It's been quite a while since our last release, but as abstrax elaborately explained in this development update, Octane had to be completely taken apart to its elementary building blocks and carefully reassembled piece by piece - which turned out to be a humongous amount of work - to accommodate some very powerful new features that will make Octane slicker than ever and extremely attractive for animation rendering.
One of these brand spanking new features is support for the Alembic file format which is coming in OctaneRender 1.5. Alembic is rapidly becoming the standard in the vfx industry to efficiently store a baked representation of animated scene data (i.e. animated vertex positions and animated transforms that result from an arbitrarily complex animation and simulation process). With Octane 1.5, it will be possible to render an animation that was exported from your favourite modeling app to the Alembic format with the Octane standalone version or send it off to the cloud for blazingly fast rendering with Octane Cloud edition.
One of the more fundamental changes in Octane 1.5 is the addition of the concept of time represented in the UI by a time slider and shutter time attribute, which allow you to scrub through an animation in real-time with motion blur (only camera motion blur in Octane 1.5):
In the following video (rendered in real-time on 4x GTX 680), we've imported a camera path that was originally created in Maya and exported to Alembic format. We can preview the animation in real-time and alter the shutter speed, resulting in more or less camera motion blur. (the animation scrubbing is actually much smoother in real life (~25 fps) than what you see in the video because of full screen capturing).
More previews to come soon, so stay seated/tuned... (moving/deformable meshes and primary visibility are next)
Cheers!
The OctaneRender team
