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Author Topic: Octane issue and FPack  (Read 1255 times)

Nildo Essa

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Octane issue and FPack
« on: April 26, 2016, 04:49:06 AM »
Hello,

I use octane for max version 2-1.9, and yesterday i tried the new FP 5.0.5 with an animated mesh, a character walking... when i duplicated the character with FP, in te viewport all is well, i can see all pointclouds of each instance, and also after ticking animation on and random samples, each instance would start at a different pose in time just as expected...However, as soon as i bring up the Octane viewport, the instances in max viewport will disappear...and i dont know what to for them to reappear, unless i delete the forest obejct and re-apply, which is very counter productive. they do show in the octane viewport though...but they show up all with the same animation, just in different positions...

i also have the character configured to use octane's random color feature for clothing, to workaround the issue of octane not being compatible with forest random color (:(), and if i choose display as mesh in FP, all colors are ignored and all characters show same materials...but then octane will respect different starting animation beginning of each instance...

it seams that we cannot have both, either we can only have all characters animate at the same time but different colors as it should be, or we can have different animations but must stay with same material..

any workaround this without instanciating? (not that i tried instanciating)

iToo

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Re: Octane issue and FPack
« Reply #1 on: April 26, 2016, 09:23:50 AM »
Hi, i'm afraid that random animation mode is not compatible with Octane and other third-party renderers. Just the "Follow" mode can be used. You can see the compatibility list here.

This is because currently we return only a pointer to the custom object in the scene and a transformation matrix, so all items are pure instances of the original geometry, and animation samples (which are computed and stored separately) are ignored.

To fix this we should create a new version of our API, and export these animations samples. After this is completed, 3rd party renderers should update their Forest Pack implementation using the new interface.
As you can imagine this is a complex task and may take time. I apologise for the inconvenience, hopefully we can resolve in next updates.

As workaround, you would create several Custom Objects with different animation offsets, adding them to the Geometry list. Then these can be randomized (using the "Probability" value) and rendered without problems by Octane.

Carlos Quintero
iToo Software