C4 DPlugin Manual

OctaneRender™ for Maxon® Cinema 4D® Plugin Manual

Version 3 — Manual publication date: 27 May, 2017
All rights reserved. OctaneRender™ and OTOY® and their logos are trademarks of OTOY, Incorporated. Maxon® and Cinema
4D® are registered trademarks of MAXON Computer GmbH.
http://render.otoy.com
Octane for Cinema 4D Plugin Manual

Contents

Introduction 1
Features 1
What’s New on V3 Renderer Core 3
Getting Started 6
System Requirements 6
Downloading and Installing the Plugin 7
Setting the Plugin into Cinema 4D 8
Troubleshooting the Installation 9
Activating the Plugin 10
Starting the Plugin 11
Using the Plugin 13
Quick Startup – Setup a Scene and Render 13
Octane Dialog - Live Viewer 16
Commands 18
Object Menu 18
Options Menu 19
Materials Menu 20
Files Menu 22
Settings Window 23
Using the Kernels 23
Direct Lighting 24
Path Tracing 26
PMC 28
Info Channels 29
Camera Imager Settings 31
Postprocessing 37
Other Settings 40
Devices 41
Account 41
C4D Shaders 42
Miscellaneous Settings 42
Out-of-core 43
LiveDB Support 43
Octane Camera 44
Thinlens Camera 47
Panoramic Camera 49
Baking Camera 49
Lighting 50
Environment Maps - HDRI Environments 55
Octane Daylight 58
Environment Medium 60
Octane Light 62
Octane Light Tag 63
Producing IES Lighting Effect 64
Projection Lighting Effect 66
Mesh Emitters 67
Using Portals 67
Materials 67
Diffuse Material 69
Glossy Material 72
Specular Material 74
Mix Material 76
Portal Material 78
C4D Material Stacking 79
Emissions 79
Blackbody Emission 82
Texture Emission 85
Using Medium Nodes 86
Textures 97
Colour Textures 99
Image Textures 100
Generators Nodes 102
Mapping Nodes 107
Falloff Map 111
Dirt Texture Map 113
Gradient Map 114
Displacement 115
Texture Transform 118
Texture Projection 118
Animation Rendering 122
Motion Blur 125
Render Passes 128
Beauty Passes 130
Material Passes 133
Post Processing Passes 134
Render Layer Passes 134
Lighting Passes 141
Info Passes 149
Extracting Proper Z-depth 151
Network Rendering 152
Octane Network Render 159
Team Render 161
Hair Rendering 162
Octane Object Tag 164
Colorspace 166
Using Background - Foreground 166
Texture Baking 166
Particle Engine 170
Volumetrics 172
Volume Object 173
Mode: Generator 174
Mode: VDB Loader 176
Octane Texture Manager 182
Exporting scene for Octane Cloud Rendering(ORC) or Standalone 184
Export Animated ORBX from Command Line 186
Performance Tricks and Pitfalls on Renderings 187
Troubleshooting 188
Change Log 189
Glossary 205
Index 211
Introduction
Octane for Maxon® Cinema 4D™ is a plugin which allows you to use Otoy OctaneRender™ GPU render engine inside Maxon®
Cinema 4D™ Layout. This manual is currently a work in progress, and is by no means an exhaustive guide to Octane rendering. We
hope to post revisions on-line on a regular basis.
Octane for Cinema 4D has been integrated using the Cinema 4D external render class plugin architecture to allow use it with the
same workflow that user has working with native Cinema 4D render engine. It supports Octane realtime rendering using a custom
Interactive Render Window and Picture Viewer.
Features
l Loading of the Cinema 4D scenes into the OctaneRender engine and rendering to the Live Viewer, Picture Viewer, Batch
rendering and network rendering
l Live update camera, lights, environments, materials and also geometries
l Full geometry support, including n-gons, HyperNurbs
l Support for Mograph, particle and hair with geometry option, also some third-party plugin
l Support of full transformations and deformation in polygonal objects, including parenting, bones, etc.
l Support for material selection tags
l Support of dynamics, mograph objects
l Arealights, Infinite Light and Sun Light, Sky supported, Daylight+Environment texture, visible environment
l Support of Octane thinLens, panoramic, orthographic Camera and C4D standard camera
l Render instances (See limitations)
l Live renderer window is a interactive render window. It shows rendering in progress with current rendering information.
Support for full interactive light/environment/geometry with motion blur, material editing with drag&drop functionality.
l Exporting the scenes and materials to Octane Standalone Software.
l Material1 converter for changing standard materials and some other types to Octane materials
l Outputs for Info Kernels modes as alpha, z-depth, material id, wireframe, shading/geometry normals, positions, texture
uw channels, etc…
l Material2 LiveDB access, cached online materials, localdb for material exchange in between plugins and standalone.
l Region rendering
l Octane camera, object transform and deformation motion blur support
l Cinema 4D sub-frame motion blur is supported
l Octane Network Rendering
l Hair rendering
l Displacement
l Random color texture for instances
l OpenSubDiv surfaces
1The representation of the surface or volume properties of an object.

1 — Introduction
l Unlimited texture counts and out of core support(System ram usage for textures)
l Rounded edges
l Volumetrics (Open VDB). Check for details.
l Motion graph color support for normal instances(not for render-instances)
l Cinema 4D Team render(R15) or NET rendering
l Octane Texture Manager
l Node based editor for Octane materials(WIP version)
l Render passes, render layers and light layers
l Material1 stacking with some limitations. Check for details.
Limitations
l Spheres in Picture Viewer (Set Render Perfect parameter as off)
l Render instances in other render instances is not supported
l Max 76 millions triangle count(or as fit as to VRAM) and max movable mesh count about 15.000.
l Octane nodes supported inside Cinema 4D
l Render target: Camera Imager, post procesing, Daylight environment, Directlight kernel, Infochannel kernel, PMC kernel,
Pathtracing kernel, Texture/Daylight environment and Thinlens/Panoramic/Bake camera.
l Emission nodes: Blackbody emission and Texture emission.
l Material2 nodes: Diffuse3, Glossy4, Specular 5, Portal and Mix materials6.
l Medium nodes: Absorption and Scattering.
l Procedural nodes: Check, Marble, Ridgedfractal, Noise, Turbulence and Wave nodes.
l Texture nodes: Float, GaussianSpectrum, RGBSpectrum and texture image nodes.
l Mapping nodes: Clamp, ColorCorrect, CosineMix, Falloff, Invert, Mix, Multiply, Gradient texture, ….

3Amount of diffusion, or the reflection of light photons at different angles from an uneven or granular surface. Used for dull, non-
reflecting materials or mesh emitters.
4The measure of how well light is reflected from a surface in the specular direction, the amount and way in which the light is spread
around the specular direction, and the change in specular reflection as the specular angle changes. Used for shiny materials such as
plastics or metals.
5Amount of specular reflection, or the mirror-like reflection of light photons at the same angle. Used for transparent materials such as
glass and water.
6Used to mix any two material types.
2 — Introduction
Demo version limitations

l Watermarked render output with limited resolution. Disabled save option for Liver Viewer.
l Livedb is disabled.
l Network rendering is disabled.
What’s New on V3 Renderer Core

DComparison for VRAM/RAM usage capabilities
Overhaul of the integration kernels

Since the beginning of Octane the integration kernels had one CUDA thread calculate one complete sample. We changed this for
various reasons, the main one being the fact that the integration kernels got really huge and impossible to optimize. Also OSL and
3 — Introduction
OpenCL are pretty much impossible to implement this way. To solve the problem, we split the big task of calculating a sample into
smaller steps which are then processed one by one by the CUDA threads. I.e. there are a lot more kernel calls are happening than in
the past.
There are two major consequences coming with this new approach: Octane needs to keep information for every sample that is cal-
culated in parallel between kernel calls, which requires additional GPU memory. And the CPU is stressed a bit more since it has to do
more work to do many more kernel launches. To give you some control over the kernel execution we added two options to the dir-
ect lighting / path tracing / info channel kernel nodes:
“Parallel samples” controls how many samples we calculate in parallel. If you set it to a small value, Octane requires less memory to
store the samples state, but most likely renders a bit slower. If you set it to a high value, more graphics memory is needed ren-
dering becomes faster. The change in performance depends on the scene, the GPU architecture and the number of shader pro-
cessors the GPU has.
“Max. tile samples” controls the number of samples per pixel Octane renders until it takes the result and stores it in the film buffer. A
higher number means that results arrive less often at the film buffer, but reduce the CPU overhead during rendering and as a con-
sequence can improve performance, too.
Speed
It’s hard to quantify the performance impact, but what we have seen during testing is that in simple scenes (like the chess set or
Cornell boxes etc.) the old system was hard to beat. That is because in this type of scenes, samples of neighbouring pixels are very
coherent (similar) which is what GPUs like and can process very fast, because CUDA threads did almost the same task and didn’t
have to wait for each other. In these cases you usually have plenty of VRAM left, which means you can bump up the “parallel
samples” to the maximum making the new system as fast or almost as fast as the old system.
The problem is that in real production scenes the execution of CUDA threads diverges very quickly causing CUDA threads to wait a
long time for other CUDA threads to finish some work, i.e. twiddling thumbs. And for these more complex scenes the new system
usually works better since the coherency is increased by the way how each step is processed. And we can optimize the kernels
more, because the scope of their task is much more narrow. So you usually see a speed up for complex scenes, even with the
default parallel samples setting or a lower value (in case you are struggling with memory).
TLDR version
In simple scenes where you’ve got plenty of VRAM left: Increase “parallel samples” to the maximum. In complex scenes where
VRAM is sparse: Set it to the highest value without running out of memory. It should usually still be faster than before or at least
render with roughly the same speed.
Moved film buffers to the host and tiled rendering
The second major refactoring in the render core was the way we store render results. Until v3 each GPU had its own film buffer
where part of the calculated samples were aggregated. This has various drawbacks: For example, a CUDA error usually means that
you lose the samples calculated by that GPU or a crashing/disconnected slave means you lost its samples. Another problem was
that large images mean a large film buffer, especially if you enable render passes. And yes, deep image rendering would have been
pretty much impossible since it’s very very memory hungry. And implementing save and resume would have been a pain…
To solve these issues we moved the film buffer into host memory. Doesn’t sound exciting, but has some major consequences. The
biggest one is that now Octane has to deal with a huge amount of data the GPUs produce. Especially in multi-GPU setups or when
network rendering is used. As a solution, we introduced tiled rendering for all integration kernels except PMC (where tiled rendering
is not possible). The tiles are relatively large (compared to most other renders), and we tried to hide tile rendering as much as pos-
sible.
Of course, the film buffer in system memory means more memory usage, so make sure that you have enough RAM installed before
you crank up the resolution (which is now straight forward to do). Another consequence is that the CPU has to merge render results
from the various sources like local GPUs or net render slaves into the film buffers which requires some computational power. We
tried to optimize that area, but there is obviously an impact on the CPU usage. Let us know if you run into issues here. Again, increas-
ing the “max. tile samples” option in the kernels allows you to reduce the overhead accordingly (see above).
4 — Introduction
Info passes are now rendered in parallel, too, since we can now just reuse the same tile buffer on the GPU that is used for rendering
beauty passes.
Overhauled work distribution in network rendering
We also had to modify how render work is distributed to net render slaves and how their results are sent back, to make it work with
the new film buffer. The biggest problem to solve was the fact that transmitting samples to the master is 1 to 2 magnitudes slower
than generating them on the slave. The only way to solve this is to aggregate samples on the slaves and de-coupling the work dis-
tribution from the result transmission, which has the nice side effect that while rendering large resolutions (like stereo GearVR cube
maps) doesn’t throttle slaves anymore.
Of course, caching results on the slaves means that they require more system memory than in the past and if the tiles rendered by
a slave are distributed uniformly, the slave will produce a big pile of cached tiles that needs to be be transmitted to the master even-
tually. I.e. after all samples have been rendered, the master still needs to receive all those cached results from the slaves, which
can take quite some time. To solve this problem we introduced an additional option to the kernel nodes that support tiled ren-
dering:
l “Minimize net traffic”, if enabled, distributes only the same tile to the net render slaves, until the max samples/pixel has
been reached for that tile and only then the next tile is distributed to slaves. Work done by local GPUs is not affected by this
option. This way a s lave can merge all its results into the same cached tile until the master switches to a different tile. Of
course, you should set the maximum samples/pixel to something reasonable or the network rendering will focus on the
first tile for a very long time…
5 — Introduction
Getting Started
l System Requirements
l Downloading and Installing the Plugin
l Activating the Plugin
l Starting the Plugin
System Requirements
Software Requirements
l Cinema 4D Plugin - V3 license for the Cinema 4D plugin. If you do not own a V3 plugin you can purchase it on our pur-
chasing page or upgrade your existing license.
l OctaneRender Standalone Edition - V3 license for the Standalone Edition. If you do not own a V3 Standalone Edition
you can purchase it on our purchasing page or upgrade your existing license.
l Matching Version Numbers - License version numbers should be identical (e.g.V3.03.3 Standalone and V3.03.3 Cinema
4D plugin).
l Cinema 4D Host Application - Maxon Cinema 4D host application R13-R18 for Windows and R15-R18 for OS X. Please
note that R16/R17 will need updates to 16.050/17.048 as a minimum in order to run the Cinema 4D plugin.

Hardware Requirements
OctaneRender™ requires a CUDA-enabled NVidia graphics card. OctaneRender™ runs best on Fermi (e.g. GTX 580, GTX 590, GTX
770/780) and Kepler (e.g. GTX 680, GTX 690) GPUs, but also supports older CUDA enabled GPU models.
GeForce cards are fast and cost effective, but have less VRAM than Quadro and Tesla cards. OctaneRender scales perfectly in a
multi GPU configuration and can use different types of Nvidia cards at once — for example, a GeForce GTX 260 combined with a
Quadro 6000.
The official list of NVIDIA CUDA enabled products is located here. You can find the download links for Windows and Linux here and
the download links for Mac can be found here.

OctaneRender™ is available for the following operating systems:
l Windows XP, Windows Vista,Windows 7, Windows 8 (32 and 64 bit)
l Macintosh OS X (32 and 64 bit)
6 — Getting Started

Internet access
Upon launching the plugin for the first time, the user will need to log in to their OctaneLive™ account which associated with their
forum log-in information. This information can be found in the customer section of the OctaneRender™ website.
The OctaneRenderTM for Maxon® Cinema 4D plugin requires Internet access for the first time launch. Internet access is not
required to use both OctaneRender™ and OctaneRender™ for Maxon® Cinema 4D® plugin. When no internet access is present,
the Live Database will not be accessable
Downloading and Installing the Plugin
1. Download and install the OctaneRender Standalone Edition as described in the Installation topic of the Standalone
manual. If you already have a Standalone license activated on your computer, you can skip this step.
Note: Make sure that the Cinema 4D host application is not running in the background while you are installing the plugin.
2. Download the software from the Latest Additions to OctaneRender and extract the content of the archive and then add
the content to the plugins folder in Cinema 4D file system.
Setting the Plugin into Cinema 4D

3. The c4dOctane folder will come with several versions of the plugin in it. In order to avoid any loading issues, delete all of the
c4dOctane-R(version number).cdl64files that you will not be using.
4. Open the Cinema 4D application. If you did not activate your Standalone license, you will be prompted to enter your OTOY
account username and password.
Now you should have successfully installed the OctaneRender for Cinema 4D plugin.
Troubleshooting the Installation

If you have followed the instructions above and do not see an Octane tab at the top of the Cinema 4D host application:
In cases where your installation of Cinema 4D is not using the default plugins path, it my not show up even after having installed it to
the plugins folder. In this case you will need to install the plugin where Cinema 4D expects it, this will usually be the preferences
folder.
Follow these steps:
1. Locate the Cinema4D version’s preferences folder. You can note its location by going to Menu ->Edit -> Preferences, from
the window invoked, there should be a button near the bottom left corner that says ‘Open Preference Folder’.
2. Open the preferences folder and copy the path. The path may look similar to these:
3. C:\Documents and Setting\<your username>\Application Data\MAXON\CINEMA4D R16\
4. C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\MAXON\CINEMA 4D R16_5B03E856
5. or C:/Users//AppData/Roaming/MAXON/CINEMA 4D R16_/
6. Run the installer and select the version of Cinema 4D
7. Ensure to point the installer to your Cinema 4D’s Preferences folder by Pasting the path you copied in Step 2
8. Wait until install process is completed.
Activating the Plugin

With the new single sign-on and licensing system, Octane will request you to enter your OTOY credentials and will attempt to
retrieve an available license from the OctaneLive server. This license will be released once the application exits, similar to a floating
license scheme. This means that there’s no need to deal with the actual license ID and pass anymore.
When you open Cinema 4D Octane V3 plugin for the first time you will be prompted with a sign in screen like this:
After entering your credentials and successfully signing in, Octane will keep a session alive as long there’s a continuous usage of
Octane or an Octane plug-in, so in most of cases there should not be any need to re-login. This session will also allow you to link your
local installation to other OTOY services such as ORC.
Note: Octane 2.x and 3.x instances can still co-exist on the same machine.
Offline mode will work slightly differently to how it’s been working until now: upon sign in, the user will be asked whether to enable
“Offline licensing” on the current machine, in which case licenses will not be released upon the application exit and will be locked to
the current machine until the session is explicitly closed via the account preferences for which the machine should be brought tem-
porary online.

Please try the following if you run into problems with stating the plugin:
l Delete “otoy_credentials” file from these locations. Then try again to restart the application.
Windows: %APPDATA%/OctaneRender/otoy_credentials
OSX: ~/Library/OctaneRender/otoy_credentials ( you may have to use Finder’s Go->Go To Folder… and type
“~/Library/OctaneRender” – without the quotes – to get to that folder)
l Try to run Standalone V3 and make sign-out from account section. If you used V2 version use Standalone V2 and V2 plugin
to deactivate. Check your licenses page for result of signout.
l For releasing the license when you used the offline mode, you should deactivate licenses from both plugin and standalone
in currently activated PC. In the plugin, go to Settings->Account->Deactivate and in Standalone go to Preferences-
>Account->Sign-out.

Octane V3 License Web Deactivation:
Check this section for deactivation
Starting the Plugin

Start Maxon® Cinema 4D. If everything is correctly placed, you should see an Octane Menu as shown in below image. If the Com-
mand is not visible, please check your installation.
CREATING A SHORTCUT FOR THE LIVE VIEWER

Select Window -> Customization -> Customize Commands, or Press ALT+F12, type ‘octane’ in the Name Filter field and
Select Start Octane Render. Assign a key combination or drag to GUI.
Using the Plugin

OctaneRender™ is a GPU based render engine and it is important to manage the GPU(s) in the system that are used for rendering.
This is done through the Devices tab. Under this tab, the checkboxes for
GPU’s that are not supported are not shown and users can only enable GPU’s with a supported compute model.
Checkboxes which is on left names of GPU, allows selecting GPUs to use for rendering if more than one GPU is installed. The Use pri-
ority option can throttle down rendering on one or more GPU’s to improve
system responsiveness especially when rendering on a GPU used for the display.
GPU memory/texture usage, can be checked from on-screen info lines of Live Viewer.
Single or multiple GPUs may be used for rendering.
Render devices may be selected or deselected at any time. While rendering you can change active GPU devices. Using an additional
card dedicated to the UI and the viewport will ensure faster feedback while working on scenes.
The ‘Render Priority’ option is for adjusting the GPU usage. It is similar to the task manager ’CPU Priority’.
Note about GPU usage: Plugin requires a NVIDIA CUDA-enabled video card to work. Using an additional card dedicated to the UI
and the viewport that will ensure faster feedback while working on scenes.
If you don’t have an additional card, we recommend using ‘low priority’ for the video card. If you have additionals cards available for
rendering, please try with ‘low priority’ for the viewport card.
Quick Startup – Setup a Scene and Render

Make a simple scene with some animated objects. Create your material, lighting setups by help of Live Viewer with its interaction fea-
tures.
Always try to use Octane materials and textures for best workflow. Anyway standard materials is supported.
Assign Octane Object tag to animated objects. It’s enough to put this tag to top of a group.
13 — Using the Plugin

To see animations or updates in Live Viewer you don’t need to put any tag, if you use Geometry->Enable->All Movable option.
But you need to use object tags for animation output in Picture Viewer.
Assign Octane Render as current renderer. Default settings are best for many scenarios.
We have two methods for rendering. See this section for details.

https://vimeo.com/128028880

Octane Dialog - Live Viewer

Live Viewer is an interactive render window for Octane Render. It supports several real-time updates. Also has all controls of
Octane Dialog and more comfortable in most usages.
In the viewer window you can navigate the current camera with ALT+mouse button. It’s a similar to controls of the OpenGL view-
port.
Also you can select materials/objects/lights from render view and pick and change camera focal distance. Copy/paste, drag&drop
materials from livedb or material manager to objects is one of its unmatched features.
It has also these useful features to boost your workflow and gives the informations about render progress and scene.
l Render progress, speed, render and completion times, current/max samples, total triangles count.
l Used/Free Memory, used/maximum texture counts, used GPU’s, usage of GPU power and temperature Modes of Inform-
ation lines can be changed by left mouse click on Live Viewer.
l Support for material picking, drag and drop from livedb and material manager to any objects in render view.
l Support for dof1, color picking and objects/octane lights.
l Material2 creation over objects in render view. Copy/paste and drag&drop materials from LiveDB or Material3 Manager
or between objects.
l Select objects from render view. Assign material to objects directly within LV.
l Enable/disable the render region command from popup menu.
l Clay rendering modes: Gray, solid and normal.
l Supports real-time motion blur(cached), hair(as in viewport), displacement and all features of renderer.
1The distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image. Although a lens can
precisely focus at only one distance at a time, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on each side of the focused distance, so that
within the DOF, the unsharpness is imperceptible under normal viewing conditions. source: wikipedia (https://en.wiki-
pedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field)

Performance tips for LV:

l For more responsive geometry updates, you may try the “Synchronization on geometry updates” option in Settings-
>Other. Enabled is better option for Windows. On OSX use disabled option to avoid opengl glitches.
l Set gpu priority on and “Medium or Low” for previews, this will cause performance loose on rendering. High is best for
final/animation renderings.
Real-Time Updates with Octane Render for Cinema 4D

Octane Dialog
Octane Dialog is main control window with several buttons and menus to manage Octane Renderer and creating object, materials,
saving the render images and settings for update controls. It’s for another way to control Live Viewer. Allows to having more space
and simpler view on LV.
resim-9
Commands
l Start button: Reset all gpu data and resend your scene. All buttons are inactive(include Start button-grayed) until new
render sessions start. So that’s not a toggle button.
l Restart button: It just restart render from zero maxsamples. As it does that when you change somethings.
l Pause/resume button: Pause or resume current render without delete any gpu data.
l Reset Button: It stops and clear all gpu data. This is fine for freeing the gpu memory without closing LV. At this per-
spective, “Stop” button can be seen as unnecessary.
Object Menu
Texture/Hdri Environment: Creates a Octane Texture Environment. Result object is Sky+OctaneEnvironmentTag. Which has
settings of Texture Environment. You can change environment texture/color nodes and other settings. You can generate IBL envir-
onments.
Daylight: Creates a Directlight + OctaneDaylightTag + Sun Expression tag. Which has all Daylight settings of Octane Renderer.
OctaneDaylightTag has Turbidity, power, north offset and new model parameters. Also you can enable/disable Sun Expression for
exact simulation.
Octane Arealight: Creates Arealight + Octane Lighttag. Actually Octane has not any light object. All lighting is done with emission
nodes on geometries. Plugin can export Cinema 4D arealights as geometry and attach Texture/Blackbody emission nodes. Lighttag
allows to adjust emission parameters.
Targetted Arealight: Creates Arealight + Octane Lighttag + Target Expression.
Similar above command. Also has a target node. If selection is a object, set the object as a target, otherwise it creates null object
for targetting

Octane Ieslight: Creates Arealight + Octane Lighttag with predefined ies light settings. You should set the distribution node with
an ies file.
Options Menu
Check Camera: Checks any updates of cameras.
Check Materials: Checks any updates of materials .
Check Lights: Checks any updates scene lights.
Check Geometry
l Enabled: Checks any changes on objects which have OctaneObject Tag .
l Automatic: Makes all objects movable without Object tag. Anyway you’ll need a object tag on animated objects for anim-
ation rendering.
Check Paint Textures: Detect changes on painted textures.
Interactive Motion Blur: Enables motion blur on Live Viewer.
l Camera M.Blur: Motion blur effect of Camera.
l Object M.Blur: Motion blur effect of Object PSR.
l Vertex M.Blur: Motion blur effect of vertex movements.

Show Alpha: Enables the presentation of transparency in Live Viewer.
Material1 Previews: On/Off for Octane Render material previews.
Opengl Previews: On/Off for Opengl material previews.
Enable Particle Engine: Experimental. Enables the direct producing of particles.
Sub Sampling: Set sub-sampling 2×2, 4×4 or off.
Full Screen: Activates full screen Live Viewer. Close/open is required on LV.
Materials Menu
Open LiveDB: Open Octane LiveDB manager.
Octane Node Editor: Open Octane Node Editor.
Octane Texture Manager: Open Octane Texture Manager.

Octane Diffuse1 Material2: Creates Octane diffuse material.

Octane Glossy3 Material4: Creates Octane glossy material.
Octane Specular 5 Material6: Creates Octane specular material.
Octane Mix Material7: Creates Octane mix material8.
Octane Portal Material9: Creates Octane portal material.
Convert Materials To Octane: Converts the selected materials to Octane material.
Remove Unused materials: Removes unused materials in scene. It’s optimised for Octane types.
Remove duplicated materials: R emoves duplicate materials in scene. It’s optimised for Octane types.
plastics or metals.
glass and water.

Files Menu
Save as Png8 image: Saves 8-bit png image from current render.
Save as Png16 image: Saves 16-bit png image from current render.
Save as EXR1 image: Saves linear EXR2 image from current render.
Save as tonemapped EXR3 image: Saves current render buffer as a tonemapped exr image.
Save Render Passes as EXR4: Saves all render passes as a (linear) EXR5 file from non-tonemapped render buffer.
Save Render Passes as PSD: Saves all render passes to as a (tonemapped)PSD file from tonemapped render buffer.
Import Orbx: Load materials from a file which is in Octane orbx format
Export To: OCS, Orbx(animated or static geometry)
1A high-dynamic range image file format.


Standalone scene: Export single frame Octane file.
Package(orbx): Export single frame ORBX file.
Animated package: Export scene as animated ORBX file.
Save Ocs: Saves current Octane Render data as OCS file (Octane Standalone scene format)
Edit in Standalone: Saves current Octane Render data as OCS file and open in Octane Standalone
Settings Window
Using the Kernels

There are four major rendering kernels in OctaneRender™:
Direct Lighting Kernel
Path Tracing Kernel
PMC Kernel
Infochannels Kernel

Click the topic links for details.
Direct Lighting
Direct Lighting can be used for faster rendering. Direct Lighting is not unbiased but is useful when creating quick animations or
renders.
Maximum Samples: This sets the maximum number of samples per pixel before the rendering process stops. The higher the num-
ber of samples per pixel, the cleaner the render. For quick animations and scenes with predominantly direct lighting, a low amount
of samples (500-1000) may suffice. In scenes with lots of indirect lighting and mesh lights, a few thousand samples may be required
to obtain a clean render.
GI Modes: There are five different Global Illumination modes in the Direct Lighting Kernel:
l None: Only direct lighting from the sun or area lights is included. Shadowed areas receive no contribution and will be black.
l Sample Environment: Use a simple ambient color from the environment/horizon. Together with ambient and none,
these modes are all very fast, as no Monte Carlo sampling is required. These give a very unrealistic, classic z-buffer/whitted
raytracing style look, but are very fast, and very handy for interactive tuning of complex scenes or on slow hardware.
l Ambient: Use a simple ambient color from the environment above.
l Ambient Occlusion: Standard ambient occlusion. This mode can often provide realistic images but offers no color bleed-
ing.
l Diffuse1: Indirect diffuse, with a configuration to set the number of indirect diffuse bounces to include. This gives a GI qual-
ity that is in between Ambient Occlusion and pathtracing, without caustics and a decent realistic quality (better than AO),
but much faster than pathtracing/PMC. It is very good for quick finals and animations. It is similar in some ways to ‘brute-
force’ indirect GI in other engines.
Specular 2 depth
Controls the number of times a ray can be refracted before dying. Higher numbers mean higher render times but more color bleed-
ing and more details in transparent materials. Low numbers can introduce artifacts, or turn some refractions into pure black.
Glossy3 depth
Controls the number of times a ray can be reflected before dying. Higher numbers mean higher render time. Low numbers under
“4” can introduce artifacts, or turn some reflections into pure black. You should setup this setting based on the complexity of the
scene you are working on, and especially based on how many reflective parallel surfaces you have.
Diffuse4 Depth
Gives the maximum number of diffuse reflections if GI Mode is set to Diffuse5 (4)
Ray epsilon
glass and water.
plastics or metals.

It is the distance to offset new rays so they don’t intersect with the originating geometry. If the scale of your scene is too large, pre-
cision artifacts in the form of concentric circles may appear. In that case, increasing the ray epsilon can make these artifacts dis-
appear. Check below image for some consequences of tuneless values of ray epsilon. Play with value until artifacts go away.
Filter Size
This sets the pixel size for filtering the render. This can improve aliasing artifacts in the render. Noise can also be reduced this way,
but if the filter is set too high, the image can become blurry.
AO Distance
The distance of the ambient occlusion in units. Always check if the amount is right related to your model scale. For example you
don’t need an amount of “3” units if your object is a small toy. But if your model is a house or something large, you can increase the
value. The more you increase the value the darker your render will be.
Alpha Shadows
This setting allows any object with transparency (specular materials, materials with opacity settings and alpha channels) to cast a
proper shadow instead of behaving as a solid object.
Alpha Channel
This option removes the background and renders it as transparent (zero alpha). This can be useful if the user wants to composite
the render over another image and does not want the background to be present.
Keep Environment
This option is used in conjunction with the Alpha Channel setting. It allows the background to be rendered with zero alpha but is still
visible in the final render. This allows even further flexibility in compositing images.
Path termination power
This is a replacement for old “RR probability”. W ith the new algorithm we try to provide a system where you can tweak render speed
vs. convergence (how fast noise vanishes). Increasing the value, will cause he kernels to keep paths shorter and spend less time on
dark areas (which means they stay noisy longer) but may increase samples/second a lot. Reducing the value will cause kernels
trace longer paths in average and spend more time on dark areas. The current default of 0.3 works good in most scenes, but play
with it. For example, in two interior test scenes it actually payed off to set the value to 0.5 – 0.6 which increases the samples/second
a lot and then just to render more samples.
Coherent Ratio
When Coherent mode is enabled either for Path Tracing or Direct Lighting then picture becomes faster noise free but downside is
flickering effects when rendering animation. For stills and action-heavy animations/cameras Coherent mode might save you some
time.
Static Noise

When this attribute is enabled, the noise is static, i.e. does not change between frames. This is disabled by default. Note that the
noise is fully static as long as only the same GPU architecture is being used for rendering. Different architectures will produce slightly
different numerical errors which manifest as small differences in noise pattern every time rendering restarts on the frame.
Parallel Samples
This controls how many samples we calculate in parallel. If users set it to a small value, OctaneRender will require less memory to
store the samples state, but may render a bit slower. If this is set to a high value, more graphics memory is needed and rendering
becomes faster. The change in performance depends on the scene, the GPU architecture and the number of shader processors
the GPU has.
Maximum Tile Samples
This controls the number of samples per pixel that Octane will render until it takes the result and stores it in the film buffer. A higher
number means that results arrive less often at the film buffer, but reduce the CPU overhead during rendering and as a con-
Minimize Net Traffic
If enabled, distributes only the same tile to the net render slaves, until the max samples/pixel has been reached for that tile and
only then the next tile is distributed to slaves. Work done by local GPUs is not affected by this option. This way a slave can merge all
its results into the same cached tile until the master switches to a different tile. Of course, you should set the maximum
samples/pixel to something reasonable or the network rendering will focus on the first tile for a very long time.
Path Tracing
Path Tracing is best used for realistic results (together with PMC). The render times are higher than Direct Lighting but the results
can be photorealistic. It can have some difficulties with small light sources and proper caustics (for which pmc is better suited).
Maximum Samples
This sets the maximum number of samples per pixel before the rendering process stops. The higher the number of samples per
pixel, the cleaner the render. There is no rule as to how many samples per pixel are required for a good render.
Diffuse1 Depth
Specifies the depth of the diffuse where depth is the maximum number of times the ray can bounce/reflect/refract in a surface.
Higher amounts also mean higher render times but more realistic results. The default value is 8. For outdoor renders a good setting
is around 4 maximum depth. For lighting interior with natural light (the sun and the sky) you will need settings such as 8 or higher.
While high values are possible, in reality rays will not usually go beyond 16 ray depth.
Specular 2 Depth: The maximum depth upon which rays passing through specular objects are traced. This may be used to prevent
transparent objects to cause a dark outline in scenes.
Ray Epsilon: See this topic.
Filter Size
This sets the pixel size for filter for the render. This can improve aliasing artifacts in the render. If the filter is set too high, the image
can become blurry.
Alpha Shadows
If alpha maps are used in the scene, this setting controls whether the shadows will calculated from the mesh geometry or from the
alpha map.
glass and water.

Caustic Blur
This is used to approximate caustics on rough surfaces and increase or decrease the sharpness of caustic noise. A zero value
provides the sharpest caustics and increasing this value increases the bluring effect to make caustics appear softer.
GI clamp
It clamps the contribution for each path to the specified value. By reducing the “GI clamp” value, you can reduce the amount of fire-
flies caused by sparse but very strongly contributing paths, i.e. it reduces noise by removing energy. “Caustic blur”, on the other
hand, reduces noise by blurring caustics, but conserves energy.
Alpha Channel
Keep Environment
This option is used in conjunction with the Alpha Channel setting. It allows the background to be rendered with zero alpha but is still
visible in the final render. This allows even further flexibility in compositing images.
Path Termination Power
This parameter provides a system where users can tweak samples/second vs. convergence (how fast noise vanishes). Increasing
this value will cause the kernels to keep paths shorter and spend less time on dark areas (which means they stay noisy longer) but
may increase samples/second. Reducing this value will cause kernels to trace longer paths in average and spend more time on dark
areas. In short, high values increases the render speed but may lead to higher noise in dark areas.
Coherent Ratio

When Coherent mode is enabled either for Path Tracing or Direct Lighting then picture becomes faster noise free but downside is
flickering effects when rendering animation. For stills and action-heavy animations/cameras Coherent mode might save you some
time.
Static Noise
When this attribute is enabled, the noise is static, i.e. does not change between frames. This is disabled by default. Note that the
noise is fully static as long as only the same GPU architecture is being used for rendering. Different architectures will produce slightly
different numerical errors which manifest as small differences in noise pattern every time rendering restarts on the frame.
Parallel Samples
This controls how many samples we calculate in parallel. If users set it to a small value, OctaneRender will require less memory to
store the samples state, but may render a bit slower. If this is set to a high value, more graphics memory is needed and rendering
becomes faster. The change in performance depends on the scene, the GPU architecture and the number of shader processors
the GPU has.
Maximum Tile Samples
This controls the number of samples per pixel that Octane will render until it takes the result and stores it in the film buffer. A higher
number means that results arrive less often at the film buffer, but reduce the CPU overhead during rendering and as a con-
Minimize Net Traffic
If enabled, distributes only the same tile to the net render slaves, until the max samples/pixel has been reached for that tile and
only then the next tile is distributed to slaves. Work done by local GPUs is not affected by this option. This way a slave can merge all
its results into the same cached tile until the master switches to a different tile. Of course, you should set the maximum
samples/pixel to something reasonable or the network rendering will focus on the first tile for a very long time.
PMC
PMC is a custom mutating unbiased kernel written for GPUs. It allows for complex caustics and lighting to be resolved.
Maximum Samples
pixel, the cleaner the render. ,
Diffuse1 Depth
Specifies the depth of the diffuse where depth is the maximum number of times the ray can bounce/reflect/refract in a surface.
Higher amounts also mean higher render times but more realistic results. The default value is 8. For outdoor renders a good setting
is around 4 maximum depth. For lighting interior with natural light (the sun and the sky) you will need settings such as 8 or higher.
While high values are possible, in reality rays will not usually go beyond 16 ray depth.
Specular 2 Depth
The maximum depth upon which rays passing through specular objects are traced. This may be used to prevent transparent
objects to cause a dark outline in scenes.
Ray Epsilon: See this topic.
Filter Size
Please refer to previous information.
glass and water.

Alpha Shadows
If alpha maps are used in the scene, this setting controls whether the shadows will be calculated from the mesh geometry or from
the alpha map.
Caustic Blur
This is used to approximate caustics on rough surfaces and increase or decrease the sharpness of caustic noise. A zero value
provides the sharpest caustics and increasing this value increases the bluring effect to make caustics appear softer.
GI clamp
It clamps the contribution for each path to the specified value. By reducing the “GI clamp” value, you can reduce the amount of fire-
flies caused by sparse but very strongly contributing paths, i.e. it reduces noise by removing energy. “Caustic blur”, on the other
hand, reduces noise by blurring caustics, but conserves energy.
Alpha Channel
Keep Environment
Path Termination Power
This parameter provides a system where users can tweak samples/second vs. convergence (how fast noise vanishes). Increasing
this value will cause the kernels to keep paths shorter and spend less time on dark areas (which means they stay noisy longer) but
may increase samples/second. Reducing this value will cause kernels to trace longer paths in average and spend more time on dark
areas. In short, high values increases the render speed but may lead to higher noise in dark areas.
Exploration Strength
This specifies how long the kernel investigates good paths before it tries to find a new path. L ow values can create a noisy image
while larger values can create a splotchy image.
Direct Light Importance
The direct light importance makes the kernel focus more on paths with indirect light. For example, imagine sunlight through a win-
dow that creates a bright spot on the floor. If the direct light importance is 1, the kernel would sample this area a lot, although it
becomes clean very quickly. If the direct light importance is reduced, the kernel reduces its efforts to sample that area and focuses
more on more tricky areas that are harded to render.
Max Rejects
This can control the “bias” of the render. By reducing the value, the result will be more biased, but the render time will be shorter.
Parallelism
This is used to reduce the number of samples that are investigated in parallel to make caustics appear earlier at the expense of
some performance.
Work Chunk Size
The number of work blocks (of 512K samples each) done per kernel run. Increasing this value also increases the memory require-
ment on the system, but does not affect memory usage and may increase render speed.
Info Channels
The Info channels kernel creates false-color images of the scene, containing various types of information about the scene. In
scenes where the environment is visible you should enable the alpha channel.
The following settings are available:
Geometric normals

The vectors perpendicular to the triangle faces of the mesh.
Interpolated Vertex Normals
Similar to shading normals preset but also strictly 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 normals
The interpolated normals used for shading. This does not take into account the bump map of the object. For objects without
smoothing this is identical to the geometric normals.
Position
The position of the first intersection point.
Z-depth
The distance between the intersection point and the camera, measured parallel to the view vector.
Material1 ID
Every material pin is represented as a separate color.
Texture Coordinates
Tangent Vector
Shows the UV coordinates for the surface (this is only useful for export script writers).
Wireframe
Shows the mesh as represented by edges, vertices and surfaces
UV max
Gives the maximum value that can be shown for the texture coordinates.
UV Coordinate Selection
Determines which set of UV coordinates to use.
Distributed ray tracing
Option to show distributed ray tracing, i.e. if enabled, motion blur and DOF2 are sampled. This enabled by default.
Bump and Normal Mapping
Option to show or not show the bump and normal map.
Wireframe Backface Highlighting
Option to highlight backface in wireframe channel.
Maximum 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


In Live Viewer window, info channel output is scaled and tonemapped to get the values approximately between 0 and 1. All tone
mapping settings except for min_display samples and gamma are ignored. Exposure is enabled for Z-depth, and will indicate the
value which gets mapped to white. It’s possible to get same output by render passes when tonemapping is enables.
For display, these values are scaled to get values approximately between 0 and 1. All tone mapping settings except for min_dis-
play_samples and gamma are ignored. Exposure is enabled for Z-depth, and will indicate the value which gets mapped to white. To
save these channels you should use untonemapped EXR1.
Maximum Samples
pixel, the cleaner the render. There is no rule as to how many samples per pixel are required for a good render.
Filter Size
This sets the pixel size for filter for the render. This can improve aliasing artifacts in the render. If the filter is set too high, the image
can become blurry.
Maximum Z-Depth2
Gives the maximum z-depth that can be shown.
Alpha Channel
Ray Epsilon
The ray epsilon is the distance to offset new rays so they don’t intersect with the originating geometry. This value should be left as
the default.
Camera Imager Settings

It’s accessible from Settings/CameraImager or Octane Camera tag/Camera Imager section. Settings/CameraImager is always act-
ive without having an active camera with enabled CameraImager from within camera tag.

2A grey scale image map that stores depth coordinates of all objects in a three dimensional scene. The lighter the objects are, the fur-
ther they are from the camera. This image map provides a perception of depth and is used as a means to adjust the camera focus or
the depth of field during compositing.

Exposure
Controls the exposure of the scene. Smaller values will create a dark scene while higher values will brighten the scene.

Gamma1
This adjusts the gamma of the render and controls the overall brightness of an image. Images which are not properly corrected can
look either bleached out, or too dark. Varying the amount of gamma correction changes not only the brightness, but also the ratios
of red to green to blue.
Highlight Compression
This reduces burned out highlights by compressing them and reducing their contrast.
Response
The use of measured camera response curves can be selected.
Neutral response
If enabled, the camera response curve does not tint the render result anymore. If you look at the following example: The left image
is the material ball rendered with no response curve and gamma set to 2.2. The center image uses the Agfacolor HDC 200 curve
and a gamma of 1. The right image shows the same curve with “neutral response” enabled.
Vignetting
Adjusting this parameter increases the amount of darkening in the corners of the render. Used sparingly, it can greatly increase the
realism of the render.
Saturation: Adjusts the amount of color saturation of the render
Hot Pixel Removal
The Hot Pixel Removal slider is used to remove the bright pixels (fireflies) during the rendering process. While many of the pixels can
dissappear if the render is allowed to progress, the Hot Pixel Removal feature allows the bright pixels to be removed at a much
lower Sample per Pixel.
Gamma2 Before Response
1The most powerful electromagnetic radiation produced by intensely hot objects in the universe. The rays classified under gamma
have a very small wavelength but are the strongest thus, producing a very high energy form of light. In 3D rendering, gamma refers
to the function or attribute used to code or decode luminance for common displays. The computer graphics industry has set a stand-
ard gamma setting of 2.2 making it the most common default for 3D modelling and rendering applications.

If enabled, gamma will be applied before the camera response. This is technically incorrect, however, this behaviour is provided as
an option to be able to render older scenes saved with previous versions of Octane without changing colors. The default (and cor-
rect) behaviour is to apply gamma last by disabling this option.
Pre-multiplied Alpha
Checking the Pre-multiplied Alpha button multiplies any transparency value of the output pixel by the pixels color.
Min Display Samples
This is minimum amount of samples that is calculated before the image is displayed. This feature can significantly reduce the noise
when navigating and is useful for real-time walkthroughs. When using multiple GPUs, it’s recommended to set this value as a mul-
tiple of the number of available GPUs for rendering, e.g. if you’re rendering with 4 GPUs, set this value at 4 or 8.
Dithering
Adds random noise which removes banding in very clean images.
Saturate To White
When the sun is too bright, it can create multicolored reflections. Increasing this value will change the colors to white. This is also
applicable to all sources of light. Fully saturated parts of the render can be pushed towards pure white with this option. This helps
avoid large patches of fully saturated colors caused by over-bright light sources such as very bright colored emitters or reflected
sunlight off colored surfaces.
White Point
This allows users to specify the color used to adjust the tint to produce and simulate the relative temperature cast throughout the
image by different light sources. The white point is white by default, acting as a white balance which helps achieve the most accur-
ate colors possible.


Image rendered without White Balance

Image rendered with White Balance
Maximum Tonemap Interval
Maximum interval between tonemaps in seconds.

Postprocessing
Enable
This is a boolean value used to enable or disable post-processing effects on the resulting render. Post-processing is disabled by
default.
Bloom Power
Controls the size of the glow originating from an emitter, the size of the halo of light originating from the sun and/or concentrated
light on reflective glossy materials to add a bloom effect to the rendered image.
Glare Power
Controls the size of the visible rays originating from an emitter, the size of the glare originating from reflective glossy materials at a
point where concentration of light is at the highest to add a glare effect to the rendered image.
Glare Ray Amount
Controls the number of visible rays radiated or reflected.
Glare Angle
This is used to adjust the direction of the glare relative to the object. A glare angle of -90 and 90 results to one main horizontal
glare, and a glare angle of 0 results to one main vertical glare.
Glare Blur
Controls the sharpness of the glare. Smaller values will result to a crisp linear glare and this is softened as the value is adjusted and
set higher.
Spectral Intensity
Used to adjust the intensity distribution of the rays across a source. This affects the strength or weakness (brightness) of the radi-
ant energy.
Spectral Shift

Used to adjust the displacement of the spectrum as the frequency of light emitted from a source changes affecting the visible spec-
trum relative to the source on the scene. The shift is evident by a color change, similar to the Doppler Effect, as the distance
traveled by the ray from its source increases or decreases.


Other Settings
This is done through the Devices tab. Under this tab, the checkboxes for GPU’s that are not supported are not shown and users can
only enable GPU’s with a supported compute model.
Checkboxes which is on left names of GPU, allows selecting GPUs to use for rendering if more than one GPU is installed.
The Use priority option can throttle down rendering on one or more GPU’s to improve system responsiveness especially when ren-
dering on a GPU used for the display.
Render devices may be selected or deselected at any time. While rendering you can change active GPU devices.
Using an additional card dedicated to the UI and the viewport will ensure faster feedback while working on scenes.
If you don’t have an additional card, we recommend using ‘low priority’ for the video card. If you have additional cards available for

Devices
This is done through the Devices tab. Under this tab, the checkboxes for GPU’s that are not supported are not shown and users can
only enable GPU’s with a supported compute model.
Checkboxes which is on left names of GPU, allows selecting GPUs to use for rendering if more than one GPU is installed.
The Use priority option can throttle down rendering on one or more GPU’s to improve system responsiveness especially when ren-
dering on a GPU used for the display.
Render devices may be selected or deselected at any time. While rendering you can change active GPU devices.
Using an additional card dedicated to the UI and the viewport will ensure faster feedback while working on scenes.
If you don’t have an additional card, we recommend using ‘low priority’ for the video card. If you have additional cards available for
Account
Settings/Account
With new SSO licensing system on V3 this section just has a ‘Sign-off’ button for deactivating the license if necessary. You may
release the used license by this button or alternatively from Standalone. Then you can activate and use it on another pc. This oper-

ation is when you are on OFFLINE mode otherwise C4D will deactivate the license on normal termination of software. By the way
please read following words about unexpected cases.
Octane V3 License Web Deactivation
With the release of V3 we have made significant changes to the way OctaneRender and the OctaneRender plugins authenticate
and manage licenses, improving usability and standardizing the authentication system across our product range. However some of
these changes had caused unforeseen issues with licensing, preventing some users from releasing and/or activating their licenses.
While these issues have been fixed in the latest version of Octane (3.01.1), it highlighted the need for an automated license deac-
tivation system similar to the one that is available for V2 licenses.
Note that with V3 every time you close Octane or the host application your license gets released automatically, so there is no need
to deactivate your license explicitly as you had to do before.
However, in some cases this may not have work perhaps because your machine has crashed and not usable, or due to that the
application hasn’t been closed and you don’t have physical (or remote) access to your machine. In these and other cases you can
still release your license using the fail-safe web deactivation which is enabled for V3 licenses.
The V3 web deactivation system allows a limited number of license ‘Unlocks’ over a given period, the exact number of available
Unlocks and how often they are replenished is still being evaluated so the number available may change at a later date. If you run
out of Unlocks, you will need to contact us at help@otoy.com to request that we unlock your license.
C4D Shaders
An experimental feature which convert C4D native shaders to textures. If it’s activated, Octane Render plugin use unsupported
shaders as rendered textures. Only uv mapped shaders works. Plugin try to convert Cinema 4D textures to images and assigns as
imagetextures. Some shaders cannot supported in this way.
Texture size option is for changing the baked texture resolution. Bigger values takes longer times while material exporting. Octane
materials has an option to set that per materials. It’s under material->common as C4D shaders parameter.
Be aware that multi-core rendering is not safe for layer shaders. May not be for some others. It can cause software crashes.
Miscellaneous Settings
Preview samples: Octane render maxsamples for material previews. Set to lower values for faster material previews.
Preview size: Render size of procedural textures for material previews. This affects appearance of material previews if it has some
procedural textures.

Opengl samples: Octane render maxsamples for opengl material previews
Texture power: This is default xbitmap(c4d standart image) output power factor. 1 is solid(white), 0.9 is transparent for opacity
images
Log output: This gives some outputs for about progress of plugin. It’s usefull for catching some troubles.
Xbitmap gamma: Gamma1 value of Standart texture maps.
Auto backup: This enables Live Viewer autosave feature.
Backup time: Value of backup timer for autobackup.
Use octane for opengl: use octane render preview function for generating opengl textures, otherwise will use software func-
tions
Synchronization on geo. updates: Parameter for specifing of geometry engine access method. This works best with ‘ON’ for
Windows versions. But this might be ‘OFF’ for OSX versions to avoid viewport glitches on multiview mode.
Render stats: Render info line
Gpu stats: Gpu names, compute model, temperature and usage info line.
Texture Stats: This gives used and max texture amounts of gpus. Types are rgb32, rgb64, grey8 and grey16.
Keep stats: Keep statistics on screen after render finished.
Slider type: Changes color and slider types. Possible types are default, C4D like, Cinema4d(native UI of C4D).
Out-of-core
Out-of-core textures allow users to use more textures than would fit in the graphic memory, by keeping them in the host memory.
The data for rendering the scene needs to be sent to the GPU while rendering so some trade off in the rendering speed is expected.
If out-of-core textures are not used, however, the rendering speed is not affected. Note also that OctaneRender’s Out-Of-Core set-
tings is only for textures, not geometry or render buffers.
Note: Renderer can automatically utilize the system RAM for render buffers if it’s necessary.
Out-of-core textures also come with another restriction: They must be stored in non-swappable memory which is limited. So when
the host memory is used up for out-of-core textures, bad things will happen since the system can not make room for other pro-
cesses. Since out-of-core memory is shared between GPUs, users also can not turn devices on or off while using out-of-core tex-
tures.
Users can enable and configure the out-of-core memory system via the application preferences. For net render slaves, users can
specify the out-of-core memory options during the installation of the daemon.
LiveDB Support
The Cinema 4D® plugin has access to the OctaneRender™ online LiveDB: Most materials contains textures with images. Textures
of materials will be saved to the tex directory of the current project.
You can select different categories from tree control. Several materials can be selected at one time.
Selected materials can be inserted with download command. Also you can drag materials and drop to movable objects in Live
viewer.

Octane Camera
Camera Types
ThinLens, Panoramic, Baking camera
Octane plugin can works with standard Cinema 4D cameras.
Octane Camera Tag should be added to a camera as in picture to use the Octane Camera properties,
CREATION:
Live Viewer -> Objects ->Octane Camera
From object popup menu, c4doctane Tags -> Octane CameraTag
Camera focus can be managed in several ways:
1. Auto Focusing (Auto Focus is checked in Thinlens section in Octane Camera Tag), this parameter has priority over 2., 3. and
4. clauses
2. Focal Depth parameter from Thinlens section in Octane Camera Tag, this parameter has priority over 3. and 4. clauses

3. Focus Object from camera properties
4. Focus Distance from camera properties
Activating Depth of field1 effect, it’s done with Aperture value.

Linking the focal point to any object


Thinlens Camera
Aperture
The aperture of the camera in the scene. Choosing a low value will have a wide depth of field1 where everything is in focus. Choos-
ing a high value will create a shallow depth of field2 (DOF3) where objects in the foreground and background will be out of focus.
Focal Depth
The depth of the plane in focus, measured in meters. See previous section for advanced usage.

Auto-Focus
If enabled, the focus will be kept on the closest visible surface at the center of the image, regardless of the aperture, the aperture
edge, and focal depth values.
Perspective Correction
If Up-vector is vertical, enabling this option keeps vertical lines parallel. This is useful for architectural rendering, when you want to
render images of tall buildings from a similar height as the human eye, but keeping the vertical lines parallel
Near Clip Depth
The main purpose was for interior scenes where you want to get a good shot of the whole room but you cannot do so without a very
large FOV1, because you need to keep the camera inside the room. With camera clipping (near plane), you can position the camera
outside the room – lower the FOV2 and increase the clipping plane distance in front of you until the closest walls are clipped out. The
geometry is not altered, only the clipping of the camera, which means that shadows, reflections and refractions are still affected by
the clipped geometry.
Distortion
This adjusts the spherical and cylindrical distortion. The rendered image displays the entire sphere and uses equidistant cylindrical
projection also known as lat-lon projection.
Aperture Edge
This controls aperture edge detection at all points within the aperture.The lower values will give more pronounced edges to out of
focus objects affected by the a shallow depth of field3 (DOF4) such as objects in the foreground and background.
Orthographic
This enables or disables Orthographic Camera mode. When active, all same-length parallel edges display as the same length
regardless of the perspective that should result from the object’s orientation.
Lens Shift
Shift value for camera in film plane. It’s very same as Film Offset X/Y in Cinema 4D camera. Also both parameters work in two ways.
Stereo
This enables whether anaglyphic stereo rendering is active. When active, the render will be able to be viewed with Red / Blue 3D
glasses or side by sides mode.
Left/right Filter
The left and right filter colors are used to adjust the colors used to create the anaglyphic stereo affect in the render.
1The extent of the observable world that is seen at any given moment. In case of optical instruments or sensors it is a solid angle
through which a detector is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation. source: wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view)

Panoramic Camera
Camera Mode
Provide the option to use either a Spherical Camera Lens or a Cylindrical Camera Lens
Field of View1 (fovx)
This sets the x coordinate for horizontal field of view2 of the camera in the scene.
Field of View3 (fovy)
This sets the y coordinate for the vertical field of view4 of the camera in the scene.
Baking Camera
Activating and setting Bake Camera
Camera type=Baking
This camera type enables the texture baking.

Baking group ID
Specifies which baking group should be baked. By default all objects belong to the default baking group number 1. New baking
groups can be arranged making use of object layers or object layer maps similar to the way render layers work.
UV set
Determines which UV set to use for baking.
Revert baking
If checked, the camera directions are flipped. This can be used to use the mesh as a to render the rest of the scene.
Padding
Due to interpolation when mapping a texture to a mesh, sometimes a black edge may appear. This is due to that the texture is
black (there’s no data) beyond the UV mesh. In order to avoid this, a padding can be added around the edges of the baked data.
The padding size is specified in pixels. The default padding size is set to 4 pixels, being 0 the minimum and 16 the maximum size.
Optionally, an edge noise tolerance can be specified, which allows removing hotpixels appearing near the edge UV geometry. Val-
ues close to 1 do not remove any hot pixels while those to 0 will try to remove them all.
Baking position
If a baking position is used, camera rays will be traced from the specified coordinates in world space instead of using the mesh sur-
face as reference but still point towards the same surface point.
This is useful when baking position-dependent artifacts such as the ones produced by glossy or specular materials.
Lighting
OctaneRender™ currently supports Environment Maps / HDRI files, Sun /Sky environments and mesh emitters as lighting options.
Sky Object, Physical Sky, Infinite/Sun/Area lights are supported by Octane Render for Cinema 4D plugin.
Octane Render need a light source to rendering.
Plugin requires a environment light source to illuminate the scene. If there is not any sky or daylight object then it uses a internal
environment texture and take the color from ‘settings/Environment/Env. color’ parameter.
It uses the C4D Sky objects as environment texture. When multiple Sky objects are available the plugin uses first one.
If there’s sky+daylight(direct light) available then only daylight will be used. But selecting the ‘mix sky texture’ option will activate the
mixing of sky and environment texture.
See following pictures about work flow of Octane Sky and Octane Daylight combinations.

No sky or daylight in scene



visible environment enabled


Environment Maps - HDRI Environments

Cinema 4D usage
Sky Object + Octane Environment Tag

Preset Buttons
l Gray: Create a gray setup on Octane Environment Tag
l Hdri: Create a HDRI setup on Octane Environment Tag
PARAMETERS
Texture
The Texture affects the color of the environment. User can link a texture node to set this color from any map, including an HDRI
map.
Power
The power of the entire environment can be adjusted using the Power parameter Rotation: If the environment is not in the correct
rotation, it can be adjusted in real-time by using the Rotation parameter.
Importance Sampling
Enables quicker convergence (noise reduction) for HRDI images by applying importance to certain areas of the HDRI so as to
sample rays that resolve to the important areas more often than unimportant areas. This means the ray tracing is more efficient as
it is not wasting time on rays that do not contribute much to the overall image quality. Due to the added complexity this will reduce
the Ms/sec of rendering, but each Ms will be more effective, therefore resulting in a higher image quality in less time. Importance
sampling is enabled by default.
RotX and RotY
Offset values for Environment texture. This parameter affects the Transform node

Default setup for Hdr images of Texture. So texture must have a transform node. To use a Image Texture Shader that gives more
control over Environment Image. If you have washed image try to change gamma value. Gamma1 1.0 value is generally better for
most hdr textures.
Type
Assignment for primary or visible(second) environment.
Selecting visible environment makes second Daylight or SKY environment objects for backplate/reflection or refraction.
Example for visible environment

Here we have Daylight+mixed SKY on first image, second has Daylight+mixed SKY also additional SKY(HDRI) with visible envir-
onment over previous objects.

Octane Daylight
Octane has a powerful DayLight Environment node to simulate Sky and Sun lights.
User can select how to set the Sun direction, using the geographic data or using the Sun angles.
Standart Directlight, are supported by Octane Render for Cinema 4D plugin.
Cinema 4D usage: Infinite/Sun Light + Octane Daylight Tag
Create: Live Viewer->Create->DayLight

Turbidity: The Turbidity can be used to adjust the sharpness of the sun lights shadows. A low value creates sharp shadows (like on
a sunny day) and a higher value diffuses the shadows similarly to a cloudy day.
Power: The Power slider can be used to adjust the strength of the light. This can affect overall contrast and exposure level of the
image.
North Offset: The North offset slider can be used to adjust the actual north direction of the scene. This is useful for Architecture
Visualization to ensure the direction of the sun is accurateto the scene.
Model (old/new): This specifies which daylight model to be used as the current environment. The old daylight model lights a
scene with basic spectral radiance assuming that the sun is moving over the horizon at a constant distance from the object. The
new daylight model is used to simulate full spectrum daylight providing more sky color variation as the sun moves along and then
bears shorter rays as the sun moves closer to the normal plane.
Sky Color/Sunset Color: These settings are used by the new daylight model to customize the spectral shade of light. This can
affect overall mood expressed by the image.
Sun Size: This allows users to control the sun radius in the daylight environment.
Mix sky texture: Allows to use texture environment and daylight together
Type
Assignment for primary or visible(second) environment.
Selecting visible environment makes second Daylight or SKY environment objects for backplate/reflection or refraction.

Environment Medium
This is new option comes within Environment or Daylight tag. It allow to create environmental medium to produce fog effect.
Medium
This allows users to create an environment medium. This is analogous to a volume geometry that encloses the whole scene and cre-
ating a bubble with inward-pointing normals around the camera such that camera rays properly enter the volume. If specified, the
medium will be applied to a “virtual” sphere around the camera.
Medium Radius
If a medium (either absorption or scattering) is specified, this controls the radius of the “virtual” sphere created around the camera
when the medium is applied


Octane Light
Standart Area lights are supported by Octane Render for Cinema 4D plugin.
Octane Light Tag is designed for giving Octane emission texture features to Area lights.
Each tag generates a special material with emission and assing to light geometry.
It allows real time light transforms, geometry and properties editing.
Result of updates immediately affects active render data.
There is two emission types as Black body and Texture emission.

Also IES1 lighting effect can be obtain with assignment of IES2 data to Distribution slot.
A sample for Area light and Octane Light Tag
Octane Light Tag
Parameters
Enable
Activates tag
Type
Switch for black body or texture emissions
Temperature
The temperature (in K) of the light emission.
Normalize
(for black body emitters) is used to keep the luminance of the emitted light from a black body constant if the temperature varies,
instead of making it brighter if the temperature increases.
Use Light Color
This enables output color sync to light color. It’s use full to produce animated colors with mograph effectors
1The moniker for the aesthetic lighting of enclosed areas and/or open spaces to invoke an atmosphere, focus, mood or tone by har-
nessing and enhancing the effects of the illumination from various light sources. As lighting was scientifically studied and standards
were set by the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America founded in 1906, the term IES evolved to broadly include the rep-
resentation and profiles of artificial lighting in 3D graphics and visualization. In computer graphics, an IES light is the lighting inform-
ation representing the real-world lighting values for specific light fixtures. For more information, visit http://www.ies.org/lighting/.

Power
This is the wattage of the light source. Each light in the scene should be set to its real world wattage. For
example, a desk lamp could be set to 25 watts, a ceiling lamp to 100 watts, and an LED light to 0.25 watts. This setting should not be
used to balance the lighting power of the scene.
Distribution
The distribution controls the pattern of the light. This can be set to a float texture and an image or IES1 file can be loaded.
Efficiency or Texture
This setting is used to set the efficiency of the light source. No light is 100% efficient at delivering the power at the specified wattage
(a 100 watt light bulb does not actually deliver 100 watts of light.) The efficiency setting can be used to enter the real world values.
These values can be used to create very realistic light settings. For example, a standard 100 watt incandescent bulb would only be
approximately 2.0% efficient where as a 25 watt compact fluorescent light will be 10% efficient. These will both produce around the
same quantity of light in real life.
A sample for Area light and Octane Light Tag
Light source sampling rates
in earlier versions of Octane Render™ light sources were sampled according to area. In some scenes this will lead to a poor balance
between light sources. In a room with a big TV (which emits some light) and a couple of small bright spotlights, the TV would have
been sampled most of the time, leading to a lot of noise in the light from the spotlights. Emission nodes have a parameter called
sampling_rate, to control how much weight is given to the emitter when picking an emitter to sample. This allows you to choose
which light sources will receive more samples. In the above example you can increase the rate for the spotlights, so they get
sampled adequately.
Producing IES Lighting Effect
Producing IES2 Lighting effect
Shortcut: Live Viewer->Objects->Octane Ieslight
It creates premade setup with ies file in distribution, texture projection is setted to spherical with rotX=90 degree.
Transform node in ies image allows to scale ies effect. Make sure projection is setted Object Coordinates


Projection Lighting Effect
Projection Lighting effect
Efficiency or Texture – this parameter can produce the effect with a image texture.

Mesh Emitters
Mesh Emitters allow an object to be used as a light source. This can be used with both Texture and Sun / Sky lighting systems. In
order to use a mesh as a light source, it needs to be changed to a
Diffuse material1 type. The Emission parameter has two different options: Black body and texture emissions.
Using Portals
SeePortal Material.
Materials
Octane Render has five main material types. Mix, Diffuse2, Glossy3, Specular 4 and Portal. In Cinema 4D plugin has Mix, Octane
Material5 and Portal material. Diffuse6, Glossy7 and Specular 8 types are integrated to
Octane Material9 to giving more flexibility and faster usage. It’s possible to switch between these three types by a ‘Type’ para-
meter. So material type easily can be changed without loosing the parameters.
1Used for dull, non-reflecting materials or mesh emitters.

plastics or metals.
glass and water.
plastics or metals.
glass and water.

l Diffuse1 – Used for dull, non-reflecting materials or mesh emitters
l Glossy2 – Used for shiny materials such as plastics or metals
l Specular 3 -Used for transparent materials such as glass and water
plastics or metals.
glass and water.

l Mix – Used to mix any two material types
l Portal – Used to designate openings in scenes to allow the render kernel to better sample light from those area
Diffuse Material
Diffuse1 (diffuse)
The value gives the material its color.
Bump / Normal
Both the Bump and Normal channels can load images to control the amount of bump mapping and normal mapping. The Bump chan-
nel should be set to float image to load a bump map. The Normal channel should be set to the image data type to load a full color nor-
mal map.
Opacity
Opacity sets the transparency of the material. Set the data type to alpha image(if the image has an alpha channel) or float image
(for black/white images) to load an image to set the transparency (use the Invert checkbox if necessary to adjust whether black or
white regions are considered transparent.
Bump / Normal

Both the Bump and Normal channels can load images to control the amount of bump mapping and normal mapping (respectively.)
The Bump channel should be set to float image to load a bump map. The Normal channel should be set to the image data type to
load a full color normal map.
Normal Smoothing
Normal Smoothing is a Boolean value that sets whether to smooth the normals of all meshes sharing that material. When off, the
materials can be faceted and polygonal.
Emission
The Emission setting controls whether the material acts as a light source.
Matte
This is a boolean value to enable or disable a matte mask of a diffuse material.
For applying absorption, Sub Surface Scattering and emission on
Diffuse1 Material2, refer to Chapter 5 Section 5.9.



Glossy Material
Diffuse1 (diffuse)
The value gives the material its color.
Specularity (specular)
The value determines the amount of specularity on the mesh.
Roughness (roughness)
The roughness determines the amount of reflection that will be present. A low roughness value will create blurry reflections and a
high value will produce a mirror like reflection.
Bump / Normal
Film Width (filmwidth)
This controls the thickness of a optical, thin film on the material. This is useful in creating rainbow or oil slick effects.
Film Index (filmindex)
This controls the Index of Refraction of the thin film.
Opacity (opacity)

Normal Smoothing (smooth)
Index of Refraction (index)
Index of refraction sets the fresnel effect applied on the glossy material. Setting a value smaller than 1.0 will disable the fresnel
effect, so the glossy color will be the color in the glossy input pin, regardless of viewing angle. When selecting a value of 1.0 or big-
ger, the glossy reflection color will be modulated according to the fresnel law: at grazing angles the color will be the color set in the
glossy input pin, at perpendicular angles it will be darker. Fresnel reflection produced becomes stronger as the index of refraction is
set higher. If you have a measured index of refraction, set the glossy color to 1.0.
In the following examples, the six balls have roughness 0, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8, 1.0 (left to right) and only the specular value and index of
refraction have been modified for each rendered image:
specular = 1.0
index = 2.0
(strong Fresnel reflection)
specular = 0.3
index = 3.0
(very strong Fresnel reflection)

specular = 1.0
index = 1.5
(normal Fresnel reflection)
specular = 0.3
index = 0.0
(no Fresnel reflection)
specular = 1.0
index = 0.0
(no Fresnel reflection)

Specular Material
Specular 1(Glass) materials have these parameters to adjust:
glass and water.

Reflection (reflection)
The Reflection value determines the glossiness of the mesh.
Transmission (transmission)
The Transmission value gives the base color to the mesh.
Index of Refraction (index)
The Index represents the Index of Refraction of the material. Standard values of Index of Refraction (IOR) can be readily found via
searching the internet. Glass typically has a value of 1.53 and water 1.33.
Film Width (filmwidth)
This controls the thickness of a optical, thin film on the material. This is useful in creating rainbow or oil slick effects.
Film Index (filmindex)
This controls the Index of Refraction of the thin film.
Bump / Normal
Opacity (opacity)
Normal Smoothing (smooth)
Dispersion Coefficient (dispersion_coefficient_B)
The dispersion in Octane Render™ is based on Cauchy’s equation which has two terms: A which is the index of refraction and B
which is the dispersion coefficient. Increasing the value increases the amount of coloration and dispersion in the object and in
caustics.
Absorption or Scattering Medium (medium)
Absorption Medium
Absorption means that the material slightly absorbs light while passing through. The color resulting from this absorption is depend-
ent on the distance light travels through the material. With increased distance it will get darker, and if the absorption is colored it will
get more saturated.
Scattering Medium
Similar to the absorption medium but with the option to simulate subsurface scattering. The scale parameter multiplies the absorp-
tion texture, allowing a wide range of values to be set more easily. For applying absorption, SubSurface Scattering and emission on
Specular 1 and Glossy2 Materials, refer to Chapter 5 Section 5.9.
glass and water.
plastics or metals.

Fake Shadows
Fake Shadows is a boolean value that sets the architectural glass option for all meshes sharing that material. This setting is off by
default. When enabled, the specular material exhibits the characteristics of Architectural glass with its transparent feature allowing
light to illuminate enclosed spaces or frame an exterior view.

Mix Material
The Material1 Mix option is used to combine two different materials. It accepts any two material nodes and the mix is controlled by
a texture node. In the example below, a white glossy material
is mixed with a red specular material. A checks texture node is used to control the mixing of the two materials.
A simple Material2 Mix Set up from Octane Standalone


Similar setup in Octane Render for Cinema 4D

A mix material1 from Live DB, Nickel Aged_Brass
Portal Material
Using Portals
Portals are a technique to help the render kernel find important light sources. In interior renderings with windows, it is difficult for
the path tracer to find light from the outside environment and optimally render the scene. Portals are planes that are added to the
scene in the host modeling program that are used by Octane Render™ to more efficiently render the scene.
In the image to the right, a room is being prepared with a small, single window. This would be a difficult scene to light with a sun/sky
or HDRI file with no lighting on the interior of the room.
A single plane was placed over the window (orange) with the normal for the plane facing into the room (blue line).
Portal Usage Notes:

When using Portals, all opening must be covered with a portal. It will not work if only one window has a portal over it when all other
windows do not have a portal over them.
The normals on the Portal object MUST be pointed into the scene or the render kernel will not use it properly.
Currently, portals cannot be placed in openings which are not open, eg a window with a portal cannot contain glass at this time. In
some complex scenes and situations, portals might slow down the render, so a bit of experimentation with/without should be done.
Portals only apply to path tracing type kernels, eg path tracing and PMC. (not direct lighting/ambient occlusion)
It is best to try to use the least amount of geometry for portals, eg only a few simple rectangular planes are best, the more geo-
metry your portals contain, the slower the engine might become.
Sometimes it is better to place one large portal over many small windows due to the above. It’s ok to make a portal larger than the
opening, just make sure it closes/covers all opening(s). A portal which is unnecessarily large will end up slowing down the efficiency,
as some of the rays through the covered parts of the portal will not go outside the space.
Portals, when defined with the portal material, will not show up in your render, eg this will be invisible geometry.

C4D Material Stacking

The Plugin has received a support for material stacking feature of Cinema 4D with C4dOctane 3.02 version.This was a really hard
and out of concept integration. So there is some limitations for initial implementation. Check the list for details.
MATERIAL STACKING LIMITATIONS
l Only works with c4d materials and octane materials and will not work with mix materials1 in any combination
l Works on movable meshes. So it requires to be in auto mode for LV or auto detect for PV or object tag in manual mode.
Doesn’t work on “Send all data” method.
l Works with flat/cube/cylindrical/spherical projection types. Tiling is supported. Doesn’t account the current tag’s UVW map-
ping coordinates. It takes it from previous material which has not alpha/opacity.
l Can work with selection assignments. But it’s still limited on complex selection sets
l Go with mix material2 setups for advanced usages.
Emissions
The Blackbody Emission type uses Colour Temperature (in Kelvin) and Power to control the colour and intensity of the light.


Light source sampling rates: in earlier versions of OctaneRender™ light sources were sampled according to area. In some scenes
this will lead to a poor balance between light sources.
In a room with a big TV (which emits some light) and a couple of small bright spotlights, the TV would have been sampled most of
the time, leading to a lot of noise in the light from the

spotlights Emission nodes have a parameter called sampling_rate, to control how much weight is given to the emitter when picking
an emitter to sample. This allows you to choose which
light sources will receive more samples.
Temperature
Power
This is the wattage of the light source. Each light in the scene should be set to its real world wattage. For example, a desk lamp
could be set to 25 watts, a ceiling lamp to 100 watts, and
an LED light to 0.25 watts. This setting should not be used to balance the lighting power of the scene.
(a 100 watt light bulb does not actually deliver 100 watts of light.)
The efficiency setting can be used to enter the real world values. These values can be used to create very realistic light settings. For
example, a standard 100 watt incandescent bulb would only be
Distribution
The distribution controls the pattern of the light. This can be set to a floattexture and an image or IES1 file can be loaded.

Blackbody emission sample
Blackbody Emission
The Black body Emission type uses Colour Temperature (in Kelvin) and Power to control the colour and intensity of the light.

Light source sampling rates: in earlier versions of Octane Render™ light sources were sampled according to area. In some scenes
the time, leading to a lot of noise in the light from the

spotlights Emission nodes have a parameter called sampling_rate, to control how much weight is given to the emitter when picking
an emitter to sample. This allows you to choose which
light sources will receive more samples.
Temperature
Power
This is the wattage of the light source. Each light in the scene should be set to its real world wattage. For example, a desk lamp
could be set to 25 watts, a ceiling lamp to 100 watts, and
an LED light to 0.25 watts. This setting should not be used to balance the lighting power of the scene.
(a 100 watt light bulb does not actually deliver 100 watts of light.)
The efficiency setting can be used to enter the real world values. These values can be used to create very realistic light settings. For
example, a standard 100 watt incandescent bulb would only be
Distribution
The distribution controls the pattern of the light. This can be set to a float texture and an image or IES1 file can be loaded.

Black body emission sample
Texture Emission
This allows any valid texture type to set the light intensity. This can be used to create neat effects such as TV screens by using an
Image Texture as the source.
Light source sampling rates: in earlier versions of Octane Render™ light sources were sampled according to area. In some scenes
the time, leading to a lot of noise in the light from the spotlights Emission nodes have a parameter called sampling_rate, to control
how much weight is given to the emitter when picking an emitter to sample. This allows you to choose which light sources will
receive more samples. In the above example you can increase the rate for the spotlights, so they get sampled adequately. Black
body emission sample The following settings are listed for the Black body emission settings, but many of the settings are shared
with the Texture emission settings. The main difference is whether the colour comes from the Black body temperature or from the
texture settings of the diffuse material.
Temperature: The temperature (in K) of the light emission. Power – This is the wattage of the light source. Each light in the scene
should be set to its real world wattage. For example,
a desk lamp could be set to 25 watts, a ceiling lamp to 100 watts, and an LED light to 0.25 watts. This setting should not be used to
balance the lighting power of the scene.
l Efficiency or Texture: This setting is used to set the efficiency of the light source. No light is 100% efficient at delivering
the power at the specified wattage (a 100 watt light bulb does not actually deliver 100 watts of light.) The efficiency setting
can be used to enter the real world values. These values can be used to create very realistic light settings. For example, a
standard 100 watt incandescent bulb would only be approximately 2.0% efficient where as a 25 watt compact fluorescent

light will be 10% efficient. These will both produce around the same quantity of light in real life.
l Distribution: The distribution controls the pattern of the light. This can be set to a float texture and an image or IES1 file
can be loaded.
Using Medium Nodes

Octane Render™ supports participating media inside objects (absorption, Sub Surface Scattering and emission). These settings
are stored in medium nodes, which are attached to the corresponding input pin of diffuse or specular material nodes.
There are two types of medium nodes, absorption and scattering. Scattering has parameters for absorption and scattering of light
passing through the medium, and emission inside the medium. Absorption is a simple version with only absorption.
Rendering a medium requires the path tracing or PMC kernel, with a sufficiently large maxdepth setting. For media inside diffuse
transmitting materials the direct light kernel with Diffuse2 (4) GI mode can be used as well.
Meshes
Participating media should only be added to meshes that define a closed volume, rather than planes. Using planes to model leaves
of a plant with SSS will for instance not work. Using a single plane as ground plane should be OK (it will be treated as an infinitely
deep material). The mesh can have opaque objects nested inside, but nested participating media are not supported.
How to make a medium node work

A specular material is the easiest: by default it is set up properly. Transmission must be nonzero; for the best effect reflection and
transmission should be set to 1.0.
On diffuse materials subsurface scattering only works after they are set up with diffuse transmission.
To do so, connect a node to the transmission input pin.
The reflection value needs to be set to a sufficiently low value, as only the part of the spectrum that is not reflected can enter the
inside of the object. If the reflection is set to 1.0, all light gets reflected regardless of the transmission value. If set to 0.0, all light
gets transmitted, but this gives an unnatural appearance. Values of 0.1–0.2 are a good starting point.

Also, if the reflection is coloured, the transmitted light will have the complementary color (e.g. if the reflection is set to yellow, the
transmitted light is bluish).

The transmission value works the same as in the previous releases, and is multiplied with the complement of the reflection spec-
trum. This should be set to a high value. If possible, use a diffuse transmitting material.
The Absorption and Scattering Medium node parameters
Absorption is controlled with the absorption texture, which defines how fast light is absorbed while passing through a medium. A set-
ting of 0.0 means no absorption. The higher the value the faster light is absorbed by the medium. This setting is wavelength-
dependent, in the following setup for example it is set to absorb blue light faster than other colors, giving the object a yellow appear-
ance.
The absorption texture is multiplied with the scale parameter. This allows setting a wide range of values more easily.

Subsurface scattering is controlled by the scatter texture (multiplied by the scale value), and the phase function. The scattering tex-
ture defines how fast light gets scattered when traveling through the medium, in a similar way to how absorption is defined. A very
high value means light gets scattered very fast, a value of 0.0 means no scattering.
The phase function controls in what direction light gets scattered. There is currently one kind of phase function defined, with one
parameter, scattering_direction. If set to 0.0, it means light gets scattered the same amount in any direction. A setting larger than

0.0 means forward scattering, the larger the value, the more light is scattered in a similar direction as it was traveling. 1.0 means it
doesn’t change direction. A negative value means backscattering, so more light is scattered back to where it came from.
The following setup uses a wavelength dependent scattering. Blue light is scattered more, so it has more tendency to scatter back
out of the material before it gets absorbed. Yellow-red light is scattered less, so more of it goes straight through the material, giving
shadowed areas the yellow color.
Scattering inside a specular material will introduce a lot of noise. It will work best with smooth illumination.
Finally emission is defined by attaching an emission node to the emission input pin. When connecting an emission node to a medium
node, it defines emission inside the volume instead of at the surface of the object. The power parameter gets a different meaning:

it controls how fast the radiance along a ray increases while traveling through the volume, and not the total power. It is not mul-
tiplied with the scale parameter.
This effect works best with large and not too bright objects, very small bright objects will create a lot of noise.
The following image shows a normal mesh emitter (left) and a volume emission (right). The emitter in the right side has specular
material with an index of refraction of 1.0 (making it invisible without the emission).
The step size parameter allows lowering the average distance between points where Octane samples the absorption, scattering
and emission textures. If these textures are not constant, lowering this parameter may improve the appearance of the material,
but if set too low the ray tracing may terminate before the ray is traced back out of the material.
The priority input is currently not used.
The Environment Medium

The Environment Medium is a means to create a volume geometry which encloses the whole scene, by specifying a medium node in
the daylight and texture environment nodes.
If specified, the medium will be applied to a “virtual” sphere around the camera with the radius “medium radius”.
The Volume Medium

A Volume Medium offers the ability to apply colour ramps independently to each of absorption, scattering and emission. In order to
make use of a ramp, users must have a colour specified for the corresponding channel. For example, to use the absorption ramp,
users must select a colour texture for absorption.
The Volume Medium Parameters

Absorption
This specifies the colour texture for absorption
Absorption Ramp
The absorption color ramp that defines the colors range. The absorption ramp takes as input the grid value. In the colour gradient,
the colours near “0” on the left are used for mapping low grid values to some custom colour (as in this case, the lowest values are
mapped to white). Higher grid values are mapped to colours on the right of the colour gradient. Bear in mind that less saturated col-
ours will cause there to be less pronounced absorption. Emission and scattering ramps operate in the same way.


(Volume colour ramps)
Please note that volume ramps are restricted to static colours for performance reasons (ie. it is not possible to attach a series of
other texture mappings/generators to colours in the ramps).
There is an important consequence of volume animations specifically related to volume ramps: There is a “Max value” on the ramps,
which you must set to a reasonable value. This value is used to scale grid values to between 0 and 1, so that the ramp can map
these back to colours in the colour gradient. This is needed because maximum values in the grids sometimes differ greatly through-
out VDB sequences. If you set a Max value too high or too low, this will still work, but you will only see a subset of the colours in the
gradient that you specify. The maximum values for grids in the current VDB selected are now shown in the volume node’s inspector
pane. A good rule of thumb is to choose a value near to these, but you are free to customise as you like.

The Volume Gradient allow users to control the colour of a volume geometry (eg. Flame) more precisely.
Invert Absorption
This inverts the absorption color so that the absorption channel becomes a transparency channel. This helps visualize the effect of
the specified color since a neutral background shining through the medium will appear approximately in that colour.
Scattering
This is the scattering cross section. This channel defines how much light is absorbed over the color range.
Emission
This sets the volume emission to allow Volumetric Emission Modes. For emission, the Medium node can have either a black body
emission node, or a texture emission node.
When using the blackbody emission node, it is important to ensure that the data used for the emission grid (see import pref-
erences) contains temperatures in Kelvin. It is common to find VDBs that have unitless “temperatures” with arbitrary ranges such
as 0 to 1, or even 0 to 45, as is the case with some sample VDBs from openvdb.org. Typical temperature values range between 0 to
6500, where lower values tend towards longer wavelengths (red colours) and higher values tend towards blue/white. In order to
get realistic results from the blackbody emission for volumes, you must disable Normalize in the emission node. Lower tem-
peratures give off less light than higher temperatures, but when normalized, the radiance emitted by all temperatures are equal.

When using the texture emission node, the input temperature grid is interpreted as emission power, not emission temperature.
This is more linear in that the higher the “temperature” value, the more light will be given off at that point. Once volume gradients
are implemented, you will be able to control the colour (of eg a flame) more precisely.
Emission Ramp
This is the emission colour ramp.
Phase
The phase function also affects a volume as it would affect a medium node, and modifying the scale value of the volume scales the
density values of the volume linearly.

Density
The Absorption and Scattering scale. Similarly to the Medium node, volumes may also have scattering, emission and absorption.
These colours influence the appearance of a volume significantly.
Also bear in mind that it is important to ensure the volume is not too dense. One may be tricked into thinking a volume is less dense
by a higher volume density and a higher volume step length in the kernel. It is recommended that you reduce the volume step
length to an acceptable performance and accuracy level, and then reduce the volume density. Otherwise you may risk rendering a
solid object at a high step length, giving deceiving results sometimes.
Volumes are rendered in an unbiased way, and therefore are able to scatter multiple times, and also cause self-shadowing effects.
Textures
Texture Types
The Texture types allow for creating very flexible materials. There are four main types of Texture Node Types:

Colours and Spectrum: Colour and spectrum textures provide methods of applying a colour to a material.

Generators: Generator textures are used to actually create or modulate other textures. They are grey scale.
Images: Image textures use image files to create the texture.
Mappings: Mappings are Nodes that allow mixing and manipulation of other texture nodes.
Texture Generators and Mappings
Texture Generators are used to create patterns that can be used alone or in combination with the Mapping and Colour textures to
create memory-efficient, procedural textures. Procedural Textures can be used to create textures, bump maps and other
advanced materials with minimal impact to GPU memory. It is therefore advantageous to explore creating materials using these
textures before resorting to image based textures.
The current types of generators include: C
hecks, Dirt, Falloff Map, Marble, Noise, Polygon side, Random Color, Ridged Fractal, Saw
Wave, Sine Wave, Triangle Wave, Turbulence

Colour Textures
Colors can be represented in a couple of ways in Octane Render. Available nodes Float, RGB and gaussian spectrum.
Note: Octane color space is linear by default. So values for Float/RGB spectrum are linear. Plugin display converted colors in RGB
color swatch and color picker accordingly to scene color profile.
Float: The texture is based on float value.
RGB spectrum: The texture is based on the RGB colour that is selected.
Gaussian Spectrum: The texture is based on a Gaussian distribution spectrum. The wavelength is used to set the center of the
spectrum and the width
is used to set how wide the curve is. The narrower the width, the more pure and saturated the colour.

Image Textures
Grey scale Image — This is a float image which is interpreted as gray scale even if it is a full colour image, thus saving GPU ram.
The Invert checkbox can be used to invert the image (useful for bump and opacity maps.)
RGB Image — A colour image texture is used for the parameter. The image is interpreted as being full colour even if it is a grey
scale image, and therefore taking up more GPU memory.
Alpha Image — An alpha image utilizes the images native Alpha Channel to provide transparency. This type will only accept PNG
and TIF image types.
Image Texture node
In order to properly utilize Image Textures, the mesh must be UV mapped prior to export from the modeling software.
Power: A kind of output multiplier for texture output. Any texture can be assigned to this parameter

Gamma1: Controls the Gamma2 of the image file
Invert: Inverts color ouput values of image Border mode
Type: parameter has Normal(colored), Float and Alpha options. It defines image type.
l Float Image: The image is interpreted as gray scale even if it is a full colour image, thus saving GPU ram. The Invert check-
box can be used to invert the image (useful for bump and opacity maps.)
l Normal: An image texture is used for the parameter (mesh must be UV mapped prior to export to properly use the Image
type). The image is interpreted as being full colour even if it is a grey scale image, and therefore taking up more GPU
memory.
l Alpha Image: An alpha image utilizes the images native Alpha Channel to provide transparency. This type will only accept
PNG and TIF image types.
Transform: It creates a transform node connection for image texture
Projection: This creates a projection node for image texture
For additional info please refer to Transform and Projection sections
Image sequence for Image Texture
Image texture supports image sequences. Beginning and end ranges must be setted properly in Animation tab of image texture.
Also standard bitmap type is working as image texture for image sequences.
When to use Float image versus Image Data Type?
There are some parameters where full color data is not used (or useful). If a full color image is loaded, it can take much more
memory in the GPU than a gray scale image, even though the user only really wants the grey scale data. Since memory man-
agement is very critical for GPU rendering, the Float image type allows a user to load a full color texture but it will be interpreted as a

grey scale image and therefore use less video ram. If the full color data is needed then use the Image data type (normal maps, dif-
fuse maps)
Generators Nodes
Texture Generators are used to create patterns that can be used alone or in combination with the Mapping and Color textures to
create memory-efficient, procedural textures. Procedural Textures can be used to create textures, bump maps and other
advanced materials with minimal impact to GPU memory. It is therefore advantageous to explore creating materials using these
textures before resorting to image based textures.
Check
Check procedural texture is useful for making stripes, checkerboard and grid patterns. It is controlled by a
float3 value. It is most useful when mixed with other textures.


Sine Wave, Saw Wave and Triangle Wave

These textures can be used to create various banding effects.

Turbulence
The Turbulence texture can be used to create many different effects based on banded noise. This flexible texture can be used to
create wood, marble, flesh, and many other useful textures.

Marble
The Marble texture is a procedural texture that can be used to create marble-like noise. It is similar to a
turbulence texture but more fine-tuned to create marble-like patterns.

Ridged Fractal
Noise
Types: Perlin, turbulence, circular, chips
Mapping Nodes
Clamp
The Clamp Texture requires a texture input and then allows for the texture to be “clamped” with the minimum and maximum slider.

Invert
Inverts the output of connected textures


Mix / Cosine Mix
Combining a Checks Texture with a Gaussian Spectrum by using a Cosine Mix Texture which is set to a Diffuse1 Channel of a
Diffuse2 Material3

The resulting material

The Mix textures are used for mixing two textures together (either linearly or according to a cosine wave). In the example below, a
Checks Mix was combined with a Gaussian Spectrum using a Cosine Mix Texture and connected to the Diffuse1 channel of a Dif-
fuse material2.
Falloff Map
Falloff Texture Map
The fall off map is a texture node typically used to control the blend of two materials depending on the viewing angle of the materials
geometry.
2Used for dull, non-reflecting materials or mesh emitters.

The angle between the ray and the shading normal is mapped from [0°, 90°] to [0 ,1]. For values larger than 1.0 it then does a
gamma correction using the skew factor as exponent. The resulting value is used to interpolate between the two input values
(called Normal and Grazing).
A sample usage for falloff map
Normal
This is the value/lightness (0 to 1) of the map at straight on viewing angles. When used as an input to a mix material1 node, the
normal is the spectral shade value between material 0 and material 1.
Grazing
This is the value/lightness (0 to 1) of the map at grazing angles. When used as an input to a mix material2 node, the grazing is the
spectral shade value between material 0 and material 1.
Falloff Skew Factor


The relative amount of the two values (normal and grazing) that are at an angle to the straight on view. 0.1 will lead to almost com-
plete coverage by the grazing value regardless of viewing angle, where as 15 will lead to complete coverage by the normal value.
The index value on glossy and specular nodes corresponds to a real world IOR (Index of Refraction) value on dielectric materials,
like plastic and glass (metals are not supported yet).
The falloff node works differently, it has a falloff skew factor:
If set to 1 then the value is proportional to the angle between the normal and the camera ray, i.e. if it is viewed from 45° then the
value is 0.5.
If larger than 1, then it applies a power curve to the angle.
If smaller than 1, then it inverts the skew factor, and mirrors the power curve.
Users can approximate the behavior of glass with skew factor of 8.0 and a normal value of 0.034.
The fall off map can also be used for other things, like the input to the opacity of glass. Falloff is useful for car shaders (at 90 degrees
it should have the desired color and in less somewhat darker, but at the same time a bit more reflective), water shaders (tends to
be more reflective to low angles of incidence), fabrics like velvet (tend to become almost white at low angles). It is also useful for
some metals to simulate some coating effects.
Dirt Texture Map
The dirt map is a texture node is typically used to control the appearance of dirt, dust particles, or worn out effects overlaid on a
material.
Strength
This is the value/lightness (0.1 to 10) of the overlaying material spread across the map.
Details

This is the density (1 to 100) of the overlaying material at certain angles as tiny specs of it are closely distributed across the con-
strained areas along the surface of the normal.
Radius
The relative size of the map set against the surface directly visible to the viewer. 100 will lead to almost complete coverage by the
overlaying material.
Tolerance
This setting can be used to avoid black edges on roughly tesselated meshes.
Invert Normal
An added option to invert the normal and overlaying material.
Following image illustrates a usage of dirt node with mix material+two octane materials.
Gradient Map
Gradient is a mapper for color/textures. Distributes connected color/textures over a input texture.
Has a gradient gui control to set position and color of knots.
Mode parameter to switch between simple or complex modes.
Simple: This mode generates colors.
Complex: This mode allow to generate colors or connect some textures to values. Input position will be read from knots of gradi-
ent gui control.

Displacement
Displacement mapping is a technique applied to textures in order to provide two dimensional objects some depth in a three-dimen-
sional space. As opposed to bump and normal mapping, Displacement mapping does not only provide the illusion of depth but it
effectively displaces the actual geometric position of points over the textured surface.
Displacement mapping is a technique applied to textures in order to provide two dimensional objects some depth in a three-dimen-
sional space. As opposed to bump and normal mapping, Displacement mapping does not only provide the illusion of depth but it
effectively displaces the actual geometric position of points over the textured surface.
Best results are produced by float(32bit) images and high values of displacement and image sizes.

Limitations:
It support only image texture. Any other procedural Octane texture will not work. But it’s possible to use most C4D textures in dis-
placement because of render to texture feature of plugin. Simply converts any C4D shader to images and uses as image. This
method can work as 2d rather than 3d mapping. You can tweak generated image sizes by Settings->C4D Shaders->Render Size or
Octane material’s C4D Shader Render Size parameters.
Octane Render interprets displacement maps such that black means there is 0 displacement.
Also note that calculating displacement geometry places additional load to the GPU and very high or extremely low displacement val-
ues (“Height”) may cause issues and GPU errors. Displacement mapping is practically used for emphasis of details inherent in the
textural aspects of the scene rather than major features that should otherwise be provided by the geometry (e.g. rugged terrains,
large crevices).
Currently, displacement cannot be used together with a normal map on the same material as this would result in rendering arte-
facts on that material.
But there is some work-around to do. You can use mix material+any materials with bump/normal map and use displacement slot of
mix material1.


Texture Transform
This node allows to transform any kind of Octane Texture seperately.
Type changes the transform type.
Rx,Ry,Rz: Rotate
Sx,Sy,Sz: Scale
Tx,Ty,Tz: Translate
Texture Projection
Projection Types

Mesh UV
Use the mesh UV coordinates. Nothing changed here.
For environment textures and IES1 Light distributions this will apply a spherical mapping, but for more control over the projection
(mainly rotation) you may switch to a spherical projection node in these cases.
XYZ to UVW
also known as: Planar, Flat mapping
Just take the coordinates in world or object space and use them as UVW coordinates. For images only the X and Y coordinates are
relevant, which are mapped to U and V. In other words the images use flat mapping projected along the Z axis.
In 1.30 the projection will map image textures to the (-1, -1)–(1, 1) range. So rotating the mapping around the Z axis will rotate the
image around the center, as the UVW rotation would do.

Box
also known as: Cube mapping (although some applications may have a different mapping called Cube mapping)
This is an extension of XYZ to UVW mapping, it will pick a different projection axis depending on the normal. This gives a quick way to
map a texture on any object without too much distortion, but possibly with a lot of seams. The same change in mapping applies
here: image textures are mapped to the (-1, -1)–(1, 1) range.
Spherical

Perform latitude-longitude mapping for the U and V coordinates, and for procedural textures the W coordinate is the distance from
the origin. This is mostly used for environment textures and IES1 Light distributions. Nothing changed here.
Cylindrical
This performs cylindrical mapping: the U coordinate is the longitude, the Y coordinate is the world space Y coordinate. For images
the mapping on the Y axis has changed to map the image to the [-1, 1] interval. For procedural textures the W coordinate is the dis-
tance from the Y axis. For points on the ground plane (Y = 0) cylindrical and spherical mapping now map to the same points on the
images (what would be the equator on spherical mapping).
Perspective

This mapping takes the world space coordinates, and divides the X and Y coordinates by the Z coordinate. This can be useful if you
want to model a projector (you use a texture with this projection as the distribution, with black border mode). It can also be used
for camera mapping.
The same change as the other projections applies here: the image is mapped to (-1, -1)–(1, 1), so by default you don’t need any off-
set to use this mapping for projectors or camera mapping.
NOTE:
Box, Spherical, Cylindrical, Perspective types require to use Octane Object Tag on objects, if you use OBJECT TRANSFORM SPACE.
Because in animation rendering, Octane requires some Object Transform node which is connected. Only Octane Object Tag gen-
erates this node .

Animation Rendering
Setting up the Octane Render for Animation Output
Select Octane Renderer from Renderer Control as shown in below picture

Geometry Engine:
Send All Scene Data: This most reliable and slowest render data sending method. Reset all data and completely send scene on
each frames. Preparation times of frames should identical on each frame. At he moment t his option doesn’t support particle engine
and v olume objects.
Resend Only Updated Objects: This faster method for animation rendering. First frame, all scene data will be sent to Octane
Render. Next frames, only updated parts of scene will be refreshed. For this method, user have to set which part of objects is mov-
able. Octane ObjectTag is designed for this and more. Please look to usage of the tag.
Geometry Control Parameters(Valid for “Resend Only Updated Objects” option)
Manual: Works as before. Requires to specify the animated, emissive, etc.. objects with Octane Object Tag by hand.
Auto Detect: Makes some pre-calculation(limited to 60 sec.) before animation rendering. Try to find/assign the movable, emissive,
etc.. objects for you. In this option, no need to use object tags as manual method. If it can’t finish the evaluating the scene in time,
all objects will be assumed as movable.
All Objects Movable: This works as LV’s “Auto” parameter for geometries. Be aware of limits of “Auto” method. It may cause
crash after 10-15k movable objects. So better to use manual or auto detect for heavy scenes.
Check Materials Every Frame
Plugin checks or not the materials and refresh for each frame. Option is effective for method2. Please try with scenes which has not
animated materials.
Check Meshes Every Frame
Option is effective for method2 and on object groups which have OctaneObject
Render Buffer
8 bit: Colors are converted 8 bit RGBA channels
Float tonemapped: Colors are direct output of Octane Render and applied tonemapping. This works well with 16/32 bit images
(tiff,exr,etc..)

Float linear: Colors are direct raw output of Octane Render without tonemapping. This works well with 16/32 bit images
(tiff,exr,etc..)
Use all gpus: Activates all GPU’s for rendering
Time Limit: It’s maximum time(second) for rendering for each frames
Overwrite Kernel Settings
This section has all kernel settings to use and change during render output. Parameters has animation support. To change the any
parameter for different frames is possible. This allow to change set maxsamples or kernel type or any parameter for different
frames.
Workflow of Export Structure
See below image about differences of render methods.

Motion Blur
Motion Blur(Octane)
Octane Render 3.0 has motion blur effect for camera, object transform and object deformations.

Limitations: Vextex motion blur should work on only objects which has constant amount vertices.
Main control is on Octane camera tag. Motion blur section has shutter time, time shift and alignment parameters. You can
enable/disable the motion blur effect from enable control.
Motion blur for objects, can be activated by Octane object tag. As you know this tag allow to define movable objects. It defines each
object will be exported indivual meshes and will have a transform and visibility node. Now, we obtain the motion blur of objects by
this tag. Vertex motion blur is a switch on tag. This activates deformation caches.
Live Viewer and Picture Viewer support motion blur.
Below image shows the required settings for object motion blur.
Live Viewer also has support for realtime motion blur. It’s little tricky. That needs some caching of matrices and vertices to can pro-
duce the effect. So you should play or scrub the timeline toward to next frames.
Interactive motion blur menu has some switches.These are only for Live Viewer and not affect the Picture Viewer renderings.
REQUIRED RENDER SETTINGS FOR PRODUCING MOTİON BLUR

Motion blur:
This control changes the required settings to default for producing the motion blur effect.
Time sampling per frames
Default value is 1. This control a parameter. It produces sub keyframes for objects. Value 4 means that will export 4 keyframes
between two frames. It can be required for some objects which are rotation very fast. This option work for Picture Viewer not on
Live Viewer.
Sub-Frame Motion Blur
We have other option to generate some motion blurred images.
It can produce these images with Sub-Frame Motion Blur effect. It can be found from effects of Picture Viewer.
Camera shutter speed affects the duration of frames. Count of passes affects the output quality.
For lower render times, there is a nice trick. That is to make animated objects making movable geometry by OctaneObjectTag. And
set animation method to partial updates from Octane Renderer settings.
shutter speed=1/30s

passes 36
shutter speed=1/125s
passes 36
Render Passes
Octane Render™’s Render Passes allow users to segregate the different aspects of the scene, respectively rendering each aspect
across multiple images. This is particularly useful in fine-tuning projects, compositing, and creating remarkably detailed and photo-
realistic images. The passes are classified as either of the following:
l Beauty pass
l Post-Processing pass
l Render Layer pass
l Lighting pass
l Info pass
Activating the render passes
Make on the Enable check box and select any passes. Select any file format and a saving location. Also it’s possible to use Cinema 4D
multi-pass saving section. But it’s not recommend without required.

Note that:
Default options are optimised for 32bit linear output. Be sure that render buffer and passes are float(linear) for getting correct res-
ults when you combine output images.
When passes are activated you’ll see selection buttons in Live Viewer as in below image

Video tutorial for Beauty Passes

Beauty Passes
The beauty passes provide a rendered view of the different aspects lighting the scene, such as shadows, highlights, reflections, illu-
mination and color. Beauty passes are rendered together with the main beauty pass (the normal rendering). I.e. each one of these
requires its own film buffer that needs to be stored additionally to the main film buffer on the device.
Beauty Passes:
l Raw1
l Emitters
l Environment – this contains the environment over the whole image instead of only the area that is not hidden by fore-
ground objects.
l Diffuse2
l Diffuse3 Direct
1In HDR imaging, this refers to minimally processed HDR image formats. Raw files can have 12 or 14 bits per color channel,
although the available dynamic range might be cut down due to noise.

l Diffuse1 Indirect
l Reflection
l Reflection Direct
l Reflection Indirect
l Reflection Filter
l Refraction
l Refraction Filter
l Transmission
l Transmission Filter
Subsurface Scattering
Filter passes and raw rendering allow more control over the final look in post-production. Filter passes capture the BxDF color of the
material on the first bounce and are available for diffuse reflection, diffuse transmission, specular reflection and specular refraction.
While Raw2 passes are passes where the filter color is divided out of the matching render pass. Dividing out the color is done during
tone-mapping, toggling raw passes doesn’t restart the render. Because a division is being done, it does not work well for saturated
or almost saturated colors (i.e. one of the RGB components is zero or near zero). All this functionality is controlled via the render
passes node:
These passes can be composed together by multiplying the raw pass with it’s matching filter pass:
diffuse = diffuse_filter * diffuse_raw
reflection = reflection_filter * reflection_raw
refraction = refraction_filter * refraction_raw
transmission = transmission_filter * transmission_raw
Below picture shows what a sample composition looks like in Nuke. To get good result, make sure that all images are saved in HDR3
and linear color space (i.e. gamma is 1 and linear camera response). This is an example Octane project with the rendered multi-
pass EXR4 and an example Nuke project:
2In HDR imaging, this refers to minimally processed HDR image formats. Raw files can have 12 or 14 bits per color channel,
although the available dynamic range might be cut down due to noise.
3An image which presents more than 8 bit per color channel unlike most common image formats.

To obtain same look in AE compositing with beauty passes
Please see below table and images. Consider that response curve makes changes on final look.

Material Passes
l Opacity
l Roughness
l Index of Refraction
l Diffuse1 Filter
l Reflection Filter
l Refraction Filter
l Transmission Filter
l Opacity
This renders the opacity channel, i.e. the alpha channel of the material. The “opacity threshold” in the info passes node allows users
to define until which alpha value the material is considered opaque. Any alpha above this threshold will render with the set opacity.

So if users want to render the opacity channel, it is advisable to do it on the first bounce and therefor need to make the material fully
opaque ( i.e. set“opacity threshold” to 0).
Post Processing Passes

Post Processing passes provide a view of the post processing effects on the scene. If the post processing node is enabled and a
post-processing effect is applied on the scene, the post processing render pass negates these effects and separates it from the
main pass. Users may also specify whether the environment should be included in the post-processing pass of not.
Render Layer Passes

Render layers allow users to separate their scene geometry into one parts, where one part is meant to be visible and the rest of the
other parts “capture” the side effects of the visible geometry on it. The layers allow different objects to be rendered into separate
images where in turn some normal render passes may be applied.

The Render layers are meant for compositing and not to hide parts of the scene. In the scene, users would either disconnect the
geometry (so it does not render) or use the general visibility in the object layer node. As a consequence, the render layers are suit-
able only when alpha channel is enabled in the render kernel.
To set up a scene for rendering in layers, an Object Layer Map node is used to connect an object node to an object layer node,
where one can assign the layer ID for that object.
With the Layer ID for objects in the scene assigned, users may proceed specifying the active render layer. This can be done through
the Active Render Layer node, which connects the active layer to the Render Target:

The main beauty pass will then only render this active layer and cut out everything else, users can also choose to invert everything
by toggling invert in the render layer node. The real power of the render layer feature is in the shadow and reflection layer passes,
where the “side effects” of the render layer are captured. They allow users to compose the render layer on some background with
shadows and reflections.
1. Paths that hit the truck (active layer) on the first bounce are saved in the Beauty pass
2. Paths that hit the road (non-active layer) on the first bounce and the truck (active layer) on the subsequent bounces go to
the shadows/reflections pass. T
he layers are rendered in passes where:

Shadows: combines black shadows (in the alpha channel) with colored shadows (in the RGB channels) in a single image. The blend
mode is multiply. It captures the same shadows as the matte material with the difference that the matte materials captures all
shadows in the alpha channel and hence doesn’t keep color information.
Black shadows: Captures black shadows, i.e points on the non-active layer geometry where light is fully blocked by objects on the
active layer. If light is blocked, shadows are always captured regardless of the material that receives the shadow. It’s assumed that
the object that receives theshadows has a white diffuse material. e.g. shadows cast on a polished mirror like surface would not be
visible in the render but we capture them in the shadow pass anyway. This pass only uses the alpha channel and should be com-
posed in via the normal blend mode (regular alpha blending).
Colored shadows: Captures colored shadows cast by objects on the active layer geometry. Only objects with a specular material
with fake shadows enabled can cast colored shadows. (TIP: when enabling fake shadows make sure that the kernel has alpha shad-
ows enabled, otherwise it won’t work). This pass doesn’t have an alpha channel and should be composed in via the multiply blend
mode.
Reflections: Captures light reflected off of objects on the active layer on objects on the non-active layers. This pass respects the
materials so the look of the reflections really depends on the materials used.
OctaneRender distinguishes shadows as either of two shadow types: “black shadows” and “coloured shadows”.
Black shadows are caused by opaque materials or specular materials that do not have the “fake shadow” option enabled. They are
basically what the matte material is capturing and can be composed using normal alpha blending.
Coloured shadows are shadows that are cast by specular materials with the “fake shadow” option enabled. The corresponding col-
oured shadow layer pass needs to be composed onto the background using multiplication. The “shadow layer pass” will capture
both black and coloured shadows and also needs to be composed onto the background using multiplication.
Understanding the visibility option
If the option “visibility only” is disabled (default) users should activate the alpha channel, since those parts of the image without geo-
metry on the active layer are rendered black, i.e. the environment is not visible in the main pass.
If the option “visibility only” is enabled, everything that is not on the active layer will be treated as invisible. The environment will be
rendered and users do not have to enable the alpha channel. Also, as a consequence, the reflection and shadow passes will not
work anymore.
In the example below, given that the truck is on the active render layer ID1 while the road and emitter sphere are on non-active
render layers ID2 and ID3:

Once the Active Render layer node is enabled, the default behavior of the render layer pass – visibility disabled – will show the rays
that hits the non-active layer and a hole is punched where the truck is:
(Beauty – Main)
(Shadows)
(Black Shadows)

(Colored Shadows)
(Reflections)
If the visibility option is enabled shown below, both the primary and secondary ray pierce through the object in the non-active layers
even while these are not in the scene at all. The visibility option means the layers will only affect visibility of the object in the active
layer and this will constitute only the Main Beauty pass. Objects in non-active layers are treated as if they are not in the scene at all
and the other render layer passes do not work:
(Beauty – Main)
(Shadows)

(Black Shadows)
(Colored Shadows)
(Reflections)
So in the example where visibility option is enabled, note that OctaneRender can not capture the road in the active layer while the
objects in the non-active layers are treated as if these do not exist. When the visibility option is on, it also cannot capture the shad-
ows/reflections of the truck into a separate layer. This is because OctaneRender kernels can not trace two rays at the same time.
Even if this were possible, the render time would still not be cut down in half by making two separate renders.
Click here to download this sample scene.
Render Layer Passes Reassembly:

Creating the composite with the black shadows requires the layer to be multiplied or compounded using the “over” operation.
Lighting Passes
A light pass isolates the contribution of a light source. Each light pass behaves as if all the other lights in the scene are switched off.
The individual light passes can be added together to recreate the original render in post or to further adjust the individual con-
tributions of each light during post. The light passes available are:
Ambient light: Captures ambient light either from the sky in a daylight environment or from the texture in a texure environment.
Sunlight: Captures the light contribution of the sun. Only useful when a daylight environment is configured.
Light pass 1-8: Light passes 1 to 8 capture the contribution from mesh emitters. Emitters (both texture and blackbody) have a
light pass ID pin assigning an emitter to a light pass. It’s possible to assign multiple emitters to the same light pass. If nothing is con-
figured, all emitters contribute to light pass 1.
To use light passes in OctaneRender, each light emitter needs to be identified and mapped to the desired light pass. This can be
done by assigning the Light Pass ID in each of the emission nodes that are in the scene:



To actually see the passes, make sure to enable the lighting passes according to the existing IDs that have been assigned.

Each light pass contributes to the main render:


Lighting Passes Composite Reassembly

When compositing, the individual passes produced by OctaneRender need to be combined in post with the additive blend mode in
the third party compositing software.


Info Passes
Info passes, on the other hand, provide a view of the effects of the normals, UVs and geometric data provided in the scene. The info
passes are rendered one by one using only one additional film buffer either at the end or when needed. This is to save GPU memory
and because they are fast to calculate. The maximum samples (Max samples) for Info passes can be adjusted without affecting the
maximum samples set toward the final rendered image. Info Passes:
l Geometric Normal
l Vertex Normal
l Shading Normal
l Tangent Normal
l Z-Depth1
l Position
l UV Coordinates
l Texture Tangent
l Motion Vector
l Material2 ID
l Object ID
l Texture Tangent
l Motion Vector
l Baking Group ID
l Light Pass ID
l Render Layer ID
l Render Layer Mask
l Wireframe
l Ambient Occlusion
For example, using the motion vector pass in post (e.g. in photoshop), and given the propeller geometry below:
1A grey scale image map that stores depth coordinates of all objects in a three dimensional scene. The lighter the objects are, the fur-
ther they are from the camera. This image map provides a perception of depth and is used as a means to adjust the camera focus or
the depth of field during compositing.

To use the motion vector pass in post, enable the motion vector pass and then export this pass to .exr format.
Notes:
If the motion vector pass is enabled, the motion blur in OctaneRender is automatically disabled.
Note that if the motion vector pass is enabled, the motion blur in OctaneRender is automatically disabled. This is because the same
effect can be achieved later on in post, therefore there is no need to render it through OctaneRender.
Let’s say the object that is open in octane has some motion blur, and the motion vector pass is enabled, below is what the data in
the motion vector pass will basically signify:
-The green color signifies the vertical movement (green channel is up and down) -The red color signifies the horizontal movement
(the red color is right to left)
There may also be some green and red blending into yellow, so in fact this would tell the user that the object is moving concurrently
vertically and horizontally since the red channel encodes the left and right movement and the green channel encodes up and down
movement.

There’s also the z-channel and the blue component which is 0, which means there is nothing in there.
So what users have to be careful for: If the object moves too far to the left or too far down, the vector may have negative values
and these negative values will not be visible in the Octane viewport. In this case, users will see only black in the Octane viewport
since for negative values, the object is actually there but not visible. This also means the vector pass will only be usable when it is
exported in .exr format and nor as .png because with OctaneRender everything that is negative is clamped to zero in .png. As an
additional note, the screen will not show negative values because the viewport simply can not display them. The pixel position in
modern screens is from 0 to 255 and as mentioned before everything negative is clamped in Octane, so if users don not see any-
thing there it does not necessarily mean that the vector pass is not working, it could be that the object is just moving too much to
the left or moving too much down.
Once successfully exported, the resulting .exr can then be used in compositing software. It may have other terms used in those soft-
ware (e.g. in Nuke its called vector blur).
Info passes/Max samples: It indicates how much maxsamples will be used for info passes.
Info passes/Distributed Ray Tracing: It enables dof1 and motion blur effect for info passes.
Baking group ID
Specifies which baking group should be baked. By default all objects belong to the default baking group number 1. New baking
groups can be arranged making use of object layers or object layer maps similar to the way render layers work.
Extracting Proper Z-depth
You may see full white output when you use Linear tonemapped type in pass rendering.
This is because of non-normalized distance values from z-depth pass.
This is how to get proper results in After Effect
l Import rendered 16/32bit image of zdepth by an EXR2/PSD/TIF.
l Add image as layer.
l Add Extractor effect.
l Select z-depth channels.
l Adjust black/white point until see gray degrading.

Network Rendering
The Network Render Feature in the Cinema4D Plugin Edition is activated t hroughNetwork Rendering->Enabled from Options

menu in Live Viewer. But before that, its good to understand how it all works together.
This section provides a detailed description of Octane’s Network Rendering Feature. If you are already familiar with Octane’s net-
work rendering concepts, you may go straight to the summarized steps to deploy this feature in your workflow.
l Overview
l Master Slaves and Daemons
l The Slave Daemons
l Steps to Deploy Octane Network Rendering

Overview
Network rendering allows additional computers to be utilized in rendering images. OctaneRender distributes compiled render data
and not scene data, so no file management is required by the user. Conceptually it is similar to working with additional GPUs by allow-
ing the distributed rendering of single images over multiple computers connected through a fast local area network. Network ren-
dering requires a master and one or more slaves on different computers. The OctaneRender instance that drives the rendering is
referred as the “master” and the OctaneRender instances that are helping are referred as the rendering “slaves”.
Since an OctaneRender slave currently requires an activated Standalone license, it is advisable to run the Standalone first to activ-
ate a Standalone license on that computer, if necessary. It is best to copy the whole folder of the released archive onto the slave
computer. Also ensure that the master and the slave are not blocked by the Operating System firewall or any firewalls in the net-
work. This can be done, for example, by turning off the firewall for home/work networks on the master. If that does not help, also try
switching off the firewall on the slave computer for home/work networks.
Master, Slaves, and Daemons

The Standalone version of the octane.exe file acts as master and a special console version of OctaneRender — octane_slave.exe —
can run on other computers as slaves. Of course, the master and the slave should be run on different computers; otherwise they
would have to share the same GPUs. Running the slave on the same computer as the master is pointless.
The OctaneRender network render slave is fairly dumb and all the render data processing is actually done on the master side. The
slave does not need to have a powerful CPU at all, but the slave is of course required to have enough memory (RAM) to store the
render data plus some render results. The operating systems of the slaves can also be different since the communication between
the machines is cross-platform. No data is stored on the slaves’ discs; it all happens 100% in memory.
Each time network rendering is required, the slave process has to be launched on the slave machines. The slave daemon makes the
control of the slaves more practical, as slave daemon can be set up to be launched at every start up of the operating system of each
machine in the network. The daemon is the little program that starts a slave process on the machine (on request by a master), mon-
itors it and stops it (on request by a master). Monitoring means making sure that a running slave sends a regular “heartbeat” to the
daemon and if that doesn’t happen it will try to stop the slave gracefully and if that does not work, it kills the process. The daemon
runs all the time and starts/stops a slave process if a master requests it. The daemon also listens for the “heartbeat” of the slave to
check if the slave process is still running at all. This slave daemon eliminates the need to launch the slave process manually on each
computer each time rendering is required on the slave.
Setting Up The Slave Daemon
To set up the daemon, simply run the batch script _install_daemon.bat on the slave computer. During the setup, it will ask if the
user wants to use all GPUs or only a sub-set and on which port the daemon should listen to for master requests. After that, the dae-
mon will be resident on that machine and it will be active at all times.
When a daemon is invoked by a master, the slave is quickly launched to get some information about the number of GPUs, version,
bitness, etc. and then closed again. After that there is no slave process running. So the daemon just sits there and waits for mas-
ters (there could be multiple masters in the local network) to detect it, by scanning the complete local network in regular intervals.
The daemon should appear in the daemon list of the network preferences of the masters. If it does not, it can have the following
reasons:
l The network rendering in the master is not enabled.
l The daemon is listening on a different port than the master is scanning. In your case both are 48000, so that’s fine.

l The daemon is in a different sub-net than the master is scanning. If you have only one Ethernet adapter on the daemon
and master PCs, you can safely ignore this case.
l The Windows firewall keeps the master from connecting to the daemon or the daemon from responding to the master.
That’s the most likely reason. To verify it, disable the firewall for private or home/work networks on both PCs. You have to
close the Windows dialog containing the firewall options. Only then the change is actually applied. If the daemon is now
detected (should take only up to 10-20 seconds), you can try enabling one firewall after the other to see which one is caus-
ing trouble. If you want to have the firewall running, you may have to poke a hole into it, to allow the communication
between daemon and master.
Only when you enable a daemon in the master settings, the slave gets actually launched and will eventually appear in the status bar
of the master. One daemon can be activated only by one master at a time. If daemon is currently “occupied” by another master the
user will see the daemon state change accordingly.
You can open Network Preferences from, Live Viewer->Options->Network Rendering->Settings

Steps to Deploy Octane Network Rendering

1) Set up the Slave nodes. Install Standalone Editions on the Slave Nodes, make sure that these are of the same version as the
OctaneServer installed in Master. The Octane version for the Slave must be the same version as the plugin you are using (ie. if you
are using version 3.05.3 of the plugin, you must setup the slave for Octane 3.05.3).
2) On each of the Slave Node machines, navigate to the installation folder of the Standalone Edition and locate the following files:
_install_daemon.bat
_run_installed_daemon.bat
3) On the Slave Node machine, install the slave daemon by running the file called _install_daemon.bat
4) On the Slave Node machine, run the slave daemon by initiating the file called _run_installed_daemon.bat
At this point at the Slave Node machine, you should see a window with information similar to this:
5) Back on the Master Node machine, enable the plugin's Network Render featureif it is not already running. This should already pick
up the heartbeat of the slave node and tap into the gpus of the slave node.

On the slave node, you will notice on the Slave Daemon at the Slave Node some new lines indicating when the Master Node has
picked up this connection.
6) The last step which is to go to Live Viewer menu Option/Network rendering/Settings and enable the Slave listed in the window.



Octane Network Render
It can be activated with Network Rendering->Enabled from Options menu in Live Viewer.
Overview
Network rendering allows additional computers to be utilized in rendering images. OctaneRender distributes compiled render data
and not scene data, so no file management is required by the user. Conceptually it is similar to working with additional GPUs by allow-
ing the distributed rendering of single images over multiple computers connected through a fast local area network. Network ren-
dering requires a master and one or more slaves on different computers. The OctaneRender instance that drives the rendering is
referred as the “master” and the OctaneRender instances that are helping are referred as the rendering “slaves”.
Since an OctaneRender slave currently requires an activated Standalone license, it is advisable to run the Standalone first to activ-
ate a Standalone license on that computer, if necessary. It is best to copy the whole folder of the released archive onto the slave
computer. Also ensure that the master and the slave are not blocked by the Operating System firewall or any firewalls in the net-
work. This can be done, for example, by turning off the firewall for home/work networks on the master. If that does not help, also try
switching off the firewall on the slave computer for home/work networks.
Master, Slaves and Daemons
The Standalone version or the octane.exe act as master and a special console version of OctaneRender, octane_slave.exe, can run
on other computers as slaves. Of course, they should be all on different computers or they would have to share the same GPUs.
Running the slave on the same computer as the master is pointless.

The OctaneRender network render slave is fairly dumb and all the render data processing is actually done on the master side. The
slave does not need to have a powerful CPU at all, but the slave is of course required to have enough memory (RAM) to store the
render data plus some render results. The operating systems of the slaves can also be different since the communication between
the machines is cross platform. No data is stored on the slaves’ discs, it all happens 100% in memory.
Each time network rendering is required, the slave process has to be launched on the slave machines. The slave daemon makes the
control of the slaves more practical, as slave daemon can be set up to be launched at every start up of the operating system of each
machine in the network. The daemon is the little program that starts a slave process on the machine (on request by a master), mon-
itors it and stops it (on request by a master). Monitoring means making sure that a running slave sends a regular “heartbeat” to the
daemon and if that doesn’t happen it will try to stop the slave gracefully and if that does not work, it kills the process. The daemon
runs all the time and starts/stops a slave process if a master requests it. The daemon also listens for the “heartbeat” of the slave to
check if the slave process is still running at all. This slave daemon eliminates the need to launch the slave process manually on each
computer each time rendering is required on the slave.
Setting Up The Slave Daemon
To set up the daemon, simply run the batch script _install_daemon.bat on the slave computer. During the setup, it will ask if the
user wants to use all GPUs or only a sub-set and on which port the daemon should listen to for master requests. After that, the dae-
mon will be resident on that machine and it will be active at all times.
When a daemon is invoked by a master, the slave is quickly launched to get some information about the number of GPUs, version,
bitness, etc. and then closed again. After that there is no slave process running. So the daemon just sits there and waits for mas-
ters (there could be multiple masters in the local network) to detect it, by scanning the complete local network in regular intervals.
The daemon should appear in the daemon list of the network preferences of the masters. If it does not, it can have the following
reasons:
l The network rendering in the master is not enabled.
l The daemon is listening on a different port than the master is scanning. In your case both are 48000, so that’s fine.
l The daemon is in a different sub-net than the master is scanning. If you have only one Ethernet adapter on the daemon
and master PCs, you can safely ignore this case.

l The Windows firewall keeps the master from connecting to the daemon or the daemon from responding to the master.
That’s the most likely reason. To verify it, disable the firewall for private or home/work networks on both PCs. You have to
close the Windows dialog containing the firewall options. Only then the change is actually applied. If the daemon is now
detected (should take only up to 10-20 seconds), you can try enabling one firewall after the other to see which one is caus-
ing trouble. If you want to have the firewall running, you may have to poke a hole into it, to allow the communication
between daemon and master.
Only when you enable a daemon in the master settings, the slave gets actually launched and will eventually appear in the status bar
of the master. One daemon can be activated only by one master at a time. If daemon is currently “occupied” by another master the
user will see the daemon state change accordingly.
You can open Network Preferences from, Live Viewer->Options->Network Rendering->Settings
Team Render
The C4D plugin will render if you are using TeamRender, but it does this via the C4D hosts in the networked machines which
assumes that you have the same plugins installed in peers/clients when you made the project. This will make the render faster by

letting C4D tap on other nodes, but, you will also need a combo license for each node. (Note that if you are to deploy any of C4D’s
network rendering feature, TeamRender or NetRender, this would require every other node in your network to also have a licensed
C4D plugin and standalone combo.) For the plugin to work via TeamRender, each client will need its own Octane licenses authen-
ticated prior to rendering.
There is a distinction between Octane’s Network Render feature and Maxon C4D’s network features especially in terms of the licens-
ing. Here are some diagrams to clarify the distinction:
Requirements for a client machine in preparation for TeamRender:
l other copy of Cinema 4D which is working on Client Machine
l an Octane Standalone License and
l an Octane for Cinema 4D Plugin installed and authenticated Plugin License.

This is easier to setup.
It should work smoothly if can work with Standart Renderer
SETUP FOR CINEMA 4D NATIVE NET RENDERING
NET client wants to read preferences file of Octane Render
You should copy oct.dat file from c:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\MAXON\Cinema4Dr15_ABCDEFGH directory of Cinema
4D to c:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\MAXON\Cinema4Dr15_ABCDEFGH\
Hair Rendering
Octane Render has support for direct rendering of hair geometries without converting to polygons. Octane Render has a new hair
engine which is optimised for hair rendering.
It exports only vertices of per hair strands and diameter of each vertex. R enderer generates faces on runtime in render sessions.
This requires less memory and export times for preparation and rendering.
Notes:
l Hair objects will have same output on Live Viewer and Picture Viewer.
l But Feather objects has an Editor LOD parameter. This is important to know because Live Viewer use Editor data for
feather and geometries. Because of this(LOD<%100) you may see less hair strands in LV. And this can cause render fail-
ures or much longer render times in Picture Viewer. To avoid this use LOD=%100 and tweak your scene with this setting.
This is similar case like that having different numbers in Editor/Render parameters of Subdivision objects.
l Also no need to use Hair effect on Render Settings. Any hair will be rendered without object tag usage
Materials:

Plugin converts hair materials to Octane Glossy material1. This conversion is on very basic stage. It required for usage of hair
deformation effects of Cinema 4D. Also usage of a other Octane Material2 on Hair object is possible. Please refer to sample hair
scene for Octane Render for Cinema 4D.
Usage of Octane material on Hair Objects

1Used for shiny materials such as plastics or metals.


Octane Object Tag

This tag is designed for real-time geometry updates on while moving or editing any objects. Second usage is that making faster ren-
derings on scenes which has lot of static geometry and some moving objects. O bjects which are under this tag, they will be expor-
ted as individual meshes with a transform node. This is required for object transform motion blur and transform based texture
projections. Object motion blur is a feature of Octane Render 2.0.
Mesh No: Object group number for exporting to Octane Render.
Force Updates: Optionally to force the updates of meshes while rendering animations for every frames. Just use that if you have
update detection problems on any objects.
Object motion blur: To enable/disable object motion blur or type. You can disable motion blur for the objects while motion blur is
active on whole scene. Please note that, use ‘transform/vertex’ option when you need vertex motion blur. Because it can cause
slowdown and high ram usage.
Use guids on motion blur: Use it if you have motion blur detection problems on particles.
Visibility parameters
General visibility: Option for making the attached objects are visible/hidden to renderer. It works as opacity for each objects.
Camera visibility: Option for making the attached objects are visible/hidden to camera. It does not affects the reflec-
tion/refraction/shadow visibility.
Shadow visibility: Option for making the attached objects are visible/hidden to shadow rays. This option can works only with
alpha shadows in current kernel.
Object Layer ID: It’s number of Render Layer for object. ID=1 is default value for every objects in scene. ID>1 requires to sep-
arate your objects from rest of scene.
Bake ID: Baking group assignment control for objects.
Object Color: Color assignment for ‘Object layer color’ render pass.
Render As Hair: Convert line/spline objects to Octane hair geometry.

You should add this tag to any object or group to see updates in Live Viewer. But updates for geometry in Live Viewer should be
selected.
Putting a tag to top of any group is enough for assigning to all child objects. Also this tag is useful for incremental rendering. If you
apply a tag to any animated group with numbered 1-8, and leave all other static geometry as well as, then you can do animation ren-
dering with very low export times. Please check the render settings section for usage in animation rendering.
Proper setup for a object group for real-time updates for Live Viewer and incremental updates for Animation Rendering

Colorspace
Input color profile may be Linear or disabled is best option. This option provide the color outputs which are matched in all Octane
color gui controls. Using the SRGB profile is still possible. The plugin still will do the required color conversions for you.
Please check this link:
Linear workflow in Octane: http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=33214
Using Background - Foreground

Plugin uses similar way to producing composited images in LV and Picture Viewer. You should use a C4D material which has a image
in color texture. Just put this material to a Background/Foreground object. Plugin also supports image sequences with these
objects. Alpha channel has to be activated from settings of current kernel.
Texture Baking
The texture baking system allows extracting information from a mesh’s surface using by using its UV map to generate a texture that
can be mapped back to the mesh later on.
On Octane, texture baking is implemented as a special type of camera, which in contrast to to the thin lens and panoramic cam-
eras, has one position and direction per sample. The way these are calculated depends on the input UV geometry and the actual
geometry being baked.
For each sample, the camera calculates the geometry position and normal and generates a ray that points towards it, using the
same direction as the normal, from a distance of the configured kernel’s ray epsilon. Once calculated, the ray is traced in the same
way as it would usually do with other types of camera.

Mesh pre-equirements
In order for a mesh to be used for texture baking it should be setup to fulfill the following requirements:
The mesh should contain at least one UV set. In the case of Alembic, up to 3 sets can be used. As a way of example, one of them
could be used for texture/normal mapping and the second one for baking.
The mesh’s UV geometry should lay in the [0,0] -> [1,1] region. UV geometry outside this region will not be taken into account for
baking.
There should NOT be different geometry primitives mapped to the same UV region. Otherwise you may find artefacts due to over-
lapping geometry.

First you need some meshes which are properly unwrapped. You may use C4D’s Optimal Mapping command or manual methods. It
can be found from command list or BP UV Edit section.
Note that: If you are trying to bake multi objects on same bakeID, be sure that objects has not overlapped uvw mapping. Other-
wise you may see overlapped results in render view. See Baking the multi objects section on following part.

To bake the textures for single/multi objects, you can use Octane Object tag. It’s possible to specify the bake group from ObjectLay-
er/BakeID.
Set any bakeID on for objects. This will assing your object to specified baking group.

Then add a camera with Octane Camera tag and switch to baking camera. Set the bake group ID and tweak some parameters of
baking if you need.
Then start rendering in Live Viewer window. You should see baked textures for bakeID from camera tag as shown in below image.

Baking tips
l Set your kernel’s filter size to 1.0 as usually baking doesn’t need much antialiasing, so this will bake out the data more pre-
cisely.
l Set Imager’s response to “Linear/Off” to disable specific camera response curves.
Extracting render passes
Enable Render Passes and activate required passes

To get different passes, you can use OctaneRender->Render Settings->Passes. You can see small buttons in LV for active passes.
It’s possible to manually save per pass from Live Viewer or all passes together from Picture Viewer. You should activate passes and
select some of them and locate saving location of passes.
HOW TO: Baking the multi objects

This is a sample how to bake many object to single object with baked diffuse+lighting.
l Create a simple scene with a few primitives and different materials. Make the uvw mappings as you wish.
l Convert objects to polygon. And combine via “connect objects”.
l Add a “Bake Texture” tag to this combined object. Just select “Surface Color” and give a proper size for result. And fire the
rendering of baking process by “Bake” button in Bake Texture tag. This will apply a unwrapping to uvw of object and gen-
erate combined diffuse color.

l Create a new material and apply this resulted image which comes from baking process. Add an Octane object tag and set
bakeID=2.
l Add Octane Camera from LV->Objects menu. Switch it to bake camera, select bakeID=2. And fire the Octane rendering
now.
Particle Engine
Let’s start to talk about that what’s this….
You may know the plugin can render any geometry and also particles. But they should be generated objects or render instances by
particle. Using render instances are relatively faster and memory efficient way.
But when we come back to particle topic, this still may be slow way with a lot of particles. So we have decided to add a particle
engine to process data more quickly.
In the engine, we have direct access to some kind of particles and feed directly this data to the renderer. As a result of this method
plugin will have very fast access on particle generation and will be possible to render faster.

Using particle engine on X-Particles with xpEmitter
Add an Octane Object tag to xpEmitter
Find the ‘Particle Rendering’ section in object tag. Be sure that’s in ‘Sphere’ mode. Add some objects to list. Be sure they have mater-
ials.


Sample rendering with motion blur and particle engine.
colored xpTrail object with hair engine. SCENE

Volumetrics
With V3 OpenVDB1 is introduced as a part of Octane Render. See what’s that: http://www.openvdb.org
OpenVDB2 is shortly a volumetric data library. Allows to efficiently utilize the big amount voxel data for producing volumetric effects.
Here voxel is a kind of pixel data with density value. But it have 3 dimensional coordinates opposite of 2 dimensional image pixels.
Volume object has two main jobs: Voxel generator or VDB loader.
Switching is done by type parameter. Or it can be created from LV->Objects menu as Fog/Vdb volume. Then plugin makes initial set-
tings for startup usage.
1Dreamworks’ open-source C++ library housing the data structures and tools implementation for storing and manipulating volume
data, like smoke and other amorphous materials. The purpose of OpenVDB is mostly to have an efficient way to store volumetric data
in memory and on disk. It has evolved into a more general toolkit that also lets you accomplish other things, such as fracturing
volumes, converting meshes to volumes and vice versa. However, it does not include a computational fluid dynamics solver, and
therefore it cannot procedurally generate smoke or fire. OpenVDB is fully integrated as a library in OctaneRender. For more inform-
ation about OpenVDB, check at http://www.openvdb.org/.

See next topics for detailed descriptions of two modes.
Volume Object
With V3 OpenVDB1 is introduced as a part of Octane Render. See what’s that: http://www.openvdb.org
OpenVDB2 is shortly a volumetric data library. Allows to efficiently utilize the big amount voxel data for producing volumetric effects.
Here voxel is a kind of pixel data with density value. But it have 3 dimensional coordinates opposite of 2 dimensional image pixels.
Volume object has two main jobs: Voxel generator or VDB loader.
Switching is done by type parameter. Or it can be created from LV->Objects menu as Fog/Vdb volume. Then plugin makes initial set-
tings for startup usage.

See next topics for detailed descriptions of two modes.
Mode: Generator
Works a voxel generator and voxel container. It contains a voxel array which is bounded by 3-dimensional box. Iterates some tex-
tures(ex. noise) on 3d-space to tweak density of voxels.
In this mode, a dummy viewport presentation will be available. See below image how the voxels are presented by small boxes. More
accurate rendering may requires more dense voxels.
Here voxels are generated by driving the Texture->Noise in a relative 3d coordinate space. Division is calculated by dimen-
sions/voxel_size.
divx=400/5=80, divy=100/5=20, divz=400/5=80 and Result box contains 80*20*80 voxels.
See ‘voxel multiplier’ example for more effective usage.
Default mode is Display Type=Box. It simply draws some boxes for per voxels and scale it by density values. This is fastest drawing
mode after ‘None’ option.

Below example show the usage of voxel multiplier parameter. It has only effect when rendered on the Picture Viewer.
The Plugin divides the voxel size value to voxel multiplier on PV(aka animation rendering).

Here first image is from Live Viewer. Voxel size=10cm. Multiplier is non-functional on Live Viewer. Here we can easily see the voxel
shapes because of low resolution.
Second image from Picture viewer, Voxel size=10 cm and Multiplier=2. So resulting voxel size=10/2=5cm. Voxel counts in PV are
2*2*2=8 times higher of LV voxel counts. So It roughly requires 8 times more RAM and calculation times.
Last one again from PV. Voxel size=10 cm and Multiplier=8. So resulting voxel size=10/8=1.25cm. Voxel counts in PV are 8*8*8-
8=512 times higher of LV voxel counts. So It roughly requires 512 times more RAM and calculation times.
Here is something that you should be careful. You can easily reach to RAM limits when division counts comes to very high values.
So don’t decrease ‘voxel multiplier’ immediately also same for ‘voxel multiplier’ parameter. Best way to go step by step for avoiding
from a render failure or out of ram message.
Mode: VDB Loader
File: Any openVDB file name.
Start: First frame number for sequence.

End: Last frame number for sequence.
Offset: Frame number where the sequence begin to play.
Loop: Enables looping on the sequence.
Digits: Value=4 means that fire[nnnn].vdb has four digits. Like that fire0000.vdb, fire0001.vdb, fire0002.vdb, ….
Import Unit: It’s required to change import scale. Change it until you get a proper size.
Setting grid mapping and velocity options

From Grid Mapping controls, you can select any channels of VDB for assigning to Octane Volume Medium slots. Any combination can
be done by grid mapping selectors.
Scale value on right of control that’s for scaling the voxel values as the given numbers. Allows to tweak balance between

Creating Volume Medium

Medium slot requires some medium nodes. Most convenient type is Volume Medium. It contains Absorption/Scatter/Emission slots.
Also Ramp connections.
Anyway Absorption/Scatter medium types are acceptable.
Here some preset buttons(Fog, Fire, …) help to create some startup assignments for going forward.
Tweaking Volume Medium

When you try to make a smoke/cloud you need to have connected Absorption/Scatter pins. With some RGB or Gaussian spectrum
types.
Fire effect additionally requires a Emission channel. Here be sure you set the volume grids to correct Octane pins through by grid
mapping control.


Result

Here is two different approach to paint Vdb volumes. As you can see that’s about blackbody vs. texture emission usage.

Example scenes for volume object.
Please find examples package and locate _Volume-object-scenes directory. Be sure “Send all data” is not active render method.
Octane Texture Manager

Due unsupported imagetexture type we have own texture manager. It’s having a similar functionality of Cinema 4D’s Texture Man-
ager.
Quick access from Command List(shft+C or shft+F12)
Command: Octane Texture Manager

Features
Detection of missing textures, suggested and real paths, material usage, displaying size and bit depth, file name replacement.Note
that It can shows some approximated statistics for memory usage. But this may be different from real usage in The Renderer.
Because renderer has some optimisations and conversions in its deep lines. And it’s not accessible by plugins.

Exporting scene for Octane Cloud Rendering(ORC) or Standalone

1. Open a scene needs to be exported for rendering.
2. Run command from Live Viewer->Export To->Export Animated ORBX. This command will open the Export Dialog.
3. Select “Start Export” button to start exporting process. There is some useful options.
Use Render Settings: For using output range and filename as output target for rendered images.

Show result in Live Viewer: It’s for checking the created scene in render output.
Open in Standalone: Open exported scene in Standalone after export finished.
Send to ORC: Upload the exported scene to ORC after export finished. Then you can start rendering from ORC control panel.
How to render in ORC

1. You can manually upload exported ORBX to ORC at orc.render.otoy.
2. You can select “Send to ORC” and let the export dialog send that after export process. Method.1 is recommended because
this method will occupy the Cinema 4D during upload process.
3. Go to control panel of ORC. Find scenes section. Press “CREATE A JOB” button.
4. Tweak your samples/resolution/frame range/… parameters from new screen. Select any format from list to create a
render target.
5. Here you can change image filename or leave as default. Also read options to change format. For example, you can get
render pass output with 4 digits numbers with %r_%p_%4n.%e notation.

Export Animated ORBX from Command Line

Following command exports whole frames of scene to an ORBX file.
“CINEMA 4D.exe” sample.c4d -exportORBX d:/output.orbx

Performance Tricks and Pitfalls on Renderings

Performance tricks and pitfalls on renderings
Live Viewer vs. Picture Viewer renderings
We’ll call these as LV and PV for quick notation. LV uses the viewport(editor) geometry data from scene. But PV uses the render
data from scene for geometries. Because of this, resulting triangle counts most likely will be difference for LV vs. PV. As a con-
sequence of this difference, the renderer can hit to triangle limits. This limit on V2 was about 19.x millions triangle and free VRAM
amount. But in V3 there is not any hard limit for triangle numbers(it’s still limited to 76 millions triangle due some reasons). Anyway
your geometry data should fit to VRAM of gpu. So practical limit of V3 is depended to available VRAM amount.
If you have some cloned objects and if it’s possible that always use “render instances” option. This helps to reduce exported triangle
counts, export time and free VRAM amount.
Be aware of different triangle counts in PV against LV if you have subdivisions as in Subdivision Surface/ Hair objects/etc…
If you see some visual differences in PV against LV, be sure that you have default options of Geometry Engine/Control, Render
Buffer Type. Auto detect is mostly fine for providing best results as we mentioned in previous part.
Flip-flop or trim effect on motion blur. This happen on insufficient time sampling values for fast rotations. See image for effect. Solu-
tion is to increase Time sampling per frame in render settings.
187 — Performance Tricks and Pitfalls on Renderings

Troubleshooting
Render failures
There is some exact steps when you see a Render Failure message. And these are mostly about The Renderer or Cuda. And most
important is to get your feedbacks about these if you still can’t solve that after the following steps.
Check Console window and Octane Log window about extra information messages. These will give some idea what’s going on.
Detect that’s happening on Live Viewer or Picture Viewer. If in both continue to next steps. Or just occurs in Picture Viewer, this can
be about more triangle counts for final rendering. Because triangle counts can be different on Picture Viewer. That’s because of dif-
ferent parameters in subdivision object or similar one. See this image to figure out how works. Here we choose to work with view-
port’s geometry data in Live Viewer. Due some performance concerns in interactive mode. But with Picture Viewer all geometry
data is generated by Cinema 4D and we use it. That’s the reason of different triangles counts. This can cause that we may be on out
of VRAM for geometry. And render failure might be happened.
If you are seeing this on Live Viewer please check material setups. Delete all materials and try again. It can be somewhere in mater-
ials If errors gone away. Note that displacement can be a source of this. It can be very compute intense effect when you force it to
high amount or big resolutions. Also using over a complicated mesh.
If you still get the render failure errors after deleting all materials then check free VRAM. Your triangle count can be much high for fit-
ting to VRAM. Try to optimise your objects. Use render instances if you still have not do that.
188 — Troubleshooting
Change Log
Latest build:V3.04.3-R1(3043001)

Changes of V3.04.3-R1
– Fix the crash on livedb with deleted localdb dir
– Fix wrong scaling of TFD. Just works with uniform scaling.
Changes of V3.04.3
– Mograph support for Voronoi object
Changes of V3.04-R1
– fix on instance engine. Fixed some update problems with visibility changes, etc…
– Added W gradient node for hair gradients.
– Animated ORBX improvements
– fix: TurbulenceFD container rot/scaling
– Added more object masks
– reversed z-axis orientation for VDB volumes
– fix: Node editor(OSX) RMB-context menu problem
– Alpha/opacity support for materials in viewport with octane shading.
– Volume objects will support objecttag parameters as opacity/layerID/etc… anymore.
– GI_AMBIENT/GI_SAMPLE_AMBIENT removed from GI mode of Direct Lighting Kernel. Check your settings of your old scenes.
– Gpu usage/temp correction test(Windows)
– Gpu overheat protection control for picture viewer renderings(Windows)
– Small improvements on info lines for gpu usage/temp.(Windows)
– Increased amount of presets to 64 for Octane settings
– Fix: Stage object + camera mblur problems
– Randomtex on render instance issue
–
– Fix: Wrong camera offset in LV on unlocked res.
– New zoom option for LV with mouse wheel.
– A/B image comparison mode. New Compare menu in LV.
– Fix: Crash on Reset/stop button. Now can it break the updating operation.
– Fix: TurbulenceFD one voxel shift.
189 — Change Log

– Improvement: Initial support for Octane materials in Standard renderer.
– Improvement: Initial support for Cpu rendering of Opengl previews with alpha and texture output. Unselect “octane for OGL
prevs” to activate.
– Fix: detect paint of xbitmap.
– Deprecated: Send all data, 8-Bit buffer on Render Settings. Please stay away to use these for future projects. They will be
removed in some period of time. Go with “force updates” in objecttag if you have update problems.
– Short path names with ImageTexture for “Save project with assets”
– Octane NetRender access revision to allow slaves free after render finished
– Export to single frame orbx
– Fix: Missing displacement in material converter
– Fix: missing vol_step_len in absorption/scattering medium
– Fix: Wrong result with material stacking

Changes of V3.02-R3
-Fix: Crashes with RealFlow plugin
-Fix: Crash on multi image files dropping to Node editor
-Fix: Leaked nodes with Object tag over hairs
-Fix: Speed boost on animated ORBX export
-Fix: Some bugs on animated ORBX export
-Fix/change: Removed to use cloned doc on Sending scene to Live Viewer. This for avoiding Realflow crashes at this point. Speed
boost is obtained here and need feedbacks about stability.
– Fix and revisions on Node Editor. Copy/paste or drag/duplicate with connections.
– Fix: Hair engine
– Experimental material stacking feature by C4D texture tags. See notes about usage.
– Fix: ignored range parameter in animated sequences
– Fix: Not visible volume/scatter objects on first frame renders
– Fix: enabled partial-alpha parameter for old scenes.
– Fix: unfinised render when region acitaved in Picture Viewer.
– Fix: Extreme memory usage on Animation rendering when vertex motion blur is used.
– Fix: Daylight_tag/medium/Add_fog button
– Fix: Volume object(VDB) velocity scale
190 — Change Log

– Fix: Tonemapping gpu selections
// MATERIAL STACKING LIMITATIONS
// limitations: only works with c4d materials and octane materials and will not work with mix materials1 in any combination
// Works on movable meshes. So it requires to be in auto mode for LV or auto detect for PV or object tag in manual mode. Doesn’t
work on “Send all data” method.
// works with flat/cube/cylindrical/spherical projection types. Tiling support. Doesn’t account the current tag’s UVW mapping
coordinates. It takes it from previous material which has not alpha/opacity.
// Can work with selection assignments. But it’s still limited on complex selection sets
// go with mix material2 setups for advanced usages
Changes of V3-R1.1
– Fix channel combo
– Fix: empty statistics on PV with render region
– Fix: Bug on license control for clean installs
– Improvement image drag&drop to Node editor. Better multi drop and replacing old image names with dropped images.
– Loop mode in vdb sequences
– Fix: Crash on scatter
Changes of V3-b2.1
– Fix on PV and background alpha
– Fix on missed “invert absorption” on medium nodes
– Fix on rendershader function for C4D shaders
– Fix: Background object renderings
Changes of V3-b2.0
-Improved render failure detection. See console for details.
-Volume object changes. Support for velocity channels, etc…
-Mix material icon
Changes of V3-alpha10
– Hair lock problem
– Black opengl previews when octane disable on ogl preview
– Fix: leaked geo node creation in LV mode after switch back from another scene
– New Camera visible environment
– Dynamic vdb bounding box presentation
– Vdb sequence detection problem
– Fix: image sequence detection problem with non-standard characters

191 — Change Log

– Fix: Black previews when ogl preview is disabled.
– Improved mix preview icon
– Fix: Crash on NE with c4d materials
– Support for input to output in NE.
– Fix: Ignored hair material thickness curve
– Sdk has speed increase for geometry compilation on OSX/Linux
[b]Changes for 2.25 R4[/b]
– Fix: Hair render lock problem on Picture viewer with “Hair Render”.
– Fix: Drop to LiveDB functionality to avoid to overwrite the exist materials.
– Fix: Double octane node creation for shared material/textures. It’s for export/import materials from/to livedb.
– New section(Common) in Octane material to give more space in GUI. Node editor button in material.
– Fix: Small revisions on mix material1 updates.
– Now possible to change Localdb directory from Settings or LiveDb window.
– Small fixes about workflow problems.
Changes of V3-alpha6.2
– Fix: Livedb, drop to LiveDB functionality for overwrite materials.
– Fix: Double octane node creation for shared material/textures. It’s for export/import materials from/to livedb.
– New section(Common) in Octane material to give more space in GUI. Node editor button in material.
– Fix: Small revisions on mix material2 updates.
– Now possible to change Localdb directory from Settings or LiveDb window.
Changes of V3-alpha6.1
– Fixed missing render passes of V3-Alpha6
– Fix: Object layer colors for render instances
– Fix: Update problem on mix materials3
– Fix: TurbulenceFD shaking problem with different voxel sizes of Objecttag.
Changes of V3-alpha6
– Contains all revisions of 2.25-R3
– New interpolation on gradient texture
– New Volume Medium and Volume Gradient(ramp) type.

192 — Change Log

– New camera imager parameter, “Gamma1 before response”
– Improved TFD/object tag functionality
Changes for 2.25 R3
– Maintance and performance fixes for mostly on update mechanism for Live Viewer.
– Fix: Livedb import on materials with macro node has been used.
Changes 2.25 R1.1
– Fix: Surface brightness of ligh tag. Added to scene convertion for old scenes.
– Fixes/changes on Node Editor. Added “update previews on drag” parameter to refresh node previews on tweakings.
– Fix: Black render out problem with “floatbuffer” on simple/quick scenes.
– Fix: Unnecessarily updates on LV after tweaking materials.
Changes 2.25
– Added Take support for R17
– Fix: Conflict with Take system and octane sliders
– Fix: Performance loss on animation rendering with octane net and floatbuffers. Possibly on big resolutions.
Changes 2.24.2 R1.2
– Fix: Ignored values of some imported textures from orbx/livedb.
– Fix: Restart LV render when opengl textures updated.
– Fix: Some crashes for exportORBX parameter on commandline.
Changes 2.24.2 R1.1
– Fix: Render region on panning of LV
– Fix: Stereo mode on camera tag
Changes 2.24.2 R1
– Fix: Crash on material previews after switching the Take.
– Fix: Revisions on gui of Kernel settings
– New seperated option for colorgui and slider gui
– Pan support on LV. It works on lockres mode by LMB.
– New commandline parameter for exporting whole scene as animated ORBX.
command line: “CINEMA 4D.exe” dummy.c4d -exportORBX c:\test.orbx
Changes test6
– Render settings: Get render region button added
– Floatbuffer is default on render setings.
– Some fixes on Nodeeditor.
193 — Change Log

Changes test5
– Object tag changes
– Fix scatter bugs, reverse z-direction on clone’s childs, uv tiling fix, rotate by texture, etc..
– Solo mode enable/disable option
– Settings bug on commandline, external render managers
– Tag gui revisions
– Several minor bug fixes on plugin engine
Changes test4
– Fix: Wrong object detections when used the Auto mode from render settings.
– Scatter object: Improvements for vertex mode, gui, etc… Initial support for Mograph effectors
– Particle engine revisions. Activating of particles is done with Octane Object tag.
– Several minor fixes and gui revisions
Changes
– Live Viewer Settings: Passes section removed and replaced by Passes section of Render Settings. LV settings will copied as render
preset for old scenes.
– Fix: EXR1 compression parameters in passes section.
– Unticked diffuse color is black
– Scatter object improvements
– Material2 optimisations for unused/unvisible materials
– Solo mode support.
– Fix: Crash on float-point overflows on mesh vertices
– Fix: Crash on vertex motionblur and unconstant vertex counts
– New parameter on Object tag. To quarantee the detection of geometry updates with complex setups.
Changes
– New: Asynchronous update system. Completely revised update engine. Faster response on viewport, material editings, less delay
on geometry changes.
– New: Scatter object type. Test version. It’s still wip version.
– Imp: Particle engine. Works with Object tag. Support for custom objects. It’s still wip version.
– Fix: Lot of small improvements on GUI.
– Fix: Restart in LV after playing with gui of materials.
– Fix: Focus Object refresh problem for single viewports
– Fix: Wrong handling mixed material3 system
– Fix: Support for native “Remove unused materials” command.

194 — Change Log

– Imp: Transform/projection textures. Uniform scaling.
– Fix: Hairs are same in LV as render output.
– Direct support for C4D color gui.
– Contains all fixes until 2.24.1.
Changes for 2.24.1 R1
– Fix: Non-english chars problem on image sequences
– Fix: Localdb problems
– Fix: Light management improvements
– Fix: More memory usage with cloners
– Improvement: Detection of triangle/nodes count limitations
– Improvement: Asynchronious data sending, better information about update process
– Improvement: Keeping mix material1 linkages to connected materials when you copy/paste the objects/materials
– Fix: Frame skipping problem on motion blur engine
– Added account section to Preferences->Octanerender, for Render Clients
– Added Cloud rendering to LV menu.
– Fix: Orbx exporter for arealight materials.
– Fix: Removed double resending the geometry to Live Viewer on beginning of a render
– Render Settings: Renamed parameter “Geometry Engine”.
Added parameter “Geometry Control”:
1-Manual: Works as before. Requires to specify the animated, emissive, etc.. objects with Octane Object Tag by hand.
2-Auto Detect: Makes some pre-calculation(limited to 60 sec.) before animation rendering. Try to find/assign the movable,
emissive, etc.. objects for you.
In this option, no need to use object tags as manual method. If it can’t finish in time, all objects will be assumed as movable.
3-All Objects Movable: This works as LV’s “Auto” parameter for geometries. Be aware of limits of “Auto” method.
Can crash after 10-15k movable objects. So better to use manual or auto detect for heavy scenes.
– Render Settings: Removed parameter “Update Method”. This is a revision for simpler usage and removing propably unused para-
meter.
– Render Settings: Changed behaviour of motion blur parameter.
– Fix: Long preparation time problem on scenes which has big instance counts and Motion blur.
– Fix:

– Scroll for side buttons with mouse wheel
195 — Change Log

– Solo mode on group buttons by RMB
– Copy/paste short on Node Editor
– Fix: Removed double resending the geometry to Live Viewer on beginning of a render
– R16: Limited support Reflectance Channel on C4D materials
– Node Editor: Enable/disable functionality for nodes
– Render passes saving: PSB option added.
– Added enable/disable functionality for Octane Material1 tabs
– Indivual “render to texture size” parameter for each Octane Materials. This is a overwrite option for global parameter in “settings-
>C4D shaders->Render size”.
– Fix: Unstopped render on closing the Live Viewer. Issue has been appeared on RC4.
Changes for 2.23.2 rc4
– Node Editor: Added “show node graph” and “save as orbx” commands
– Fix for saved Octane windows to layout
– Node editor stability fix and improvements. Some undo functionality. Fixed keyboard focus problem for node selections.
– Texture manager: Replace image file names
– Fix: Evalution of Mg shaders in a material with connected to mix material2
– Node editor: Lot of fix and improvement. New functionality to direct connect to pins or connection lines. Improved side menu. Bet-
ter key handling.
– node editor: zoom/pan with ALT+mouse or 1/2 keys. Custom settings. Auto load materials, improvements for connection of
boxes
– node editor: New Side menu. New look and many new functionalities for nodes.
– Octane Texture Manager
– Camera support for Orbx exports
– Fix: missing textures on untitles.scene while using of preset materials
– Export ORBX: fix missing camera connection
Changes for 2.23
– Fix for opening problem for LV window after render to Picture Viewer
– Fix for crash on delete command in node editor
– Color profile is correctly affecting now the C4D material colors, color shader on C4D materials.
– Fix for material converter and c4d’s standard material(srgb/linear color profiles).

196 — Change Log

– Fix for render instance updates and even for Xparticles generators when render instances are selected
– Unit support for some parameters like amount/offset on displacement, focal-depth, aperture, etc. no camera tag, rounded edges
on materials.
– selection set support for images and movie file support on C4D bitmap
– Hsv/rgb mode for octane colorgui (uncompleted)
– Keep environment parameter is back
Changes for 2.22
– SDK 2.22
– New camera parameters for stereo rendering on panoramic camera.
– New f-stop parameter on camera tag.
– Removed default texture creations on mix material1/scatter/displacement/medium nodes to avoid memory leakings.
– Stability and functionality improvements for Node Editor. Zoom support.
– Performance improvements for geometry update.
– C4D Colorizer shader emulation.
– Check geometry option is enabled by default.
– Storage of plugin settings has been moved to scene structure avoid some export problems.
– Fixed alpha problem on files wich is save as indivual render passes.
– Added main pass option for render passes.
– First version for mograph color shader. It cannot work with render instances.
– Experimental Mograph emulation for several mograph generators and mg color shader and multi shader. Currently it’s still in devel-
opment and does not works on render instances.
– Changed “Start after beauty” parameter to disabled by default. It avoids to the render progress issue for info passes on anim-
ation rendering. I advice to change that should be disabled on your old scenes.
– SKD 2.20 changes
– Fixes for localdb crashes.
– User category is removed. You can manually copy the all orbx files to localdb folder.
– New render layer functionality for render passes. See Render layer section in Settings/Render Settings.
– Multiple object mask output for several layer ID’s. See
– Affect alpha option for specular materials
– Multi render mask support(max 8). This is a addition to available feature. Every pass will be generated after main/beauty/info
passes. Each mask will takes a few second to finish. Which is depended to info max samples.
– Visual improvements for render info in LV.
– Some fixes for button issues.
– New render passes and parameters
– Fix for cast illumination in texture emission
197 — Change Log

– Several minor fixes over last version
-changes since 2.14.0
– Fstop and iso will be deprecated on next versions, actually it’s removed from standalone but keeping it in plugin by some formula.
– Reduced the brightness of the daylight environment by a factor of 0.6 for the new daylight model and 0.8 for the old model.
This way there is a better match between the texture environment and the daylight environment. Or in other words: Exteriors
rendered with
the default exposure settings are less overexposed than before. Older scenes will be converted automatically and should render
the same.
– Performance and memory usage improvement on render instances. Removed double mesh usage by some optimisations.
As a result, it will be much faster on scene compilation and consume less vram usage for render instances.
– New options for emission texture. Will allow to use without casting illumination.
– New parameter for side texture.
– Render region has been improved on live viewer. Now all interactive modes should work when render region activated.
– Settings are fixed to allow the changes of parameters during animation rendering.
– Fixed losing material links while switching between scenes.
– File saving for render passes, it has been fixed.
– Fixed some problems on Render queue
– Better object selection throught Live viewer interface
– Fixed lock resolution button behaviour
– (2.20) New render layer feature to get the masked outputs of grouped objects. Also allows to get the shadows and reflections.
– render instances and refresh LV render with mouse movement problem
– revision and improvement on tag gui
– Background object can work with c4d shaders
– Fix for delay on opengl previews
– Sdk 2.14 improvements(New side texture, roughness parameter for diffuse material, replacement on coherent parameter by
new coherent ratio parameter)
– fix/improvements on render info status
–
changes for 2.11.1 RC3
– fix on breaking render while passes are active
– fixed mistaken option for fast geometry updates
– fix for popup dialog on non-english versions
– stability revisions on node editor
changes for 2.11.1 RC2
198 — Change Log

– Improvements on render passes for LV and animation rendering
– Revised arealight handling
– New interactive help window
changes for 2.10.0 and 2.11.0
– fix for memory leaks
– render passes
– hair render fix on vpost(R15/R16)
– R16 version
– Gradient texture fix on LiveDb downloads
– Fixes for broken materials in LiveDb
– Fix for opengl previews of Mix materials1
– Fix for motion blur problem on Hypernurb, etc..
– Fix for nodegraph for reverse sizing and visual elements
– better support for some C4D shaders in standard materials
– support for axyz anima plugin
– New noise texture type
– Highlight compression parameter on camera imager
– Improvements on color correction node(saturation, hue, contrast)
– Fixes and improvements on Render Passes
– Checkerboard on LV for better alpha presentation
– Custom default environment color
– Luminance multiplier for luminance channel of C4D materials
changes for 2.06.0
– fix for uvmapping on hair objects(Picture Viewer)
– Test version for Node Editor
changes for 2.05.1
– fixed a bug on Render Region to Picture Viewer
– fixed a memory leak on vertex motion blur
changes for 2.03
– Fixed displacement and mblur problems(by Sdk/plugin)
– Faster and higher quality convertion on native C4D shaders(multicore cpu, Windows only), new C4D shader settings.
– render instance will update anymore only with objecttag, better viewport performance.
– sticky render info
199 — Change Log

– Low gpu usage when Octane windows are closed or scene resetted
– “Synced Updates” option removed
– speed optimisation for workflow
– Octane gradient fix
– Object linking in Projection node, it’s accounting the scale of objects now
changes since 2.02
– new optimisation for renderinstances on interactive rendering. Removed some unnecessary updating messages. They should
work much better on complex scenes
– fixed a mistake on mblur on renderinstances’s childs
– fixed disable mblur option on objecttag
– animatable octane gradient
changes since 2.01
– render instances will update if has objecttag(meshno>0)
– render region is working on anition renderings(in picture viewer)
– render region will affect(picture viewer renderings)
– little fix on update detection for (visibility changes on Live Viewer). It should work better now
– fix for wrong multipass colors, it should give correct values as well on some compositing softwares.
– displacement node uses own resolution for native c4d shaders
– New render setting parameters. Network rendering, clay mode, render region
changes since 2.00.22
– fix on fovx parameter of panoramic camera
changes for 1.53.1
– fix on wrong behaviour for camera tags as Motion camera, Camera crane, etc.. when motion blur is used
– fix for visibility tag on render instances
– fix for environmenttag buttons
changes for 1.52.1
– fix for environmenttag, resolved some garbage
– Fixed a crash on mixmaterial previews, which is occured Octane Dialog is closed
changes for 1.52.0
– Some fixes on geometry updater.
– Two different geometry updater method has been implemented, both has own advantages. Which is named as “Syncronization
on geo. updates” and located under Settings/others section.
Default option is disable for that. This allow faster feedback on viewport and makes the updates on background. If you has some
weird geometry on render view, please set on this option.
– New safe area lines for Live Viewer Window.
200 — Change Log

– Color convertion is disable for Floatbuffer option of render settings. So we should expect correct linear color output with float-
buffer.
– User category of Livedb windows was been revised. As longer you can put and get own materials to user category or create and
organise material directories.
– Octane 1.52 features, it has improved matte material behaviour for several conditions
*changes since 1.20b
– live viewer popup menu, copy/paste material commands, several shortcuts for material/object/dof1 selection and apply
– fix for stop/restart rendering buttons: Now gpu frequency can go down
*changes since 1.20a
– transform node scale/translate slider limites has been changed
– savescene with assets command was corrected
-fix and features on 1.19
– fixed wrong arealight size which occured when scene scale is not cm.
– fix for alpha of standart materials, this is correcting xfrog alpha problem
– fix for uvmapping problem on assignment from parent objects
new features of release 1.8a
– new functionality for DRAG&DROP to live viewer(limited to movable geometry and some types of geometry)
– fix on new algorithm of geometry updates
– quick fix for material of render instances
– floattexture has value limit, is bigger than 1.0 for higher bump values
– negative scale is available on transform nodes
– fixed memoryleak for animation rendering with float buffer
changes since 1.16
– drag&drop to Live viewer
– trying to improve/fix problems on geometry engine
changes since 1.14
– New floatbuffer algorithm for faster output
– improved algoritm for detection and refreshing geometry changes
changes since 1.10
– improved c4d native shader update system
– clay mode
– fix on octane settings bug which is occuring after finished render
201 — Change Log

changes since Beta 0.9.6
– fixed a problem which is occured while doing incremental rendering with subframe motion blur
– New LiveDB manager with offline mode and user materials
– improved Render area on Live Viewer
– Autosave for Live Viewer
– Gamma1 setting for standart bitmaps
– stability improvements
– improved material previews
– extended control for quick acces to kernels
– improved Live Viewer and Picture Viewer render info display
– fixed closing the scene problem with object updates option
– moblur support
– r15 support
– settings presets menu
– remove unused materials
–
changes since Beta 0.8.8a
– revisions on Octane object presets
– New octane dialog
– transferred all render icons to octane dialog
– new overlay rendering mode is in wip stage
– copy/paste octane settings
– copy octane settings to render settings
– added all controls of kernel/cameraimager/post to render settings
– octane render settings revised
changes since Beta 0.8.6d
– material preview size parameter for procedurals
– material previews
– render failure detection
– render progress lines added
202 — Change Log

changes since Beta 0.8.1b
– ies orientation problem
– cameratag aperture and focal distance min values can be zero
– Two update method option added to Octane Render Settings
– Fixed, in pathtracing, the alphachannel is checked (or return to checked after changing the kernel) even if alphachannel isn’t activ-
ated.
– hierarchical material detection improved (e.g. symetry and white material problem)
– Live Viewer Save Image problem fixed
– Remove unused materials problem fixed
– Set renderdevices problem fixed
– fixed render info problem on Picture Viewer with float output
– fixed copy/paste error from a scene to other
– Fixed frozen render progress problem
– Geometry update structure is changing(geometry matrix supported)
– new gpu/system info window
– Lighttag improved
– Octane ImageTexture works with Project Info->Textures and Save project with assets command
– New node ( Transfom )
– material index animatable
– if imagetexture is used from presets, every time, it will not copy t o tex folder
– shaderToTexture problem fixed for Picture Viewer rendering
– advanced onscreen render info
– gpu usage and temperature monitoring
– Material1 Node Based Editing
– Picture Viewer settings has 8bit/Float Tonemapped/Float output
– Some memory leaks are fixed
– working on direct support for some particle systems
– SDK 1.20.2
– “save C4D scene with assets…” command revised similar to standart save project command
– standart material to Octane runtime rendering is improved
203 — Change Log

– material convertion is improving
– arealight and octanelighttag restarting render problem fixed
– preview maker, update geometry option
– picture viewer rendering, support for quick updates mode
– Color convertion to linearspace is applied for Material1 previews, Picture viewer and color controls
– Full or incremental geometry updates and material updates options are activated on Render Settings and Octane preview sec-
tion. Now to make quicker rendering for static meshes or static meshes+animated meshes is possible. If you use update meshes
option you need OctaneObjectTag on animated objects groups with number is bigger than 0.
– Material2 editor checkboxes fix
– some stability problems
– texturetag assing to selection tag problems fixed
– arealights geometry generation fixes
– huge speedups instance object export and creations
– fix on colors of videopost rendering (histogram)
– memory leak problem on rendering
– sdk 1.17
– new picker algoritms (dof3, mat picker)
– Texture search paths is extending(10 texture paths)
– Save projects command improved (collect any texture from absolute or texture paths to target project folder)
– Sdk 1.16
– Macosx release and demo
– camera film offset is linked to octane camera
– Animation rendering problem fixed

204 — Change Log

Glossary
Anti-Ghosting
The automatic or manual correction involved in the merging a stack of images during the creation of a
High Dynamic Range image. The process aims to correct the strange effect when objects that change
position in the image set is partially visible (like a ghost) in the final HDR image.
AR
Viewing a conceptual three dimensional scene in context to see how it might look in the real world.
Augmented Reality
Viewing a conceptual three dimensional scene in context to see how it might look in the real world.
Depth Buffer
A grey scale image map that stores depth coordinates of all objects in a three dimensional scene. The
lighter the objects are, the further they are from the camera. This image map provides a perception of
depth and is used as a means to adjust the camera focus or the depth of field during compositing.
Depth of Field
The distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an
image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance at a time, the decrease in sharpness is
gradual on each side of the focused distance, so that within the DOF, the unsharpness is imperceptible
under normal viewing conditions. source: wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field)
Diffuse
Amount of diffusion, or the reflection of light photons at different angles from an uneven or granular sur-
face. Used for dull, non-reflecting materials or mesh emitters.
Diffuse material
Used for dull, non-reflecting materials or mesh emitters.
205 — Glossary
DoF
Effective Focus Range

EXR
A high-dynamic range image file format.
Field of View
The extent of the observable world that is seen at any given moment. In case of optical instruments or
sensors it is a solid angle through which a detector is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation. source:
wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view)
Focus Range
FoV
The extent of the observable world that is seen at any given moment. In case of optical instruments or
sensors it is a solid angle through which a detector is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation. source:
wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view)
206 — Glossary
Gamma
The most powerful electromagnetic radiation produced by intensely hot objects in the universe. The
rays classified under gamma have a very small wavelength but are the strongest thus, producing a
very high energy form of light. In 3D rendering, gamma refers to the function or attribute used to code or
decode luminance for common displays. The computer graphics industry has set a standard gamma
setting of 2.2 making it the most common default for 3D modelling and rendering applications.
Glossy
The measure of how well light is reflected from a surface in the specular direction, the amount and way
in which the light is spread around the specular direction, and the change in specular reflection as the
specular angle changes. Used for shiny materials such as plastics or metals.
Glossy material
Used for shiny materials such as plastics or metals.
HDR
An image which presents more than 8 bit per color channel unlike most common image formats.
High Dynamic Range

An image which presents more than 8 bit per color channel unlike most common image formats.
IES
The moniker for the aesthetic lighting of enclosed areas and/or open spaces to invoke an atmosphere,
focus, mood or tone by harnessing and enhancing the effects of the illumination from various light
sources. As lighting was scientifically studied and standards were set by the Illuminating Engineering
Society of North America founded in 1906, the term IES evolved to broadly include the representation
and profiles of artificial lighting in 3D graphics and visualization. In computer graphics, an IES light is
the lighting information representing the real-world lighting values for specific light fixtures. For more
information, visit http://www.ies.org/lighting/.
207 — Glossary
Independent Software Vendor

An individual or business that builds, develops and sells consumer or enterprise software. Although
ISV-provided software is consumed by end users, it remains the property of the vendor. An ISV is also
known as a software publisher.
Interactive Photorealistic Rendering

Provides artists a quick preview of the image prior to the final render, and efficiently allows for adjusting
some elements in the scene such as lights, shaders and textures interactively. An IPR image contains
shading and lighting data including some for visibility, in addition to the software render.
IPR
Provides artists a quick preview of the image prior to the final render, and efficiently allows for adjusting
some elements in the scene such as lights, shaders and textures interactively. An IPR image contains
shading and lighting data including some for visibility, in addition to the software render.
ISV
An individual or business that builds, develops and sells consumer or enterprise software. Although
ISV-provided software is consumed by end users, it remains the property of the vendor. An ISV is also
known as a software publisher.
LDR
Image formats that have 8 bits per color channel such as the common image formats JPEG, PNG, GIF
among others.
Low Dynamic Range

Image formats that have 8 bits per color channel such as the common image formats JPEG, PNG, GIF
among others.
Material
The representation of the surface or volume properties of an object.
Mix material
Used to mix any two material types.
208 — Glossary
Mixed
The ratio of diffuse and specular reflection.
NGE
Node Graph Editor
OpenVDB
Dreamworks’ open-source C++ library housing the data structures and tools implementation for storing
and manipulating volume data, like smoke and other amorphous materials. The purpose of OpenVDB
is mostly to have an efficient way to store volumetric data in memory and on disk. It has evolved into a
more general toolkit that also lets you accomplish other things, such as fracturing volumes, converting
meshes to volumes and vice versa. However, it does not include a computational fluid dynamics
solver, and therefore it cannot procedurally generate smoke or fire. OpenVDB is fully integrated as a lib-
rary in OctaneRender. For more information about OpenVDB, check at http://www.openvdb.org/.
Raw
In HDR imaging, this refers to minimally processed HDR image formats. Raw files can have 12 or 14
bits per color channel, although the available dynamic range might be cut down due to noise.
Specular
Amount of specular reflection, or the mirror-like reflection of light photons at the same angle. Used for
transparent materials such as glass and water.
Specular material
Used for transparent materials such as glass and water.
209 — Glossary
TMO
Maps HDR images to standard displays which have a limited dynamic range. The more prominent
TMOs are Mantiuk’06, Reinhard’02, Drago, and Durand.
Tone Mapping
A term referring to various methods of “converting” HDR images into a viewable format.
Tone Mapping Operator

Maps HDR images to standard displays which have a limited dynamic range. The more prominent
TMOs are Mantiuk’06, Reinhard’02, Drago, and Durand.
Virtual Reality
Immersively engaging and experiencing depth perception in a three dimensional scene through stereo
vision goggles and head-mounted displays.
VR
Immersively engaging and experiencing depth perception in a three dimensional scene through stereo
vision goggles and head-mounted displays.
Z-Buffer
Z-Depth
210 — Glossary
Index
D
depth of field 47
diffuse material 21, 67, 69, 85, 110, 137, 198
E
EXR 22, 31, 131, 151, 194
F
field of view 49
FoV 48
G
gamma 31, 33, 43, 57, 112, 131
glossy material 21, 72, 76, 163
H
HDR 131
I
IES 63-64, 81, 84, 86, 119
M
mix material 21, 76, 112, 114, 116
O
OpenVDB 96, 172-173, 176
S
specular material 21, 74, 76, 86, 137
211 — Index
T
tone mapping 31
Z
z-buffer 24
z-depth 1, 30, 149, 151
212 — Index

C4 DPlugin Manual

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OctaneRender™ for Maxon® Cinema 4D® Plugin Manual

1The representation of the surface or volume properties of an object.

1The representation of the surface or volume properties of an object.

Demo version limitations

What’s New on V3 Renderer Core

Overhaul of the integration kernels

Downloading and Installing the Plugin

Setting the Plugin into Cinema 4D

Troubleshooting the Installation

Activating the Plugin

Starting the Plugin

CREATING A SHORTCUT FOR THE LIVE VIEWER

Using the Plugin

Quick Startup – Setup a Scene and Render

13 — Using the Plugin

14 — Using the Plugin

15 — Using the Plugin

Octane Dialog - Live Viewer

16 — Using the Plugin

Performance tips for LV:

17 — Using the Plugin

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19 — Using the Plugin

1The representation of the surface or volume properties of an object.

20 — Using the Plugin

Octane Diffuse1 Material2: Creates Octane diffuse material.

21 — Using the Plugin

1A high-dynamic range image file format.

22 — Using the Plugin

Using the Kernels

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1The representation of the surface or volume properties of an object.

30 — Using the Plugin

Camera Imager Settings

1A high-dynamic range image file format.

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