kraken wrote:Sure. User error.
Make a cylinder 32 sides. Add a material with nodes. Looks like junk. I'm sure its my fault.
Thanks for the help.
Hmm, ok. Yes, it is your fault.
So I created a cylinder and rendered it with Octane:
It looks like junk. Now I bevel the edges to the cylinder like so:
Now when I render it, it looks better but still could use some more geometry.
The problem is not with Octane or any renderer, it's because the surface normals are being interpolated from one vertex to another. There are limitations to this technique and you have found them. If you want to understand better read up on Phong shading like here or other sites that talk about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phong_shadingNow you can get shadow terminator errors which causes the edges of the shadows to be blocky. Octane 3 handles this better than version 2 so it will look better when the Blender plugin is updated.