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

Creator of PoserPhysics
Creator of OctaneRender for Poser
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