Octane Guide Project:
Guide Index and Study Path
Guide Index and Study Path
Version 1.3, Updated March 2024
About This Guide
This serves an an index to all the other guides and lays out a recommended learning path through them. It’s going to be updated frequently as new guides come out or get rewritten.
Spreadsheet
This spreadsheet is a list of all the guides in the project with sortable columns. It shows the guide version numbers, when they were last updated, and what version of Octane they’re good through. It also has a list of all the PDFs that are currently available - the goal is to have a full set by the end of the year when they’ve all been updated for at least 2023 if not 2024.
The ones marked in green are current. The yellow ones need to be rewritten, and the red ones are the highest priority for a rewrite.
The gray placeholders exist because some guides were split out, combined, moved, abandoned, or backburnered during the writing process, and gaps in the sequential numbering resulted. Sorry, anyone with OCD :/ I’ll probably fill them in with new guides.
Commenting
Commenting is open (for now). Please don’t abuse it 😊 There’s a section at the end for future topics - feel free to leave ideas in the comments there. The priority this year is getting the current set organized and up to date, but I’ll start generating new ones after that (and possibly during).
PDFs
The PDF of this guide is here.
PDFs are only available for about half the guides at the moment, but as they all get rewritten this year, PDF versions will become available. All of the ones that exist today are here
I. Intro
Learning any render engine is a big job. There are tons of ways through it, and areas that are more interesting (or necessary) to some than others.
All of the guides in this project can be broken down into four subcategories: UI, Materials, Lighting, and Rendering. UI is the UI of Octane itself - where stuff is, how to work with the node editor, etc. Materials and Lighting are self-explanatory. Rendering covers both kernels and post production. The camera guide is lumped into rendering for now even though it’s kind of its own thing.
Here’s a list of all of the guides divided up by category:
UI/Overview
Materials
Basics: Universal Material Build Guide > Universal Material Channels > Material Starter Set > Procedural Patterns
Channel Deep Dive: Normal Maps > Displacement: Part I | Part II | Part III
Advanced: Texture Sets > Mixing and Layering Deep Dive > Volumetrics Overview
Stepthroughs and Utilities: LED Board Project > Billiard Ball Project > Mixing and Layering Stepthrough: C4D | Standalone > Height Map Creator
Lighting
Rendering
Kernels: Scene Optimization > Render Settings > Caustics and Photon Tracing
Color Management: Color Spaces Overview > Color Spaces in C4D & Octane
Post Production: AOV Intro > Passes Deep Dive > Checklist
Other: Hardware Guide > Camera Guide
II. Recommended Reading Order
Getting Started
If you’re brand new to Octane or render engines in general, the Getting Started guide is the way to … wait for it … get started. This will give you an overview of Octane and show where everything is, and then it has a relatively short follow-along walkthrough that goes through the process of creating materials, setting up lights, and doing a quick render. The Live Viewer Guide will show you all the ins and outs of the interface. The Quick Reference Guide was meant as a companion to the Getting Started guide as an easily searchable reference in case you forget where something is or what it does. These is good through Octane 2020 and basic enough to still be applicable to the current version, but it’s top priority for updating over the next few months.
Speeding Up the Workflow
The next step is probably learning a bit about how to render faster. The faster you can iterate, the easier everything else is going to be since waiting for changes to show up is boring and irritating. The Scene Optimization & Kernel Settings guides would be good to give a read through. This guide is also fairly old and will be updated right after the Getting Started guide. The basics are still sound though.
Render settings are tricky, and it’s going to take time to instinctively know which switches to throw when things are taking too long, but this should plant some seeds as you’re going through the learning process.
Color Management
Similarly, even though it’s an advanced topic, the sooner you can learn about Color Management, the better - it affects everything in some way or another, and even if you don’t fully grok it at first, some key things will probably stick in your head as you run into issues along the way. The Color Spaces Overview and Color Management: Octane guides go into a LOT of detail about this, but it’s worth at least skimming through if not a full read.
Materials
From there, probably the next stop on the journey will be getting a handle on modifying materials. The Universal Material Build Guide will get you thinking through any material type in 9 steps or so. If you need more info on each of the channels, the Universal Materials Channels Deep Dive has you covered. If you want a starter set of materials to play with and modify, that’s here. There’s also a Procedural Textures guide for making patterns and stuff, and a Texture Set/SBSAR Workflow guide that will help you get premade texture sets into Octane.
At this point, if you’re not using the node editor, now’s the time. The Octane Node Editor guide will show you how to think about nodes and get you more comfortable with it.
There are a few channels that are pretty complicated and warrant their own guides. These can be addressed now, or when you run into issues with them. Normal Maps aren’t too bad, but aren’t self explanatory, so there’s a Normal Maps guide. Displacement and Mediums are probably the hardest to understand. Displacement has a few guides, and there’s an overview on Mediums in general, but most of the information for medium channels are located in the Universal Materials Deep Dive guide in the latter half. Mixing and layering textures is tricky too - there’s a Deep Dive and Stepthrough Guide on this topic.
Lighting
Lighting is the next major component of Octane. For now, there are only a few guides on this, but more are in the hopper. HDRI lighting is covered in the Environment Deep Dive guide and is probably the easiest and fastest to understand. There’s also a whole guide on Lighting and Emission, and an Interior Lighting Stepthrough. Between these, you should have a handle on at least the technicals of lights in Octane. Indirectly related is the Caustics and Photon Tracing Kernel guide. This is useful for making more realistic renders, but it can really beat on the GPU, so it needs to be done carefully.
AOVs / Post Processing
The last step of the process is post production. Octane’s AOV system has undergone massive changes in the last few versions, so these will all have to be rewritten, but the existing guides should still give some insight into what the AOV system is and how it works.
Everything Else
Finally, there are a few rando ones to look at. The Camera Guide will give some basic information about real world cameras, how they relate to Octane, and how to set up things like depth of field and motion blur. The Hardware Guide is a little out of date, but the basics of how to choose components for a good rendering rig are still valid. There’s are two project walkthroughs: Shader Effector LED Board and Billiard Ball Project that cover C4D integration and good practices for real world projects. There’s a Workflow Efficiency guide for setting up custom presets and a whole series of Resource Management guides that go nerd level 9000 on how Octane works from a system resources standpoint and what you can do to speed up millions of instances or lots of textures or polygons.
Author Notes
OG000 Guide Index version 1.3, Last modified Mar 2024.
Changes from 1.0: Added link to Scene Optimization Guide
Changes from 1.1: Added link to Live Viewer Guide
Changes from 1.2: Changed HDRI guide to Environment Deep Dive and updated language
This guide originally appeared on https://be.net/scottbenson and https://help.otoy.com/hc/en-us/articles/212549326-OctaneRender-for-CINEMA-4D-Cheatsheet
All rights reserved.
The written guide may be distributed freely and can be used for personal or professional training, but not modified or sold. The assets distributed within this guide are either generated specifically for this guide and released as cc0, or sourced from cc0 sites, so they may be used for any reason, personal or commercial.
