The Joint node is available as a tool to control skeletal systems that can be imported into Standalone using the FBX format. The node can be found under the Geometry category in the Node Graph Editor window. It is not meant to be used as a standalone node, only as a node auto-generated when a skeletal mesh system is imported (figure 1). The Joint node controls joints and can be used to control skeletal animations. Note that the Joint node only supports FK animation.


Joint Nodes

Figure 1: Joint nodes attached to an imported character animation

Import File Support

OctaneRender® supports loading FBX, Alembic, glTF, and USD files. These file formats load as a geometry archive, i.e. a node graph containing many nodes including Joint nodes (if joint animation is included in the file) and providing material and object layer input linkers as well as camera and geometry output linkers. Accessing the nodes inside these node graphs requires a text (.txt) placed in the install location of Octane Standalone. The text file needs to be named as octane_log_flags.txt. and the file needs to contain the following log flag: makeAllInspectable.


Although OctaneRender® supports bones, it does not support inverse kinematic (IK) animations. This means it is necessary to convert any IK animation to forward kinematic (FK) to make the FBX files work in OctaneRender®.


Support For Bone Deformations

To support FBX and glTF, OctaneRender® has support for bone deformations. Character animations can be more lightweight than if the deformed geometry needs to be baked, as in the case with Alembic.

Bone deformations are set up in the respective source 3D modeling applications, and are not editable from the Nodegraph Editor. At this stage, the Bone Deformation node and the Joint node exists for the benefit of the FBX and gITF files, and potential optimizations in the geometry compilation.