ORK Rocks!!!
Dartanbeck
Posts: 21,714
Yesterday's email from Daz 3D reminded me to turn on the OctaneRender 2019 DS plugin.
I don't normally run my 3D machine connected to the internet, so this plugin didn't work. When I first got it (the day that ORK came out), I watched all of V's very nicely arranged and presented tutorials. Here's my take:
V's Octane Render Kit (ORK) is designed to take the initial learning curve away from the casual user, allowing us to jump straight into using the Free OctaneRender 2019 for DS plugin and still get terrific results.
The presets included in the kit are amazing! Combined with the incredibly easy-to-follow tutorial videos, the presets truly get us underway!
The Videos
Valzheimer does an incredible job of stepping us through quickly without going too fast, yet without being repetitve. There's a lot of information here, so at first it's really easy to forget a step or how to perform a necessary action. But the videos are there to watch again and, being divided into four parts makes it really easy to get to what we're looking for.
After a very short time, I found myself loving this whole Octane thing.
ORK
Valzheimer pulled out all the stops! From dropping in an initial scene, already set up for OctaneRender - just add figures and props, convert materials and render, to breaking down clickable presets for everything from converting exsisting materials to Octane shaders to applying fresh shaders from a wide variety of materials to HDRI and Mesh Lighting to render settings - these presets mnake it easy and really a lot of fun!
Quick example:
This animation was dropped way down in size and converted to GIF
Playing with all of the Environment options in the kit is a lot of fun and very powerful - especially since she gives us full advise on ways to tweak them further from their preset settings.
After she's done teaching us how to optimize using the presets, she takes us deeper into creating our own material shaders and tweaking the render. Very well presented!
I still have some learning to do in regards to animating things like the camera's DOF, etc., (I think I know now), but I'm still pretty pleased with this first try with Octane - dove straight into a full scene animation. For this test, I simply left the Silent City materials as they were from the initial auto conversion. In real practice, I'd go through her process and truly convert each material to my liking!
Hey, thanks Valzheimer!
I started a page on this OctaneRender for DS which includes all of the lniks and info needed to get up and running, as well as links to all of the ORK, including the videos. Check it out!
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Comments
Additional note - I also really love this hair by Linday! Classic Long Curly Hair, and I also got the wet version. I'm still getting used to working with the various dForce parameters and settings, but I'm certainly having fun with it! ;)
Additional Note - Aeon Soul and The DigiVault!!! ;)
...and Thorne/Handspan Studios!!!
This not-yet-complete version of Rosie 8 is made up of a lot of various body shapes, but her face is only slightly tweaked from the default shape of their Lara character - who is absolutely magnificent!
Awesome Dart
Rosie is as cute as ever 
Thanks Wendy!
...and Thank You So Much for helping me learn to use Daz Studio better. I went from total frustration to becoming quite addicted in just a few days! You totally ROCK, my Friend!
Nice work Dart!! Question? Any reason you chose 2019 version instead of the latest 2020 version of Octane.
I do have one question: Do you need a certain driver in order to use Octane Render? I may have installed a driver for NVIDIA iRay in 2017, but it may have fried my motherboard in May of that year. I don't know if I need a certain graphics card in order to install a driver for a certain render engine. If a certain graphics card is needed, that is something I may consider purchasing in January or February, after the holiday sales are over.
I am thinking my previous computer I had back in 2016 and early 2017 had no NVIDIA graphics card - and that would make a whole lot of sense, since that computer was pretty cheap when I bought it. It's also pretty clear that it may be the reason for my motherboard having failed. The computer I presently have, was a little more expensive, even though it was on sale at the time. I am thinking that I may consider purchasing the required NVIDIA graphics card needed for Octane Render in the new year. And if my current computer is on the way out, I may consider transferring the NVIDIA graphics card from my old computer to my new computer.
I can't accurately address this as I don't have all the technical knowledge behind the Otoy software, but I can speak from first-hand experience as someone who has used a very sub-par machine for the longest time (laptop on GTX870m). When Otoy first introduced denoiser (Octane 4) some things have definetly changed in the manner of the machine/GPU you'd need to run it fast and it required latest drivers to work with new features. Denoiser won't work on CPU, for once, and if I'm being completely honest I think it wasn't too friendly towards pre-10xx GPUs either as I've encountered issues at that time of upgrade which led me to put Octane on the shelf for a little bit and just wait and see what comes next. What I would suggest is to try Octane (it's free now, which is also great for us old users who were indecisive about upgrading to subscriptions after the version 4) and do your research of history of drivers to pick the one that can suit your machine best and keep it as close up to date as possible. There has, no doubt, been a few drivers in the past that didn't land too well but those flaws have been ironed up over time. I can confidently say that I had no issue with any latest iteration of Nvidia driver in at least 2 years or even more, as I was running a 1070Ti for the past year or so, and today the RTX3080. I hope that gives some perspective what to look for when making your next update decision.
That said, thank you Dartanbeck for the flattering review of the Kit! :) Your result looks amazing and even more amazing for a first try, I am sincerely impressed.
V.
Thanks V. I've been playing around with the NodeGraphEditor and just love it!
Coming from Carrara, I'm used to having to tweak my shaders when I'm introducing new products to my library, then I save them with my new settings.
I am still having a bit of difficulties with eyes. The Irises just seem to glow flat, with no apparent sparkle to the outer layers. I started adding some of my Carrara shader techniques to the irides, and I've been finding success. I just have to figure out how to get the moisture and cornea to glisten.
Here is the test bed scene I was using to work on these things - as well, I had a real blast tweaking the shaders for the incredible Aeon Soul "The Legend" armor that she's wearing. I added my own twists by texturing their AlphaKini to match The Legend. I'm also really loving Linday's awesome hair and Thorneworks/Handspan Studios' Lara, whom she is based on.
In all of this, I ended up dialing back significantly on the stylized look at bring her back closer to reality. Just a taste thing. I don't really care how "Real" she looks! ;)
The HDRI is from one of Horo's packs. I love that guy!
The Octane Render Kit is a real time/life saver! Not only that, but it's a great learning tool - comparing what the plugin itself creates as an automated conversion compared to V's amazing preset enhancements - try different material options and compare, etc., She really packed the ORK with a plethora of great tools! Those incredible Mesh Lights, for example... I love those things! She put a morph slider on them to recess the light back into the fixture to vary the effect... Genius!
...and those lights work in Iray too!!!
Hey ProPose!
Yes, the reason is that the free OctaneRender for Daz Studio is OctaneRender 2019.
Yeah... forgot to mention that I messed up on sinking her into the shadow catcher! LOL
Like I said, I was working on the eyes and armor!
I could fix that in post, but I thought it would be nicer to uplo
I'm using 2020.1.5.55 Prime. Which is also free. I just thought that there was some functionality differences that caused you to use the older version. I've never used the 2019 Prime version so I can't say what or if there are any differecnces. No big deal either way, just glad you're putting in the effort to share your experience both here in the forums and also on your website
Cool! I heard something somewhere that we had to use 2019. Thanks!
Yep. The D|S portion of my website will be getting more attention very soon! ;)
So playing around with OctaneRender (it turns out I am using 2020) over Christmas holiday, I've had successful (and not so successful) experiences doing things outside the box, like using the Nodegraph Editor's tools like Multiply, Add, Mix, etc., to take LIE (Layered Image Editing) much deeper than what we can achieve in the Surfaces tab in D|S, etc., trying to get her eyes to look better. They seem so blank without shine.
After work today I did a search on the issue and discovered the problem. It turns out that the D|S OctaneRender plugin ships with a set of legacy filters applied to the render engine that force it to ignore several parts of the eyes, like Cornea, Eye Moisture, etc., I believe there were three surfaces ignored.
Here's how to fix that:
In the field that the arrow is pointing to, put your cursor at the end of the last word and backspace these filters out. It will look like this image when you're done.
Anyway, I was having so much fun playing with all of this stuff because of the ORK. Of this I am absolutely certain.
Even when I want to mess around with the shader settings in my own way, I always start with V's presets. I like what she' done and has a nice, smooth layout and organization.
Playing around with the atmospheric environment settings is a Blast!!! I was using her example (video 3) of creating god rays using the Dust environment and having a lot of fun with it. Still, I come back to the realization that I'm still brand new to all of this, including rendering in Daz Studio itself!
So now, as I wait for my hair to simulate I am revisiting her videos to soak in more of the knowledge she provides. The first two runs through them gave me everything I needed to know to create some pretty cool animations and renders. The render two posts up is one frame of an animation.
After teaching us how to use the ORK to get started in OctaneRender, she proceeds to show small, helpful and inspirational tips regarding tweaking settings of various things - and she does a lot of these wonderful tips throughout.
She's very consice and moves straight through without repetition, so the four videos cover a lot of ground. Going back to capture more knowledge always uncovers more helpful hints.
I just found out about the information in the post above this one, so I'm excitied to see how her eyes look as soon as this hair is finished simulating - speaking of which: I've used a lot of what I've learned about making Rosie 5's Carrara Dynamic Hair into my new dForce workflow, so I'm excited to show that off as well. The whole process works great with that wonderful hair I bought from Linday!
So I'd like to thank V and Daz 3D for really making this 'stay-at-home' Christmas holiday a very special one!
With V's ORK, Linday's Classic Long and Curly and Long Wet dForce hair products, I also had a very Aeon Soul holiday! It always hurt to have to bypass their newer (Amazing as Always!!!) costumes due to the fact that Genesis 3 and 8 are not supported (officially) in Carrara. Felt good to stock up on: Whymsy, Y'Vas, The Legend, Holoflow, Proxy and Everyday 2 with a plethora of the addons! I'd also like to thank all of the Daz 3D artists for their contribution in this whole amazing Holiday Sale thingy going on. I know it must hurt to offer up your hard work for so little return - so I hope that you managed ten-fold or more sales because of it to help make up for that. I truly love and respect the amazing products all of you create!
Hey V,
I really appreciate you putting in so many presets! It makes it so easy to swap the attributes of surfaces without sacrificing the original texture sets! The presets for the various mesh lights with the library icons showing just what they do is a real time saver that I'm constantly using!
I've also been using your awesome HDRI environment presets - copy them under a new name to create my own from other HDRI I have, like the woods scene in the images above. The way you set that up for ease-of-use is, again - a real time saver/frustration reliever!
Okay, so in Video 3 (I'm watching again right now), she gets into exploring the shaders presets that come with the kit, many in great detail.
In doing so, she mentions that we can load these shaders as a testing ground for experimentation. This is very true. The methods that she uses to make sure that materials spread evenly onto any surface, rather than custom UVs is quite cool. So I'll just grab one of her shaders and then as I add other maps and such, I pump those settings into my new additions to get the same affect applied to what I'm doing - if that makes any sense. You'll see what I mean if you end up messing around with shader creation - something that I love to tinker with!
I also think it's very cool that, even though she includes a shadow catcher plane all set up and ready to render, she also shows us how to create the shader in Video 3!
Bravo!
My Sister was my Secret Santa this year and got me this cool book
Always being a fan of this sort of art, this wonderful tome and ORK, Aeon Soul and many others are helping me to get some of these Fantasy Art urges onto the screen!!! :)