Octane VS Corona

[RobSteady]

Corona v7.1
Default settings
i7 2600
10 min

Octane for 3ds Max 2.10
(Coherent mode enabled, Path Term. Power: 0.3)
2 x GTX Titan
10 min (11 sec)

[RobSteady]

Not bad at all for a free program and an old cpu...
Octane needs highlight compression for brighter interiors and less burnouts!

[gueoct]

Interiors are definitely THE weak point of Octane...

There are projects (interiors), where i have to switch to VRay because
with Octane i can´t meet the deadline

[Chris]

The Octane version looks more realistic. You have these subtle color differences in the shadows which the Corona version don't have.

[RobSteady]

Octane definitely looks more realistic since it's unbiased; have not testet Brute force/Brute force with Corona.
And I always liked the color noise in Octane that I've only seen in Maxwell so far.

But highlight compression would be very usefull; most of my clients want these almost unnatural bright interiors.
Right now I'm saving out two different exposed images and mix them in Photoshop...

[acc24ex]

- damn it, yes, theese are pretty close, octane NEEDS to speed up the interiors, it is insanely slow .. it takes a lot more work to set up interios, just because it takes ages to see results to tweak it to perfection..

[voon]

It depends what you're really looking at in the end. I guess renderers also apply the 80/20 rule ... you can easily get something that looks 80% nice with speed, cheating, biasing etc. often its fine and enough. but those that want the last bit of truth in complex jewellery caustics and whatever will probably wait 80% longer for those last 20% of perfection. Some just want to have something looking nice and fairly realistic, and some want true realism.

At least that's what I assume, without any technical background

[glimpse]

Octane definitely looks more realistic since it's unbiased; have not testet Brute force/Brute force with Corona.
And I always liked the color noise in Octane that I've only seen in Maxwell so far.

But highlight compression would be very usefull; most of my clients want these almost unnatural bright interiors.
Right now I'm saving out two different exposed images and mix them in Photoshop...

Rob, thanks for comparison =) Unbiased test render in Corona would be nice addition here =)

Have to agree with the rest Octane noise looks just better - sometimes leaving it isn't a bad thing =) as every camera produce lit bit of it.

As for brightness & all burnouts - You can actually get pretty result in Octane too, it just takes a lot of time to tweak things out - provided functionality is enough. Though I've noticed another thing with Octane. Sometimes image change it's brightness longer You render & if You happy with it while previewing, it might end up slightly different if You leave it to cook for an hour two..

About those "unnatural bright interiors" think it's some sort of a trend that especially realEstate agencies are pushing for.. - in reality architectural photographers use some fill lights (spot & soft-boxes) take multiple exposures & blend things out in order to get appealing image that in reality is rarely seen =) Knowing this we can use that in our advantage too - as evenly lit interior will get clean output faster in Octane =)

in the end have to agree with Voon too - You can get good result in Octane fast enough, but if You start messing around, boy that eats time..whatever hardware You have..

[juanjgon]

The question is ... what happens if you animate something inside the Corona scene, characters with deformations, or soft body simulations, for example? ... and if you animate the sun light, or light sources inside the room?

Of course, a biased solution can be rendered a lot faster than an unbiased one, but you need to fight with the biased render settings to get images without artifacts, and animations without artifacts are sometimes even impossible (or only possible with much higher render times). This is the magic of unbiased renderers like Octane or Arnold, you don't need to spend hours with render settings, and the final animations are always good, without artifacts.

Anyway a biased kernel for Octane could be a game changer for interior visualization and the archviz market.

-Juanjo

[RobSteady]

@ glimpse
Sure, you can tweak it a little bit more but a simple slider for highlight compression would be great.
Is this so complicated to implement?

@juanjgon
For animations it's great, of course!