Complex Mesh Limitations and Questions Tweet

[rabassa]

Hello!


I'm playing around with the demo version of Octane on my Mac.
The Test Suite files work fine and any simple objects I create in Blender work as well but anything complex seems to choke Octane - Is this because it is a demo version?

Also in Blender you can assign different materials to groups of vertices within a Mesh - is this possible in Octane?

thnx!
-rich

[kubo]

dunno quite you mean by choke, but just yesterday I loaded a 5M polygon scene with some textures and even thou it took more time than usual voxelizing it worked fine, almost toped my 470 1,2Gb vRam but it went smooth. But if you use your display gpu to render and use pathtracing your OS could "suffer" a bit, that's why most of us have a dedicated gpu to do the rendering. I can actually play Black Ops in my 260 and render away in my 470, that's as cool as it gets

[abstrax]

Hello!


I'm playing around with the demo version of Octane on my Mac.
The Test Suite files work fine and any simple objects I create in Blender work as well but anything complex seems to choke Octane - Is this because it is a demo version?

Also in Blender you can assign different materials to groups of vertices within a Mesh - is this possible in Octane?

thnx!
-rich

Depends on your hardware, too: Everything (geometry, textures, additional data) has to be loaded into the VRAM and if there isn't enough of it Octane gives up. Which graphics card are you using and how much RAM does it have?

Cheers,
Marcus

[rabassa]

Hey Abstrax,

I have an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS wuth 512 MB ram
Is that good, bad?

thnx,
rich

[abstrax]

Hey Abstrax,

I have an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS wuth 512 MB ram
Is that good, bad?

thnx,
rich

That's pretty bad. Sorry, for the bad news, but if you plan to work with complex or moderately complex scenes, you will probably need at least a GPU of the GeForce 200 series (260 or higher) with 1GB VRAM. And it's starting to be real fun with a GPU of the GeForce 400 series (460 or higher). Between each successive GeForce generation is quite a jump in performance. If you get a chance to play with Octane on a newer GPU, try it and you will see, what I mean.

For complex scenes you might need quite a bit of RAM in your desktop (maybe 2GB or higher), too.

Cheers,
Marcus

[rabassa]

Well not all terrible as I am planning to buy a new Mac sometime this year. I was just on apple looking at the Mac pro. They use ATI Radeon graphics cards... Now bear with me as I am not technical at all but can Octane run one one of these machines?


Thanks!
Rich

[GeoPappas]

Well not all terrible as I am planning to buy a new Mac sometime this year. I was just on apple looking at the Mac pro. They use ATI Radeon graphics cards... Now bear with me as I am not technical at all but can Octane run one one of these machines?

No. Octane requires CUDA which is a proprietary technology from NVIDIA.

[abstrax]

Well not all terrible as I am planning to buy a new Mac sometime this year. I was just on apple looking at the Mac pro. They use ATI Radeon graphics cards... Now bear with me as I am not technical at all but can Octane run one one of these machines?


Thanks!
Rich

Yep, GeoPappas is right - you definitely need an NVIDIA graphics card. There is no way around it.

Cheers,
Marcus

[rabassa]

Well Shoot - any plans to expand Octane to other graphic cards? I don't think I would have a choice of cards on a new Mac Pro....

-rich

[kubo]

I believe that ATI support is not on the short term list, but I think I've read quite some threads on NVIDIA gpus for MAC, do some digging on the forums 'cause I know there has been some success there. Good luck