render Settings in the Render Settings tab. You just create a new settings profile by giving it a name. Next time you load it will go to default but you just click on the default button and choose the one you have just created.
EDIT: No, that doesn't work either. The "New" one I just created disappeared the next time I started DAZ Studio.
I have been messing with Octane these last couple of days and though I like it quite a lot, I don't think it will be replacing Iray for me. At least not for still renders. I don't mind the material tweaking since I'm starting to do that frequently using Iray anyway, even if not to that degree, but I like Iray a lot too. So I don't feel I have the need to spend so much extra time doing that for just one render. The reason I'm still learning it is that I'm interested in animation, making the ability to render faster while still using PBR sound great to me. Or even for making comics. Those are the cases where I don't mind spending a lot more time fine-tuning a character because it will be used repeatedly. Honestly, I just got Carrara so I'm a lot more interested in using Octane there, sadly it's not free but I can use the Daz version to learn about it and then decide later if I like it enough to get it for Carrara.
Anyway, here is a scene I made with Callie 6 and some Genesis 2 clothes and hair. This is an Iray version I made to have a comparison point.
This is what I got after auto converting materials. (This was actually before I ran Iray Uber Base on everything and changed the base color to red to make the previous render)
And here I just messed around with the clothes materials, especifically the ones that converted to white. Messing with the skin will be for another day. Having to go surface by surface does seem time consuming here =_=
All these were rendered for 2000 samples. Octane took minute and a half, Iray double that. Though I'm sure most of that is probably because I haven't fixed most of the materials yet. Still, there is something about the Octane look that I dig quite a bit.
Don't try running DS as admin - it won't let you anyway, but it's not in geenral a good idea as it is likely to lead to issues with file/folder permissions.
Eh, that was the workaround that was posted in the forums there, maybe it was from the older version of DS or something.
I renabled the plugin, closed and reopened studio, now the scene I opened yesterday no problem is crashing DS with memory allocation error from the octane plugin. Tried a different scene that was giving me a pure black result, figured out why. I had ghost lights in there, they were blocking the camera @.@
Someone knows if it will be always free or we have to pay a fee at the expiration day?
The free tier is there to attract new subscription users. It will not expire it is there to get new customers. They only make money on those who use it with more than one card or want the speed increase from having a rtx nvidia card. If you have one of the old perpetual licences don't loose it you grandfather in but the new stuff is all subscription. If you were a subscription user and you want to use the free tier I would cancel my subscription and then download the free tier version. This is why I don't think they will make the carrara a free tier option not enough user base like daz studio and blender to attract the inpatient with deep pockets.
No, I have got no previous purchases from there, only that free tier. Actually it expires in January 2020 and I was wondering if it could need an renew fee or something similar.
Where do you see a expiration date? Oh, I see it, on the subscription page. I am going to be super pissed if it goes to paid after I learn how to use this lol.
it probably should have been rebuilt from the ground up, the original developer abandoned it.
Carrara which I use has a very robust plugin fully integrated, I can use Carrara shader room as well as the node editor this DS one has always been frustrating to use.
so youre saying its been beta for like 5 years?
Lol that's not at all what I said.
More like paid alpha from what I heard :P
OK, I had time to start doing some real test scene comparisons, and I am not really impressed at all. I set up a typical scene I render, set the emissive objects to the same temp and watts setting in both engines to try and make it as apple tp apple as I know how. Render size is the same as well 1545 x 2500, not large at all. The scene setup with 3 different scene lamps, and a large plane right below the ceiling for an extra filler light. Octane took just under 2 hours to get 5000 samples, and still looks very very noisy. I forgot to turn the octane denoiser back off before I started the final octane render, so it really had a leg up on the iray test. The iray version hit 5000 iterations in just under 50 minutes, looked less noisy, but I suppose it's because the noise in iray seems a lot less contrasty.
I find octane is far faster than Iray for an equivalent scene.
Did you just use the auto-convert materials option? I wouldn't call it fair comparison unless you take the time to make the shaders work there properly, I figure that influences the results too. In my book, both are good options and it's just a matter of a balance between which look you like best and how willing you are to get into Octane shading. I always read rendering is faster in Octane, but I think that pretty much cancels out with the shader work. In my case, I mess around with it because I'm not sure which look I like best, so I want to be able to shade properly a scene before deciding if the work is worth it.
you can make templates in octane to cut down on conversion time. There is a tutorial on templates in the daz version of the otoy forums.
Oh, that's interesting. Thanks for the info. I assume still some final tweaks are needed for each individual material but it'd help to get some basic steps automated
Yeah something will need tweaks still, but that just depends on what it is. Usually I will do that with my skin shader. I need to see if I can get faceoff to add more of the iray options to the templates
I find auto convert materials often come out too glossy because the same ( pure white ) input is, for some reason, plugged into the diffuse colour and also into the specular colour. It's straightforward to assign a separate colour input to the specular in the shader, but it's a nuisance if there are a lot of materials.
Well, I am comparing how well the render engines stack up out of the box. If the user has to spend a bunch of time fiddling with shaders, a huge chunk will not be interested in it anyways. I found a setting I overlooked, "gpu render priority and put my GPU to max, it's faster now, but still a tiny bit slower than iray. Which is weird, I hear a lot that octane is a lot faster, not seeing it yet. I wonder if the people saying it's faster are using the octane PMC kernel, which is the closest one to iray as far as I can tell.
My second test, same scene, but added one more lamp right behind the girl to see if that helps, upped the samples for both to 8000. Also took the camera tonemapping preset off octane, and just put it to gamma 1 like iray to see if that was a difference maker. Iray took an hour 40 minutes to hit 8000, octane took an hour 56 minutes, so the time was a hell of a lot closer, but iray still winning.
Here is a slice from each image side by side, octane looks a lot noisier to me. There is a lot I like about octane, such as the camera tonemapping presets, it's really cool to see how it would look on different types of film. I think the hair looks a lot softer as well, as well as the whole overall image looking a lot warmer for some reason, not sure why that is, but it looks more natural for an indoor scene. All the main lights are set at the same 2300ish warm temperatures and 400 watts in both material engines.
I am going to try to add some more weak light planes and see how that helps the speed, although I am afraid it's going to start making the render look flat. It's already got a few lights, and an open wall with an hdri on to help get the inside lit.
Anyone using octane, or any other render engine is going to have to take time to fiddle with shaders. Sorry but there is no getting around that. Until you start building up your own library of presets it's going to be slow to start off. As for noise, one thing you can do it turn caustic blur up to 1. pathtracing is the fastest photo real kernel, pmc is a bit more specialized for cetain things.
It looks like you've not set the light temps for the emissives to be anywhere equivalent between the octane & iRay scenes for your two sample renders. The octane looks like you have about 3000K emissives with much too strong a cd/m2 while the iRay scene looks like it has little to no 3000K light sources in the scene.
Not sure what happened on the lights, I am not used to using watts, so maybe you can see something wrong in the setup? Here is the side by side of one of the emission light materials.
Also I will try pathtracing on this next test, see what happens. From what I was reading online PMC was the best quality like iray, so that's what I went with. What are the special circumstance you want to use PMC?
I am not willing to fiddle around with shaders a lot, I don't have to with iray for the most part. If adding an hour of fiddling to every scene is a thing, I will probably just quit while I am ahead. I am sick and tired of spending all my free time fiddling, fixing, optimizing, customizing, instead of making pictures, the reason I got into this stuff for lol. I seriously spend like 90% of my free time correcting stuff, and I just about had it. I think after this job is finished, and I got some time, I am going to do a great library purge, and just shitcan anything I can't use out of the box haha. No more expressions with no picture to see what it looks like, have to turn the sliders to see that angry expression looks more like a drunk expression is a gaint pain :P
iirc, I read PMC is used if you need/want stuff like Caustics.
And sure, nobody is forcing you to use it, it's just a new free tool and each of us chooses whether we want to learn how to use it or not. But that doesn't reflect on the quality of it. It's not that Iray itself is easier to use, it's just that vendors already did the work for you. The thing is, shading is somewhat an "artistic choice" so not messing around with shaders even with Iray pretty much limits you to the vendors' artistic choices. Now, again, if you are fine with that, it's also cool, not bashing you for that, just trying to make the point that it doesn't mean that Octane is inferior just for that.
That makes it easy to remember then, it's like iray caustics button. Good to know, am now doing test 3 on pathtracing kernel instead of PMC.
That's why I decided I wasn't going to mess with Octane. That and not having a nVidia GPU.
Hmmm, well the Octane and iRay render parameters superficially look like that are equivalent but your results show they can't be. The octane is 300 watts which is really bright if the light is close enough but the iRay is 300 cd/m2 which apparently must not be near 300 Watts. I think 300 Watts is roughly 20000 candela or 4500 lumens (although those depend on an angle I don't know but guessed to be 30 degrees). If you were to make the wattage about the same in the octane render I think it's only about 5 watts.
You could be right, I assumed putting watts on the dropdown would make the cd/m2 box just equal watts instead of that. I suppose for the next test I can try to eyeball it light by light to get it more similar in looks, rather than rely on numbers being the same.