Looking at what Otoy have said (and again, no promises but this is what I understand) is that for individual users with up to two GPUs, Octane and some of the interface programs will become free for any users (even those without a licence currently) and those who do have an existing licence will ...

Thank you good sir!

OK - I'll just have a play to try to get a handle on the new features.

Planetary Environment? Where is that hiding? I haven't seen anything about that.

Thanks - I updated the driver and all is good now. Any hints and tips on using the new features?

Hi Sighman,

I have downloaded the V4 build, downloaded the extra thingy needed when I first opened Carrara after dowloading, set up a little test scene with a plane and some spheres, and I'm not getting a render in the window. I have included a screenshot - there is no indication that it is ...

Very cool - I will look forward to giving it a try. Is it fairly obvious where the new controls are?

That's very odd - there is a setting for saturation in the Render Target panel but it is set at 1 by default and I can't imagine you have set it to 0 accidentally. So I can't think why this happening. I hope Sighman will be able to sort you out.

A couple of notes to help people use the new instance options:

Instance Range - This allows you to set a maximum value, let's say in an example you set it to 10. If you have ten instances then each instance will return a value which increases smoothly from 0 to 1 in 1/10 increments, so if you are ...

Sighman, great thanks. I'm off to play with the new Instance stuff, that sounds cool.

I've not used that specific material but I have rendered stuff with displacement and not noticed a dramatic fall-off in render speed, in fact I have been very impressed at how Octane handles displacement.