LiveDB

The Octane DB is OctaneRender’s asset database. The Live DB lets you access materials and groups of nodes and even whole scenes shared by the OctaneRender Community and the OctaneRender Team. The Local DB allows you to access your own locally stored Octane assets making it easier to share assets between scenes and projects..

To access the LiveDB your computer must be connected to the internet.

To open Octane DB go to the Octane render shelf in Maya nad click on the Octane logo (figure 1). This opens up a window with two tabs labeled “LocalDB” and “LiveDB”.

Figure 1 : Open Octane DB by clicking on the Octane logo on the OctaneRender shelf.

Local DB

To store an Octane node such as a shader node graph to your local DB you must first start by creating a folder on your local drive. To do this open the Render Settings window. Under the OctaneRender Settings tab scroll down and expand the Local DB section. Click on the folder icon and use the file browser dialog to pick a location on your local drive (figure 2).

Figure 2 : Use the Path field to establish the location of the LocalDB

Right-click over the LocalDB folder in the LocalDB interface and choose “Add Category”. You can give the category a names such as “Shaders”.  

To save a shader to the local DB open the Shader in the Attribute Editor and click on the Store to Octane DB button. A dialog window will open giving you the option to save to Live DB or Local DB, choose Local DB. Choose the Local DB and the appropriate Category. You can add a custom name and a Description. Click OK to add the node to the LocalDB. You’ll see the new shader appear under the category in the LocalDB interface (Figure 3). To create a custom Thumbnail, right-click over the icon in the interface and choose Make Thumbnail. A smaller interface will open giving you options for the local of the Thumbnail (Figure 4).

Figure 3 : Add a shader to the local DB

Figure 4 : Create a custom thumbnail for your shader.

You can import the shader into other Maya scenes by right clicking over the custom thumbnail and choose import. Files stored in the localDB are saved as ORBX files on your local drive.

LiveDB

The Octane LiveDB is similar to the LocalDB except the files are stored online and are shared among other Octane users via the LiveDB interface.

To use an asset or material for an object in Maya, just select the object and click Create node to assign the LiveDB material to it. When this happens, the material node and all its attributes will be downloaded and will be represented in Maya’s Hypershade window where users can further customize it to suit the object and the current scene (figure 5).

Figure5 : Import Shaders from the LiveDB.