Does anyone have a link or search term for the script which reduces the number of textures for V4?

Some of the bangs and strands have transparency set in Poser to 100% without texture map (making them invisible), but somehow this gives a shadow(?) in octane.

I tried experimenting with all kind of material settings in Octane but can't get rid of it.

Does anyone have a link or search term for the script which reduces the number of textures for V4?

http://www.sharecg.com/v/20732/gallery/6/Texture/V4.1-Remap-system-for-ZBrush

I have also written a script which merges materials and remaps the uv coordinates for Alyson and Antonia based on the above concept.

Has anyone who has used poser figures with Octane a solution for the problem in attached image?

Set rayepsilon to 0.00001.

Thanks, I got the script now.

rayepsilon to 0.00001 does fix the shadow on the forehead, but not on the side of the face. I am using pathtracing.

Any other possible causes you can think of?

Any other possible causes you can think of?

Looks like you have a glossy node for her face.  Glossy reflects light.  My guess is that there is something dark in the back of the scene that is reflecting the darkness onto her skin.  In theory, skin "glossyness" only reflects light (not dark), but I haven't had time to play with that.  Your skin glossy is highly reflective.  So to get rid of the reflected dark color, simply reduce "specular" in the glossy node.  Default is something like 0.2, but for skin I think something like 0.001 might be nearer the target.  There is also a relationship between "specular", "roughness" and "bump" that will keep you entertained for hours.  In summary, I think that "roughness" is a bit like simulated "bump", so either one being high will kill off reflections.   If you have a good bump map (do they exist?), then roughness can be 0 and bump high.

Hope that helps.

I already put the specular down to 0.004 (lowest the slider went besides 0). I put it at 0.001 but that made no difference. Roughness at 0, also makes no difference.
Setting the bump map at 0 (power) does make it go away (at least it is not so obvious anymore). I'll let it render for a while to see if it has gone away, I am still in doubt that it really has.

There is nothing in the back (facing her) besides the skydome I used (I removed everything to lower the texture and memory usage)

There is still a lot to learn (and videos to watch) before you know what to tweak to get good results from an exported scene from Poser.
You plugin will make that a lot easier.

Thanks!

IMO, it is either the hair geometry is getting too close to her face (try an even lower rayepsilon, or morph the hair away from her face in that area, or maybe the gamma or power is not set right for the transmap?)

Or it's a reflection, so try zoming in to the area, and replace the environment image with a floattexture and see if that changes it.  Specular at 0.004 should pretty much make the material diffuse (no reflections). 

I tried lowering the rayepsilon a bit (can try even lower), but that did not seem to make a difference. The geometry could be too close for this. But these are the things I want to find out - what are the limitations. I took a real scene I made and now I want to see what it takes to get it to render in Octane and what kind of results I can get.
There are lots of things I need/want to change to make it better, but I take one step at a time.

Her skin refectivity is very high - look at the reflection of her dress under her chin.  Can you post a screenshot of the glossy node for her skin?

 Edit - removed the unnecesary second screen from the image

You should probably increase the roughness.

Laurie

Mmmm, my reply got eaten....

Either roughenss or bump (or both) has to be higher, otherwise her skin is a mirror.  Also, up the scene lights so you can more clearly see what is happening.

Set filmwidth to 1 for skin.

There still is something there, could be reflection - but it is symmetrical on the left and the right part of the face. So it probably is something different

See attached screenshot

There is still a heap of reflected light on her face.  That reflected dark patch might be from the tree behind.

How are you lighting the scene?  As that tree an image plane, or and enironment map?  IMO, you will work out these issues with a lot more lght in the scene - it's still quite dark.

I have no clue whether you can set up new lights in Octane (I was under the impression you could only increase the sunlight or turn surfaces into emitter objects, which I have not done)
The environment is set up as "texture environment". I assumed it would take the skydome, but now I am not so sure about that anymore. In the node setup there is no reference to the skydome texture.

So it is most likely my unfamiliarity with Octane which makes the poor light. But you have to start somewhere

For lighting, the environment set to daylight gives pretty amazing results - or leave it as texture environment, and plug in the texturemap you are using for the skydome (note: I think the texture will be flipped in the X axis and offset a little, but shouldn't matter).

As a rule, for outdoor I like sunlight or an IBL texture.  For indoor, emitters looks good.

only played in octane for a couple of hours maybe but somewhere in the light settings you can pick a (geographic) location the date and time and get the "exact" sunlight that place should be getting(exact in "" cos I dont know how good that is light an dark places seemed right but when I set it to where I am it said sunny, I had rain ;-(   !!oh well lol )

The lighting was not a problem. I was just trying to figure out why the "shadows" were appearing. Tweaking of the settings as described above and increasing the light solved that problem or at least makes it not noticable

The textures slots are a big problem. It is not only figures which have a lot of textures, but lots of sets have separate props or figures with each one or more texture maps. A number of these can be replaced by procedural material, but not all of them.
I hope that the plugin will provide a way to replace the stone/rock/brick/ground material via a simple (batch) method, since that would cover a whole lot of them

Another thing which surprised me is that GPU usage has a big impact on the overal UI of the entire system. If you render other apps will be quite sluggish in their UI. It is not a solution for offloading CPU power to the GPU and getting a more responsive system.
I guess that is why some people recommend having three cards in their system with one being inactive in Octane

Quote - The skin material looks as above.  The settings on the right are the settings for the SSS.  Scale is about the only one I change.  This is not the best SSS shader out there, but it's in the right direction.

I use the same basic glossy/diffuse mix material to setup SSS in Octane. The only difference is the value settings as you previously surmised.

Quote - Another thing which surprised me is that GPU usage has a big impact on the overal UI of the entire system. If you render other apps will be quite sluggish in their UI. It is not a solution for offloading CPU power to the GPU and getting a more responsive system.
I guess that is why some people recommend having three cards in their system with one being inactive in Octane

 

I use two videocards in my system. One is for the attached display device and the other is only for Octane Render. The card for the display is disabled (unchecked) as a Cuda device in the Octane Render program preference settings menu.

By having 2 videocards, one for the display and the other dedicated to Octane Render you will not have a sluggish UI when working with Octane Render or Windows. Another advantage is that all the RAM on the card dedicated for Octane Render will be available for your Octane Render scenes.

The textures slots are a big problem. It is not only figures which have a lot of textures, but lots of sets have separate props or figures with each one or more texture maps. A number of these can be replaced by procedural material, but not all of them.
I hope that the plugin will provide a way to replace the stone/rock/brick/ground material via a simple (batch) method, since that would cover a whole lot of them

The Poser plugin will go a long way to addressing this.  You can copy and paste whole material trees, and export/import materials to disk.  On the todo list is to export/import all materials to disk for a specific figure/prop.
Another thing which surprised me is that GPU usage has a big impact on the overal UI of the entire system. If you render other apps will be quite sluggish in their UI. 

AS per papertigers comment, or use you on-board video as your display adapter.

Here is the first of a series of Tutorials that Timtam posted on YouTube for learning Octane. Some stuff may have changed since these were posted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXUE-39fwug&list=PL0DBA6671E0A1743B&feature=plcp

Kevin

Attached Link: https://vimeo.com/51657952

The functionality of the first release of OctaneRender for Poser is done (to be released "soon"), so I'm looking at Instancing now.  The instancing implementation in Octane is pretty mind-blowing - even on my 192 core card I can render 20million polygon scenes!  I've posted some Instancing photos on the facebook page (see link below).

Oh, and PaperTiger - loving your recent gallery postings!

Ooooh......

... I wonder if Octane can be used with Vue, as well?

Heh. Even it not, this gives Poser the image quality it needs for serious animation output (and I suppose one could split the pipe; Poser/Octane for interiors, Poser/Vue Inf for exteriors. There's enough variance in lighting between environments it would probably be not too hard to work with...)

How does the Octane distributed rendering work, anyway? Is it self sufficient, or do you need a render manager? 

I wonder if Octane can be used with Vue, as well?

I had a quick look a while back, but I don't know Vue well enough.  If you can export to OBJ you can import into Octane.  In theory Vue could be linked nicely into the Octane instancing system, but it would be a big development effort, and I'm not sure the Vue userbase is sufficent at the moment to support that level of investment of time.

How does the Octane distributed rendering work, anyway? Is it self sufficient, or do you need a render manager?

It's all done on your video card(s).  With the right motherboard (and powersupply) I think you can have up to 3 NVidia cards, which would have an incredible throughput.  There is no facility to send different renders to different PCs.

Quote - Hi

The functionality of the first release of OctaneRender for Poser is done (to be released "soon"), so I'm looking at Instancing now.  The instancing implementation in Octane is pretty mind-blowing - even on my 192 core card I can render 20million polygon scenes!  I've posted some Instancing photos on the facebook page (see link below).

Oh, and PaperTiger - loving your recent gallery postings!

I can't wait to get my hands on the Poser plug-in, it looks great!

Thanks for the compliment.

I'm really looking forward to this plug-in :D

Some more info on the plugin at http://poserphysics.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/octanerender-for-poser-features.html

 SSS skin shader details at http://poserphysics.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/octanerender-sss-skin-shader.html

 Sample images and news at http://www.facebook.com/poserphysics

So when will a Daz or Poser Plugin for Octane be available ?

The first link above gives a loose indication of the Poser plugin release date :-)

Hello,

I'm verrrrry interested in that plugin. I got the Octane license some time ago, but have not used it a lot. I'm just about renewing my video card. 

What I read in the Otoy forums is that the Nvidia 5xx cards are faster than their respective 6xx counterparts (about 10..15%), but the 6xx cards are less noisy and can store 4 times more texture references (256 instead of 64), so I'm going for one of the 6xx now. Slower speed can be compensated by waiting longer, but if some scene does not upload due to a hard limit, the time invested for reducing / merging texture maps would outweight the render time difference.

Best regards,

   Michael

but if some scene does not upload due to a hard limit, the time invested for reducing / merging texture maps would outweight the render time difference.

This really depends on the types of scenes you are rendering.  Some (generally landscape) scenes I've tested have 4mil polys, but < 10 texturemaps, and I can squeeze those scenes into my 1Gig graphics card.  Other (generally architectural) scenes may have only 1mil polys, but 300-400 texturemaps, and it's this type of scene where the 600 series has the benefit.  If you do 1 or 2 human figure renders without a lot of scenery/props/clothing, I doubt you'll hit the texturemap limit of the 500 series cards (although figures do vary widely in the number of texturemaps they use).

Paul

PS. Also, keep in mind it's the number of CUDA cores that gives you the speed.  So the 650Ti has 576 cores, whereas the 660 has 960 cores and is only about 50% more expensive ($230?).  The $/core is dropping fast at the moment.  My 6month old card has 1/2 the cores you can by for the same money today.

I have now tested both the GTX580 and the GTX680 with Octane. I can confirm that the GTX580 is faster (consistently, about 15% with Octane 1.0 RC3), despite the GTX680 having 3 times the number of CUDA cores. Within a series (5xx or 6xx), speed should be proportional to the number of CUDA cores.

I would still recommend the 6xx series now, due to the texture number. The attached image (a really small scene) uses 44 texture map slots already, and the reason I could not load Stonemason's "Streets of Asia" with my old card was also due to too many textures (and not due to RAM size, as I thought initially).

Best regards,

   Michael

I have now tested both the GTX580 and the GTX680 with Octane. I can confirm that the GTX580 is faster (consistently, about 15% with Octane 1.0 RC3), despite the GTX680 having 3 times the number of CUDA cores. Within a series (5xx or 6xx), speed should be proportional to the number of CUDA cores.

Mmmmm, that's strange.  Are you testing on one PC or two?  If one, are both cards in the PC at the same time, or are you physically swapping them?  Are you using identical camera settings for the test scene?

Also, which Nvidia driver version are you on?

Hi,

I admit, I have lots of differences in the two test rigs. The 580 is in an older machine running Windows XP 64 bit, while the GTX 680 is in a newer machine, running Windows 7, 64 bit. The NVidia drivers are both release 306, but the build numbers are different due to the different OSes.

If bus / CPU speed contributes to the overall performance (as in memory transfers), the the 680 should get an advantage. Judging the test results, CPU speed is more or less irrelevant for Octane performance. 

My results are very close to the ones posted in the release candidate testing forums (I used the same Octane release, RC3 for both tests), for example here: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=24319 

I did not test the cards crosswise in the other computer. Windows took several attempts / reboots to recognize any new card when I upgraded from the previous hardware.

Best regards,

   Michael

The plugin has been released!

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=25193

can i download octane and the plugin as a trial before i buy the licence,as spending £144 is alot of money to be left with something unuseable if my pc wont let it run,and im not made of money to start replacing bits,lol

can i download octane and the plugin as a trial before i buy the licence,as spending £144 is alot of money to be left with something unuseable if my pc wont let it run,and im not made of money to start replacing bits,lol

You can downlaod Octane Standalone as a demo to try things out and test your video card.  At this stage there is not an OctaneRender for Poser plugin demo, but it is planned, and hopefully will be available "soon".

Paul

excellent,thanks faceoff

Quote - I have now tested both the GTX580 and the GTX680 with Octane. I can confirm that the GTX580 is faster (consistently, about 15% with Octane 1.0 RC3), despite the GTX680 having 3 times the number of CUDA cores. Within a series (5xx or 6xx), speed should be proportional to the number of CUDA cores.

Mmmmm, that's strange.  Are you testing on one PC or two?  If one, are both cards in the PC at the same time, or are you physically swapping them?  Are you using identical camera settings for the test scene?

Actually, that is what would be expected. There are some significant changes between the 500 (Fermi) and 600 (Kepler) series cards that can have a big effect on Cuda performance.

For one, the Fermi cards process 2 instructions per clock cycle, the Kepler cards process only one instruction per cycle. This means if all other things were equal, at the same clock speed, you would need approximately twice as many Kepler cores to match the per clock cycle performance of a Fermi card. The second big difference between Fermi and Kepler is the ability to efficiently perform floating point calculations. The reduction in transistors per core in Kepler came with a reduction in the efficieny for processing floating point calculations. Any process that relies heavily on floating point calulations will run slower.

For gamers the new Kepler architecture is much faster, as it is optimized for shading rates. The plus for people using Octane, or another GPU render engine, is that the new achitecture can handle a greater number of texture maps.

Hello faceoff

Good job and I'm really interested with your plug! Here is some questions/queries:

before the demo version could we have access to the manual?

how long the beta before the target price? (I must plan it in my budget :-))

Is the octane scene saved? can I open it in octane without poser?

I'm fighting in octane with the usual two topics:

the size of the textures: I collect the scene inventory, resize textures before going in octane. Is there an automatic process? define the ratio, put the resized textures in a defined folder (same as octane scene?), point the octane scene to these resized tex and leave poser to the original textures?

the number of textures: with Octane V1 RC we have the geometry group node. With this node I split my export from poser in 2 objects, regroup them in the same geometric group in octane. So I can define my camera, lighting, ... it will be the same for the 2 objects. It's also easier to adjust materials, I make 2 renders and merge them in 2D app. I think it's easier with your plug and the visibility tag in Poser.

Are there better ways to answer these problems?

Thanks for your answers (and sorry for my bad english!)

before the demo version could we have access to the manual?

Maybe!  Let me check.  If the answer is "Yes" I'll post a link on the Facebook page.  Have you watched the tutorial video and the features video?  They cover a lot fo the workflow.

how long the beta before the target price? (I must plan it in my budget :-))

In the short-term, the Poser plugin will be at the price it's at now.  OctaneRender Standalone (a requirement for the plugin) will potentially increase in price when it comes out of beta.

Is the octane scene saved? can I open it in octane without poser?

All the Octane settings are saved and loaded with the Poser pz3 file.  There should be no need to export the scene to Octane Standalone, so there should be no need to save as OCS. 

the size of the textures: I collect the scene inventory, resize textures before going in octane. Is there an automatic process? define the ratio, put the resized textures in a defined folder (same as octane scene?), point the octane scene to these resized tex and leave poser to the original textures?

Resize textures is not currently a feature of the plugin, and whilst it was initially considered, there didn't seem to be a need, even from the most hardcore beta tester (plug the price of cards is dropping so quickly and the memory size is increasing).  If this is a genuine issue for you, then the simple solution is to resize the very large textures in the Poser Runtime textures folder as a new texturemap name and make a MAT pose for your figure using those textures, and then simply apply that Mat poser prior to running the plugin.  That way you only need to resize once, not for every scene as you are doing now.  The other good option is to load the resized textures into the figures materials in the plugin, and then save the figures materials (as a material collection).  Then when next using that figure, simply load the material collection with the reduced texturemaps.

the number of textures: with Octane V1 RC we have the geometry group node. With this node I split my export from poser in 2 objects, regroup them in the same geometric group in octane. So I can define my camera, lighting, ... it will be the same for the 2 objects. It's also easier to adjust materials, I make 2 renders and merge them in 2D app. I think it's easier with your plug and the visibility tag in Poser.

Good workflow!  Although I'm unsure how shadows would render correctly.  Again - these much be huge scenes to be hitting the texture count limit.  The plugin has a python script you can optionly run first which will analyse the scene textures and tell you how much memory and how many rgb and grayscale maps are in the scene.  Once the scene is loaded in the plugin you have a button which will display the total texturemaps used and poly count.  Then when rendering you can get a report from Octane on it's texture and memory use (this is covered in the features vdieo mentioned above).  So there are a number of checkpoints to say you might have an issue.  If you can over the limit, there is an option in the materials tab to remove all bump maps from the material, figure/prop or scene.

The next release (out soon) will support Instancing.  The beta testers have been doing vast scenes with a single tree, clump of grass and bunch of flowers, each instanced 10's of thousands of times, to create huge scenes.  Even on my 1Gig low-spec card I've been running instance renders with over 500 million triangles.

Hope that helps.

Paul

I cannot make the manual available, however the following 2 videos contain the majority of the relevent information about the product.

https://vimeo.com/53821805

http://youtu.be/31GcDjw1AQs

Plus the following blog entry....http://poserphysics.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/octanerender-for-poser-features.html

Thanks Paul for your replies.

Plenty of great options in the instancing process. I found the octane process sometimes tedious. How work the density map? can I drive the instancing to put more grass near a wall for exemple (I like Vue ecosystems!)?

Too bad for the manuel. I like to read them in the train! and yes I already viewed all videos (and not only once!) 

I choose to split my scene taking in account the shadows to optimize the postwork. It's not easy and some object can be in both render. Aerysoul clothings (top quality!)  have an impressive number of textures. 

The time to create a new material preset is very long. Collect all textures and resize them all is quick but after I must assign all materials to resized textures. Another inconvenient is that, for me, the ratio is not the same for each scene: it depends of the complexity of the scene and if the character is in front or in the background,....  Do you know some tool(s) to optimize the process in Poser?

One more point,

Dazstudio have a really great tool to answer the size and number of textures problems: "Texture atlas". It's quick and very effective. There is also the LOD possibility. So with external renderer like octane, I'm hesitating with what could be the best tool to make my scene?

How work the density map? can I drive the instancing to put more grass near a wall for exemple (I like Vue ecosystems!)?

Yes, black = no instances, gray = 50% density of instances, white = 100% denisty of instances.

Too bad for the manuel. I like to read them in the train!

There will be a demo version available in the next week or two - but that won't help you on the train :-)

The time to create a new material preset is very long. Collect all textures and resize them all is quick but after I must assign all materials to resized textures. Another inconvenient is that, for me, the ratio is not the same for each scene: it depends of the complexity of the scene and if the character is in front or in the background,....  Do you know some tool(s) to optimize the process in Poser?

Sounds like a good idea for a new script for Poser!  Something to scale down the textures depending on the LOD.

Have you tried the Octane Standalone demo to see if you actually have a texturemap size issue?  I haven't had any feedback yet from anyone saying that they are hitting the limit.

Paul