by northalex78 » Sat Oct 21, 2023 1:05 am
northalex78
Sat Oct 21, 2023 1:05 am
Hey frankmci, Cool, I like Macs too, many people do as well.
But that doesn't excuse Otoy from breaking their word all the time.
Jules said 2023, it's on the record. Now I hear on this forum that net render is being pushed to 2024, which is literally another 12 months away (the version number not the calendar year). Why do I get the feeling it's now going to be like brigade... forever coming, but never done. How many times has the CEO said something about Brigade coming soon?
And it's not just the CEO's word, it's the announcements. The 2023 alpha page says network rendering "IS" back, but it's not. It reads like they're actually saying it will come back in 2023.2 (so, next version?).
So I ask about clarification and @mojave says "check the alpha post, it tells you. Oh also, we've changed our mind on what the alpha post said, we're not actually doing it, so that post is actually not a help to anyone". It's so confusing.
- Jules said 2023
- Alpha release post says "is" but is talking about 2023.2 (not made yet)
- This release post for 2023.1 then has a comment about "oh we're doing either of the above, it's pushed a year".
To me it feels like Otoy is just about chasing new things that look good in press releases. Now the CEO's twitter posts are about things like making RNDR do stable diffusion (or AI, subtle difference). Sure, cool OK I suppose RNDR value-go-up is nice, but Otoy can you ALSO please stick to the core promises you make to your user base? Core FUNCTIONALITY.
More and more people ARE using Macs for daily building. Apple Silicon is blazing fast, eats sims for breakfast, runs cool, and uses low wattage. PCs with GPUs are great for rendering though and Macs suck. Again I feel like the subtext here, the quiet part from Otoy that they don't say out loud, is that everyone should just use RNDR for rendering, and stop asking about network-rendering coming back. The fact is, RNDR is not cost effective for us. We need multiple nightly test renders of shots and scenes, and if we pumped all that through RNDR, we'd quickly use up the project budget. Not to mention the time it takes to prep shots - bake this, bake that, alembic something, no XP or other plugins, upload big ORBx files, hope there are no errors, download passes that are not even in separate folders. Online farms might be good for FINAL high-res renders at high samples, but they're terrible for daily driving, test shots, animatics, etc. All the stuff that's 95% of the real work in a project.
Look, the new features are great, I suppose. I'd still prefer to do chromatic aberration and flares in post 90% of the time - because those are things you want to dial in and quickly adjust, not wait for a 4k, 3000sample frame (x100 frames) to clean up if you need to re-do it based on client feedback. But cool anyway. It's just also a shame some of the coding time couldn't go to a feature PROMISED BY THE CEO and other posts. Just imagine if Otoy could not only have a great render engine, but you could have faith in whatever roadmap announcements the leadership makes. Surely trusting what the CEO says is a thing for shareholders or investors? I don't know maybe it's not high on the priority list... like network rendering it seems.