OctaneRender™ Standalone 1.10 Tweet

[abstrax]

1.1.1 will be fun

Any ideas when the new good stuff will be released as a beta,Marcus?

As usual: When we are ready and as soon as possible. Maybe tomorrow, maybe beginning of next week. Should be only days, not weeks or months.

[Refracty]

Also nach Karneval Kölle Alaaf.
Sounds great

[ara]

Just downloaded the 1.1 version and fired up my previous project to see how it performs. To my surprise I see 40% speed drop, but even bigger issue is the look change. The whole glass tile wall is now a busy mess. I clocked 2 minute renders to illustrate the issue. The whole scene is illuminated with a single 4000x2000px HDR image. I tried to enable and disable importance samping from the environment and smoothing from the glass material. Disabling importance samping gives back most of the performance, but neither fixes the look. Seems to affect all kernels. Stats for the images below.

Octane Render 1.0 RC 3
198 s/px , 3.38 Ms/sec, 00:02:01
27 Textures, 2096553 Tris, 5 Meshes, 2 GPUs, 785.8/983/2560 MB

Octane Render 1.1
120 s/px , 2.06 Ms/sec, 00:02:01
27 Textures, 2096553 Tris, 5 Meshes, 2 GPUs, 816.2/905/2560 MB

Rendered with two 570GTX cards and Nvidia driver version 310.70.

Edit: Just noting that Houdini's Mantra also produces the smoother look of the tiles with that mesh and environment map.

[roeland]

I don't know why the look of that glass wall changed so much, maybe something is stuffing up the normals. Can you reproduce this problem if you render only a few glass tiles? Is it possible to send us this scene (or part of it)?

--
Roeland

[ara]

Found the problem. Obj mesh exported from Houdini lacks normal (vn) definitions. Re-saving the file from Modo adds the normals (and rounds other values a bit) and the mesh behaves as expected in Octane 1.1. Version 1.0 and prior seem to work fine without normal definitions. I guess I have to rethink my workflow a bit if this is permanent change. I can upload example files a bit later if needed.

Edit: Here you go. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/76294644/forums/octane/glass_tile_test.zip

[roeland]

This is a problem with the new OBJ parser, it's not calculating shading normals for certain OBJ files. It will be fixed in a later release.

Check if Houdini can export vertex normals or smoothing groups. If it can export smoothing groups you can do so and enable using smooth groups in the OBJ import settings (You can add everything to one smoothing group). If this isn't possible, enable using smoothing groups in Octane, and at the top of the OBJ file insert a line "s 1" (open it with notepad). In any case if Octane has to calculate vertex normals, set the maximum smoothing angle to 89, so it doesn't smooth straight angles.

--
Roeland

[andw]

Well then after that there's SSD.... ~275mb/s for SATA2 and ~550 mb/s for SATA3 effectively.

I use RAM Drive (4Gb space is enough in most cases) for OBJ file and textures placement... so there is no more I/O bottleneck Typical transfer rate is about 6..7 Gb/s... and without any wearing out

[mauricesteenbergen]

I use RAM Drive (4Gb space is enough in most cases) for OBJ file and textures placement... so there is no more I/O bottleneck Typical transfer rate is about 6..7 Gb/s... and without any wearing out

Wow, thanks for the tip on this RAM disk thing.

I found one here that's free up onto 4GB: http://memory.dataram.com/products-and- ... e/ramdisk/
which I found more than enough for my scenes. Everything is much faster now!

[kavorka]

I use RAM Drive (4Gb space is enough in most cases) for OBJ file and textures placement... so there is no more I/O bottleneck Typical transfer rate is about 6..7 Gb/s... and without any wearing out

Wow, thanks for the tip on this RAM disk thing.

I found one here that's free up onto 4GB: http://memory.dataram.com/products-and- ... e/ramdisk/
which I found more than enough for my scenes. Everything is much faster now!

Wait, how does this work? It speeds up import time? If this is true, i need to try it to speed up my animations. import/export is 30 sec a frame right now...

[mauricesteenbergen]

Wait, how does this work? It speeds up import time? If this is true, i need to try it to speed up my animations. import/export is 30 sec a frame right now...

I created a RAM disk, and I've put the Octane executable, the project file and the assets (textures, objects) in there. Feels like the software is responding faster now too while navigating a scene.

I've setup the C4D export script to read the Octane Executable from RAM disk, and to write the objects there too. Finished renders are written elsewhere. Really worth a try.

EDIT: Tutorial is here: http://blog.laptopmag.com/faster-than-a ... a-ram-disk