Info Channels

The Info Channel kernel creates false-color images of the scene according to types that contain various information about the scene (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Info Channel kernel settings

The following Info Channel Types are available:

Geometric Normal - The vectors perpendicular to the triangle faces of the mesh.
Interpolated Vertex Normals - Similar to Shading Normal, but also calculates the shading based on vertex normals provided by actual data in the mesh. This makes flawed normals resulting from stuffed vertices visible in the shading.
Shading Normal - The interpolated normals used for shading by calculations based on the face normals, and discreetly fixes distortion to keep a smooth appearance. This does not take into account the Bump map of the object. For objects without smoothing, this is identical to the Geometric normals.
Z-Depth - The distance between the intersection point and the camera, measured parallel to the view vector.
Position - The first intersection point's position.
MaterialThe representation of the surface or volume properties of an object. ID - Octane represents each Material pin as a separate color.
Wireframe - Shows the mesh represented by edges, vertices, and surfaces.

Info Channel Kernel Parameters

Quality

Max. Samples - Sets the maximum number of samples per pixel before the rendering process stops. Higher numbers of samples per pixel results in cleaner renders. For quick animations and scenes with predominantly direct lighting, a low amount of samples (500-1000) will suffice. In scenes with lots of indirect lighting and mesh lights, OctaneRender^® may require several thousand samples to get a clean render.
Type - Contains the various Info Channel types.
Ray Epsilon - The distance to offset new rays so they don't intersect with the originating geometry. If the scale of a scene is too large, precision artifacts like concentric circles appear. In that case, increasing this parameter makes these artifacts disappear.
Filter Size - Sets the pixel size for filtering the render. This improves artifact aliasing in the render, and it also reduces noise. However, if you set the filter too high, the image becomes blurry.
AO Distance - Ambient Occlusion distance in units.
AO Alpha Shadows - The Ambient Occlusion calculation takes opacity into account, and render passes use this to determine if shadows cast by Ambient Occlusion render as transparent (zero alpha). This helps composite the render over another image without the AO shadows present.
Opacity Threshold - Geometry with opacity greater than or equal to this value is treated as totally opaque.
Z-Depth Max - Gives the maximum z-depth that can be shown.
UV Max - Gives the maximum value that can be shown to texture coordinates.
UV Coordinate Selection - Determines the set of UV coordinates to use.
Max Speed - Speed mapped to the maximum intensity in the Motion Vector channel. A value of 1 means a maximum movement of 1 screen width in the shutter interval.
Sampling Mode - Includes options for Distributed Ray Tracing and Pixel Filtering modes. Pixel filtering is like anti-aliasing - OctaneRender applies this in the render passes extracted for third-party compositing, which may require anti-aliased mattes. Without filtering, the jagged edges of objects in the scene are still evident.
- Distributed Rays - Allows Motion Blur and Depth Of Field samples.
- Non-Distributed With Pixel Filtering - Disables Motion Blur and Depth Of Field, but leaves Pixel Filtering enabled.
- Non-Distributed Without Pixel Filtering - Disables Motion Blur, Depth Of Field, and Pixel Filtering for all render passes, except for Render Layer Mask and Ambient Occlusion.
Bump and Normal Mapping - Option to calculate or not calculate the Bump and Normal maps.
Wireframe Backface - Highlights backface in the Wireframe channel.

Alpha Channel

Alpha Channel - Removes the background and renders it transparent (zero alpha). This is useful for compositing the render over another image without the background being present.

Sampling

Parallel Samples - Controls how many samples are calculated in parallel. If set to a small value, OctaneRender requires less memory to store the samples state, but renders are slower. If set to a high value, then OctaneRender needs more graphics memory, but renders are faster. The change in performance depends on the scene, the GPU architecture, and the number of shader processors available on the GPU.
Max. Tile Samples - Controls the number of samples per pixel that OctaneRender renders before it stores the result in the film buffer. Higher numbers mean results arrive less often at the film buffer, but it reduces CPU overhead during rendering, which improves performance.
Minimize Net Traffic - When enabled, OctaneRender distributes only the same tile to the net render slaves until it reaches the max samples/pixel for that tile, and then OctaneRender distributes the next tile to the slaves. This option doesn't affect work done by local GPUs.

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