LMI Houdini Octane Suite

The ‘Octane Shot Manager’ significantly enhances the user experience when working with the Octane Render Engine. We’ve removed all the technical hassle typically associated with Solaris and minimized the amount of user input required. In fact, all you need to do is specify the camera—renders will go straight to your hard drive. (In the standard workflow, multiple nodes must be set up before Octane will render.)

With the supplied ‘OctaneLookdev’ node, the user gets a pre-configured lookdev setup that includes all essential elements—Mannequin, Macbeth chart, and chrome & grey balls—ready to go with a single click.



To streamline lookdev and ORBX management, we’ve introduced the ‘Tags Workflow’. Tags are assigned using dedicated ‘Octane Tag’ nodes, allowing users to mark specific sections of the scene (e.g., Landscape, Trees, Animals). These tags can then be isolated within the Octane Shot Manager, enabling focused lookdev with final lighting and render settings.

In the default workflow, switching between scene elements often resets the context—causing a loss of camera, lighting, and Solaris delegate settings, unless explicitly set otherwise.

We mostly use this workflow to export shaded, reusable assets libraries to ORBX and use them in Octane Standalone.

ORBX Management.

We’ve also built the first comprehensive ORBX manager. Baking complex scenes into a single ORBX file was previously limited by machine resources—once the scene reached a certain complexity, baking would fail. Additionally, when working with Render Network, keeping file sizes manageable is critical.

With Octane Tags, users can export individual scene elements with a single click. Each tag is evaluated and exported as its own ORBX file, bypassing system resource limitations. This gives you the freedom to export exactly what you need—when you need it.

To further manage file sizes, we’ve introduced frame-splitting functionality. Whether or not you use tags, sequences can be split into frame blocks, reducing the size of each exported ORBX. Once the export is complete, all components can be merged into a single, optimized ORBX containers.

The ‘Octane Shot Manager’ can also function as a standalone utility to manage ORBX files from any DCC. We plan to extend this architecture to Cinema 4D and Blender Octane in the near future.

Current version:
1.0.0 (Last tested on H20.5.437)

Installation:
Drag and Drop the contents of the archive into your Packages location. Restart Houdini if required. You can safely overwrite existing 'HDAs_LebrovMotionImagery.json'

This Suite requires Octane Engine for Solaris to be installed. ORBX management features requires Standalone octane.exe path to be specified in prerequisites tab. Right click > Save as default value to overwrite your current Octane version.