The future of Blender + Octane

[matej]

I was thinking about Blender & Octane relationship. We know that:

* RS is going for integration of Octane into 3D packages, which is great and the right way to go, except that it won't happen for Blender, because of conflicting licensing between Blender & Octane SDK for integration. That leaves us with "Octane standalone" and an exporter = the way we work now. But:

* There is no official Octane exporter for Blender 2.5x. We have the great exporter that Lionel (aka Yoyoz) coded months ago and it's still working well for the latest Blender updates. But we cannot expect that this exporter will work for all future versions, like 2.6x. It might work or it might not. Some time in the future, there will possibly be an Octane scene file rewrite that will replace .obj (or maybe not?; see the first point). This might render this exporter useless. We also can't expect support & updates from Lionel, because this was his hobby non RS sanctioned project and it all falls on his available time & will to do updates. Again, he might or he might not.

That's a lot of uncertainty. My questions for RS are:

1.) Will in the future "Octane standalone" & the integrated versions differ in features? And I mean rendering / shading / lighting features, not stuff that is a specific result of the integration. Will Octane development shift to the integrated versions and so will the standalone version lag behind or even be left out?

2.) Will there be an official Octane exporter for Blender 2.5x/2.6x? Has RS any plans on this?

[Alain]

Interesting questions, maybe Cycles "replaces" Octane.
But I can't believe that Cylces ever can beat Octane.
I maybe wrong but I guess Cycles is a one-man-show (Brecht) and behind Refractivesoftware is a strong team.

Maybe there is a law-trick to intergrade Octane in Blender ?
The RS-Team should at least force the development of the exportplugin to have support as well in the future.

Kind regards
Alain

[Proupin]

A day in the life of Open Source software...

[Skwerm]

I tend to try and adopt the options in my workflow that take the least number of steps and are the easiest and fastest to use. As a licensed customer of Octane, I'd like to be able to keep using it into the future. However, if there is no easy and reliable way use Octane with Blender, I imagine I'll switch to Cycles if its results are on-par with Octane's.

If, on the other hand, development of an easy Blender integration (either by RA or by others) is kept up-to-date and is reliable, I'd be inclined to stay with Octane rather than starting up the learning curve of Cycles.

It seems to me that Octane's low cost is one of its best marketing points. And we all know that Blender users are generally bargain shoppers. I would think RA would benefit from aligning itself officially with Blender, but who knows?

[matej]

I doubt the two renderers will offer the same functionality or speed, so I would certainly want to keep on using Octane and rather complement it with Cycles (or viceversa, who knows..), not replace it. That is, if I will be able to export my scenes into Octane in the future...

[Faizol]

Interesting questions, maybe Cycles "replaces" Octane.
But I can't believe that Cylces ever can beat Octane.
I maybe wrong but I guess Cycles is a one-man-show (Brecht) and behind Refractivesoftware is a strong team.

Maybe there is a law-trick to intergrade Octane in Blender ?
The RS-Team should at least force the development of the exportplugin to have support as well in the future.

Kind regards
Alain

Actually, there are a few developers maintaining Cycles. And Cycles come out pretty strong since it's officially backed by Blender Foundation. But that's another story altogether.

Back to Octane. Octane with its low price point is a great tool for Blender users. Vray also follow this strategy (lower price point for Blender users), though Octane's low price is not exclusive to Blender users.

I'm not sure why the GPL license is a hindrance to developing the plugin. Octane itself is not compiled against any GPL'ed libraries. And there are plenty of LGPL'ed based libraries that can be used to bridge the connections between Blender and Octane.

[abreukers]

Hi folks,

We would like to let you know that your thoughts are heard, we will not comment on the comparisons made above, as OctaneRender has its own features and innovations to boast.

However, we cannot disclose any information about future OctaneRender products at this time, until they are announced. Rest assured we are aware of the GPL <> commercial issue with blender, and although there is no plugin for blender currently planned due to these restrictions, we think blender users should be able to continue using OctaneRender stand-alone versions.

Bare in mind that the new plugin product line is not going to change any development road-maps or features of the existing stand-alone engine product.

Cheers!

[convergen]

Are there any plans of creating an official (or atleast updated) exporter plugin for blender 2.5x/2.6?

[Faizol]

Are there any plans of creating an official (or atleast updated) exporter plugin for blender 2.5x/2.6?

quoting abreukers;

Rest assured we are aware of the GPL <> commercial issue with blender, and although there is no plugin for blender currently planned due to these restrictions, we think blender users should be able to continue using OctaneRender stand-alone versions.

Anyway current Octane exporter for Blender is pretty good. And if you need to customize some changes, the python source code is readily available to everyone. It's not hard at all to incorporate any changes once you know the basic of python programming (and how it's used in Blender). But if somehow you can't afford the time to do it, then this forum is perhaps your best friend though it'll take some time for a newer version to be released.

[face]

Are there any plans of creating an official (or atleast updated) exporter plugin for blender 2.5x/2.6?

So much i know, no exporter is official...

face