Just a quick and festive test. Turns out the IOR of red wine at 20 degrees centigrade is 1.3377. Thanks god for places on the internet where you can find this invaluable information. PMC, GTX 580, about 15 mins but I hadn't changed any of the hot pixel settings. Anyway, Octane 4 Max right out of the ...

I have to say I've been making comparisons between Octane and other GPU / unbiased renderers out there. Although it's by far and away the newer product, IMHO Octane offers significant benefits in terms of performance and flexibility. I've looked at coming up to speed with interfaces for a number of ...

Heh; my credit card is armed and ready lads.

It looks great, I have a few questions: did I hear in the video somewhere support for Vray materials or was this just a fevered dream? WRT instancing, do you mean instancing in the 'traditional' sense (take a tree, instance it a thousand times and lose no memory) or instancing on the graphic card so ...

My credit card is armed and ready - bring it on!!!

It doesn't feel as though mixing the two would be a huge step for them - or at least, it seems as though it would be less problematic than instancing. Still, it's a great product; I hope they can keep their development momentum going, it's just a lot more fun than Vray. Being able to experiment ...

They're HDR. The sun and sky system is really great, but without cloud the end result is always very 'Mediterranean'. I'm just outside London, and HDR provides a somewhat more English feel - only rain could improve it ;)

Actually, that's not strictly true; being able to mix sun or direct light ...

Got it - thanks! Silicon Graphics leant me an Onyx reality engine once upon a time - 3 years later the same chip set was in the Nintendo 64. My rule of thumb is that from graphics supercomputer to commodity hardware is 3 years - roll on 2014!

It does seem to be mirrored; I'm not certain Evermotion intended the trees to be imaged this close up, but if you can..! Grass is actually that billboard technique using a single image scattered - it's far more flexible than I'd have given it credit for. Here's the question though; given the size of ...

Test for trees and grass (obviously!). Trees are Evermotion, grass is from file elsewhere in this forum (thanks, btw). Card is GFX 580, environment is HDRI. This render took an hour, but honestly there was little visual improvement over the one that took 10 minutes. The downside is the set is quite ...