We are excited to make available the first release candidate of Octane 2025.1. Thanks again to all those who reported issues, and sent us feedback.
2025.1 Feature Highlights
- Rest Attributes: Support for rest attributes on meshes with animated vertices
- New Vectron Texture Displacement: Support for texture displacement in Vectron and Volume SDF nodes
- New Spectral LensFX: Matches the physically accurate measured effects of real world cameras lenses
- New Chaos Texture System: Overhauled the Chaos texture node with a number of new features and attributes
- Native Decal Support: New system in core to support easy and efficient placement of surface decals on geometry
- Render Network Integration in core: The Render Network web service and UX is now available in core as a native window panel
- Metal-RT: Major speed and memory improvements to hardware acceleration on Apple M3 and M4 devices with scenes using non-triangle geometry
- Speed/Quality Volume Rendering Slider: Increasing this value means the performance will be boosted and the rendering quality will get degraded as a result, but the balance can now be tuned by the user
- 11 new blend modes for output AOV layers
Rest Attributes
Rest attributes remove texture shifting/distortion when using a texture projection that is not UV mapped (no UVs on the mesh) on a mesh with animated vertices. When enabled, the projections will use rest vertex positions and normals to calculate the UVW coordinates. Rest attributes don’t change during the animation so the texture mapping remains consistent.
Rest attributes must be supported by the plugin and can be used by enabling
Use rest attributes pin in a projection node with support for it.When importing a geometry archive,
Rest attributes must be enabled in the archive's import settings (e.g. set it to From bind pose for FBX or From animation time for Alembic). From file assumes that the FBX or Alembic file was produced by octane (e.g. exported to orbx via OctaneRender plugin that supports rest attributes).Vectron Displacement
The new Vectron displacement node lets you displace a Vectron or a Volume SDF with an input texture.
It works in real time, at any scale, and is compatible with complex SDF trees or Mesh Volume SDF. You can also use a field texture to limit the area of action.
You can achieve virtually endless detail by stacking noises on top of each other giving you great results at minimal cost.
Spectral LensFX - physically accurate rendering with real world camera data
This version introduces a realistic lens camera which produces aberrations and other effects similar to real glass camera lenses. The effects included are:
- Bokeh
- Optical vignetting.
- Lens imperfections: such as soft focus, soft edges, and barrel distortion.
- Chromatic aberration
A series of images showing different bokeh effects with different settings:
Imperfections can also be added to bokeh effects:
Below is a sample image generated using the new realistic lens camera:
Overhauled Chaos Texture System
The Chaos texture node has been updated with the following new features.
- Support for projections other than
Mesh UV. - Use as a normal map with corrected rotation.
- Distort the grid with a texture.
- Distort the grid with an internal noise.
- Seed input controlling the main mapping randomization.
- Tile transform to offset all tiles' rotation/scale/translation.
- Rotation steps on random rotation.
- Option to disable blending.
- Increased max blending exponent.
- Option to colorize the hexagonal tiles for visualization purposes.
Native Decal Support
The decal feature allow you to project textures onto surfaces, adding visual details like dirt, damage or patterns without altering the underlying geometry. Decals are only compatible with mesh geometries.
Because of the complexity of the Octane materials, it is necessary to specify which channel receives the decal by connecting a decal texture node to the appropriate channel.
To help position the decal in 3D, you can use the decal wire-frame, which can be toggled using the decal wire-frame button located next to the sub-sample button under the render viewport in standalone.
Here you can find a sample scene with a simple decal setup:
Render Network Integration in Core
The Render Network service is directly integrated into Octane's core workspace to provide a more seamless experience for users who take advantage of its computational resources. You can dock the new Render Network browser like any other work pane or keep it in a separate window and check your uploaded scenes and render jobs directly from Octane.
Please note that the Render Network integration is only available on Windows and Linux for now.
Metal-RT optimized HW acceleration on Apple devices
This version improves support for hardware acceleration on Apple M3 and M4 hardware by adding support for non-triangle primitives such as hair, particles, texture displacement and analytic lights.
This means that scenes that use non-triangle geometry will be also able to leverage the HW instead of falling back to the software implementation as before. Scenes with large amounts of triangles as well as other primitives will initially benefit most from this approach.
Below is a performance comparison using a synthetic test scene on an Apple M4Pro chip. Please note the performance may not be indicative of the final version since there's still some work to do.
Neu Rungholt medieval village by "kescha"
Octane Server (Experimental)
The new
Octane server node allows submitting scene to a octane server and obtain result of the rendering by the network. The server can currently be another Standalone app instance or a separate Octane Server app.This is an experimental feature which currently works in Octane Standalone only on Windows and with limited Linux support. To enable it go to
Settings -> Application, enable the Enable experimental node graphs checkbox, press OK and restart OctaneHere you can find a scene with a minimal setup that uses a server instance on the same computer. In order to start the server in a separate instance of Octane Standalone go to
Octane Server -> Start.All Changes Since Version 2024.1.1
New features
- Added support for decals.
- Added a realistic lens camera node, with a choice of real world lenses to simulate.
- Addded a render pass which tells where the camera generates valid rays, and what the average throughput of camera rays is.
- Added new experimental Octane Server. To make this visible, go to
Preferences -> Applicationand check the "Enable experimental node graphs" setting. This is only available in Standalone Studio+ (Windows) and Standalone Prime (Mac OS). - Added support for rest position and normal attributes. It can be used in projections (e.g. XYZ to UVW) to make UV coordinates consistent if the mesh geometry is animated. In standalone, FBX and Alembic geometry archives now have a setting to import rest positions. Projections (triplanar, box, cylindrical, perspective, spherical, XYZ to UVW) now have "Use rest position" pin. If set to true, the rest attributes will be used for the calculations, when they are available.
- Speed/Quality Volume Rendering Slider: There is a new pin added to each kind of medium called "Ray step increase factor". Larger values means using larger ray marching step lengths for indirect rays. Increasing this value means the performance will be boosted and the rendering quality will get degraded as a result, but the balance is in the user's hands. This pin defines the increase factor as percentage value. Regular value range will be from 0% to 100%. But it can support a maximal value of 300%, i.e. the step length can be scaled three times at most.
- 11 new blend modes for output AOV layers:
- Lighter color (SDR only)
- Darker color (SDR only)
- Linear burn (SDR only)
- Vivid light (SDR only)
- Linear light (SDR only)
- Pin light (SDR only)
- Hard mix (SDR only)
- Hue (SDR only)
- Saturation (SDR only)
- Color (hue + saturation) (SDR only)
- Luminosity (SDR only)
octane.render.start()will only return when no updates are pending.- Added
octane.json.decode: Parses a JSON string - Added
octane.json.encode: Serialize a Lua value to a JSON string. - Added
octane.scriptgraph.PROPS_BIT_MASK_PIN_INFOto initializePT_BIT_MASKinput linkers in script graphs. - Fixed
octane.scriptgraph.getInputValueforPT_BIT_MASKinput linkers.
- Fixed magnitude of OSL differentials generated for UV projection when used in an environment map.
- Fixed possible crash on shutting down Octane on Windows.
- Fixed hang when trying to load certain IES files.
- Fixed bump mapping when using an orthographic camera
- Fixed regression making some old scenes appear darker by adding a compatibility mode that allows using second highlights.
- Fixed UI getting disabled while a baking texture node was being updated.
- Fixed issue causing the render not to update properly after selecting a new image file in a node that has BCx compression enabled.
- Fixed an application crash that occurred when the denoising operation was cancelled.
- Fixed texture in rendered image not being updated when you load a new texture file into an image texture node with texture compression (BCx) enabled.
- Fixed progress bar not getting removed from the status bar after loading a saved render state in the Standalone.
- Fixed OSL UV, OSL projection, matcap and instance position getting mirrored when used inemission distribution inputs and texture environments
- Fixed discrepancy between transforms on surface textures, and environment or emission distribution textures. For all of those a positive rotation angle
- Fixed appearance of metallic materials inside other dielectrics. Before these materials would sometimes be rendered too dark.
- Fixed textures rendered wrong on very large scenes.
- Fixed issue causing OctaneRender Standalone to jump to the front if you hover over the node graph editor.
- Fixed artefacts on large volumes in null material nodes which have high density absorption and emission.
- Fixed potential application crash when displacement was applied to geometry without UVs
- Fixed potential render failure if a shader had a large amount of texture inputs with delayed evaluation
- Fixed post processing environment compositing when using alpha channel + environment render AOV + post processing render AOV (with "Include environment" enabled). The post processing render AOV node has a new compatibility mode to preserve the old behavior for existing scenes.
- Fixed incorrect premultiplication for non-z-depth info render AOVs and the shadow render AOV when used in a render AOV. The render AOV output AOV layer node has a new compatibility mode to preserve the old behavior for existing scenes.
- Fixed incorrect alpha premultiplication for some info render AOVs when displaying in the viewport or saving as TIFF files with premultiplied alpha.
- Fixed post volume effects fog base color being interepreted as XYZ, not linear sRGB. The post volume effects node has a new compatibility mode to preserve the old behavior for existing scenes.
- Fixed incorrect alpha compositing for post volume effects. The post volume effects node has a new compatibility mode to preserve the old behavior for existing scenes.
- Fixed ccoating layer of the Standard Surface material not coloring the transmission as expected. This has been fixed and a compatibility mode has been added to keep the changes from affecting existing scenes.
- Fixed inconsistent appearance of glossy materials inside specular materials with nested dielectrics enabled. The appearance would sometimes depend on priorities of other materials: if all priorities were the same it would switch as if the nested dielectrics were disabled.
- Fixed the undo action of collapsing a Scene node failing in certain circumstances.
- Fixed 4D hash noise in OSL (
noise("hash", uvw, t)) - Fixed an invalid pin access error when using a standard surface material with a displacement node input.
- Fixed soft light blend mode in output AOV layers.
- Fixed a potential application crash when closing a project.
- Fixed auto bump on vertex displacement if using the second or third UV set.
- Fixed too strong bump mapping in material previews using the sphere view
- Fixed loading of animated VDBs with animated import parameters.
- Fixed broken fast rounded edges.
- Fixed potential memory leak while updating the scene geometry.
- OSL textures specifying
[[string variant = "image"]]on an input now receive the same UV coordinates as image textures. You may usetransform(1.0 / M, uv - vector(0.5, 0.5, 0)) + vector(0.5, 0.5, 0)to get the same rotation and scaling behaviour as image texture nodes. - The specular color input on metal material has an RGB node by default
- Added "UV coordinate with transform" node. This is similar to the existing "UV coordinate" node but it has a transform input and the output value is affected by UVW transform nodes.
- The "merge unwelded vertices" preference can be used with FBX files.
- Hair uses now less memory and renders a bit faster.
- Vertex displacement takes the “merge unwelded vertices” option into account.
- Directional lights can be transformed by placement nodes. This only affects the light direction, not the spread angle.
- Add missing "Volume scatter" cryptomatte for scattering medium inside null material on macOS.
- Added the rendering scene's analytic light count into the geometry statistics.
- Improvements to Chaos texture
- Support projections other than Mesh UV.
- Added option to use as Normal map with corrected rotation.
- Added option to distort the grid with a texture.
- Added option to distort the grid with an internal noise.
- Added seed input controlling the main mapping randomization.
- Added tile transform to offset all tiles' rotation/scale/translation.
- Added rotation steps on random rotation.
- Added option to disable blending.
- Increased max blending exponent.
- Added option to colorize the hexagonal tiles for visualization purposes.
- Bumped the maximum number of analytic lights from 8 to 32.
- OSL shaders can use differentials from vertex attributes for
Dx() / Dy()and related functions. - You can now use the second and third UV set for bump mapping if the first UV set is constant or not set.
- Improved support for hardware ray tracing using Metal on Apple devices by supporting all primitive types.
- The minimum NVIDIA driver version required is 522.
- The GPU version of Open Image Denoise is supported on CUDA compute model 7 (Volta) and later. The CPU version is used on machines with older models, and on macOS.
- The minimum version of macOS required is 14.5.
Downloads for Studio+ Subscription Users
OctaneRender Studio+ 2025.1 Beta 1 Standalone for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2025.1 Beta 1 Standalone for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2025.1 Beta 1 Standalone for Linux
OctaneRender 2025.1 Beta 1 Standalone for macOS
OctaneRender Studio+ 2025.1 Beta 1 Node for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2025.1 Beta 1 Node for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2025.1 Beta 1 Node for Linux
Happy rendering
Your OTOY team
