OTOY Forums

Hi all,

We would like to let you in on our next move, a major milestone for OctaneRender™. We're very proud to announce
a technology preview of the next version of OctaneRender™ which supports instancing and real-time object transforms.

The long-awaited support for instancing has been one of the most requested features for Octane and is very useful
for rendering objects like vegetation (grass and trees), cities and crowds as it requires the GPU to store only one copy of
an object or group of objects, resulting in huge memory savings on the GPU.

An instance is created once and can be multiplied thousands or even of millions of times. Each instance can also be customized
with unique materials and textures. Every instance can be transformed (rotated, scaled and translated) in real-time and
independently of other instances of the same object.

To support instancing, new node types will be added to the Standalone version on its next release. A new Geometry Group node
will be introduced to pave the way for additional node types making instancing possible at any given position. Enjoy the preview below.

New features in this preview build

Instancing.

New node types:

• Geometry group node: combines all the geometry on its inputs.
  
• Placement: creates a new instance at a different position, using a transform node.
  
• Scatter: creates multiple instances, given a list of transform matrices. A matrix is given as 12 numbers,
  which are the first three rows of the transformation matrix. They are given in row major order.
  
• Material mapping node: creates an instance of a mesh with some materials replaced.

Other:

You can create light sources with instancing. If scaled, the intensity stays the same, the power changes with
the square of the scale factor. IES lights are oriented according to the instance orientation. It is recommended
that objects with light sources are not stretched, but only scaled and rotated.

Screenshots



Videos



Turntable animation made with the in-development Octane for Max plug-in with instancing support:



Please note that the subsequent release with instancing is more like a technology preview, there is no support for
exporters yet.

The new Kepler architecture (GTX680, GTX690 and others) is not supported yet. We have not been able yet to get satisfactory performance with
the new CUDA version required for these cards.

The packages can be downloaded from our Release Candidate Testing Forum.

Yours,

The OctaneRender team

Thankyou for the update, I'm assuming that when you say instancing is not running with the exporters that also inccludes the integrated renderers ( max/maya ) ?

The integrated plug-ins with instancing are in development, expect some news about the Max plug-in very soon

btw, the video of the grassy hills was made by Karba using a test version of the Octane for Max plug-in with instancing.

I'll be waiting for the Maya instancing myself. Not sure what the latest is on this - Is the daylight 'glass' pass through ( alpha ) working properly now? if not when is it going to be sorted?

can't wait to try it out, but I only use the max plugin these days, so hopefully real soon

Camera Clipping please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Elvissuperstar007 wrote:Camera Clipping please!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

+1

At last!!!!
Thanx so much it is a so great news!

how do i use the scatter node??

So, how do we export IES lights to use their normal for the orientation?
Do we export as a separate object and import (I'm using Blender, and the exporter doesn't support instances yet). Do they actually need to be instances?

Had a big render job come in this week, so didnt have time to mess with the new version. But with this project, I could have used the new falloff node as well as IES lights not orientated to the world access.

Looking forward to messing with the new toys