Features

OctaneRender for DAZ Studio supports almost all features of the Standalone, including graph-based Node editing. Updates and new functions made available to the Standalone will usually appear in an updated DAZ plugin version after a short period of time.

Interactive use

OctaneRender for DAZ Studio is especially made to work interactively on a scene. Unlike common renderers or rendering plugins, all changes to cameras, geometries, lighting and materials in a scene are sent immediately to the render engine. Depending on the complexity of a scene and the available GPUThe GPU is responsible for displaying graphical elements on a computer display. The GPU plays a key role in the Octane rendering process as the CUDA cores are utilized during the rendering process. power, the viewport is updated nearly in realtime or within a few seconds only.

Transferred scene information includes:

Camera updates; switching cameras and all relevant camera parameters (including Focal length and F/Stop) are supported
Geometries add to a scene (by loading/importing content) are added to the rendering instantly
Object positioning - using ultra-fast updates, without the need to transfer new geometry data
Geometry deformations (Morphs) are update extremely fast on a per-object basis
Instant hiding of scene elements (by using the "visible" property of DAZ Studio)
Base and subdivided geometries are fully supported; The use of the base geometries can be forced to allow even faster viewport updates.

Material system

Since OctaneRender uses its own, physically based material system, the DAZ Studio plugin converts existing DAZ Studio materials to basic Octane Render materials automatically or on demand. Specifically, it takes over used texture maps and converts parameters as possible. Furthermore the plugin cares about specifics of the DAZ Studio material management to provide easy and fast material editing for OctaneRender.

The plugin supports all materials and material-specific functions (Nodes) found in the Standalone version.

MaterialThe representation of the surface or volume properties of an object. editing includes:

Automatic and on-demand material conversions, taking diffuse, bump, specular, and opacity channels.
Automatic material grouping: identical DAZ materials are bound to a single Octane Render material; though it is still possible to assign new individual materials to grouped elements.
Automatic texture map assignment; since GPU based rendering still needs to tamper with VRAM and texture count limitations, the Plugin chooses the best possible map type (color/bw) to make optimal use of the available resources.
Surfaces filter; hides scene elements by their surface name.
Material editing & Nodegraph Editor: The Plugin features a complete editing system for Octane materials; all parameters are available and can be shown and edited using a graph/node based visual frontend.
Material assignment: MaterialsA set of attributes or parameters that describe surface characteristics. can be assigned to scene elements by drag & drop, individually or in groups; furthermore Octane materials can be directly dropped onto the Octane viewport to assign them.
Material management: Octane materials are always saved within the DAZ scene, additionally "User presets" can be saved to have own materials at hand whenever needed.

Rendering

The Plugin supports all render setup specific features of OctaneRender; in particular the different rendering KernelsBy definition, this is the central or most important part of something. In Octane, the Kernels are the heart of the render engine. (Direct Lighting, Pathtracing, PMC, Info Channel), as well as Tonemapping and post processing functions. Also fully supported are the base lighting types (HDRIAn image which presents more than 8 bit per color channel unlike most common image formats. and Sun environment).

In addition complete render setups (including render sizes) can be created and immediately switched, and also saved as "User presets". Base lighting setups are managed independently from the rendering setups and can also be saved and recalled on demand and as "User preset".

Additional rendering features:

Aspect frame control; always shows the current rendering aspect frame in the DAZ Studio viewport; the camera perspective is changed accordingly.
Scale to viewport mode; sets the render size always to the size of the viewport.
"Final" rendering mode; collapses all individual geometries into an unified mesh, in order to provide 15-50% better rendering speed compared to the standard mode (which uses independent geometry objects).
Clay rendering and lowered resolution rendering; to instantly strip materials from the rendering and allow faster viewport updates.
A rendering lock secures an ongoing rendering from any changes.
Viewport tools/pickers to select nodes/materials, open materials, set focus points, white point (for Tonemapping) and to reload individual geometries if needed all right from the Octane viewport.
Additional camera control of Focal length and F/Stop directly from the Octane viewport.

Animations

OctaneRender for DAZ Studio allows unrestricted animation rendering; 3rd party plugins to extend the animatio possibilitie o DAZ Studio are supported as long as they use standard methods to update DAZ scene elements.

In addition the plugin provides an animation cue which allows to switch cameras, Render setups and Lighting setups based on cue frames for animations as well as rendering non-animated image sequences.

OctaneLive DB

Using community made materials form the OctaneLive DB is fully supported. Live DB materials can be directly assigned to scene elements like own created Octane materials, even by drag & drop them onto the Octane viewport.

Since Live DB materials need to be downloaded from the Internet, the Plugin caches them locally to speed up further use of materials once downloaded.

Community made Live DB materials are fully accessible and editable, and may serve as starting point for own material creation as well.

Other features

Support for standard and orthogonal cameras and DAZ Studio viewport modes
Texture map replacement and updates allow to change only used texture maps in complex Octane materials if a new material set was loaded.
Basic support for "Video textures" - image sequences applied to image nodes for animation rendering
All OctaneRender specific scene data is saved directly within the DAZ Studio .duf file.
Texture maps transferred to Octane still respect their "Runtime" folder origins; the Octane saved data thus allows to fully load scenes even if the Runtime folder structure is different from the saved one.
Texture maps used in Live DB materials are automatically downloaded if they are missing (given an active Internet connection).
GPU cooldown; if needed, the Plugin may pause a rendering if a certain GPU temperature is reached
Windows 7 Aero can be turned off directly from within the Plugin to free resources for rendering; this can be also automatically done every time the Plugin starts.
and much more...

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