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And? Did they talk about new features yesterday?

Yeah I'm curious too.. any news on that topic? =) please.

Can't have been anything important.
Can't even find a short news report about the day at Siggraph on the net.
Oh well back to rendering....

And this is the problem... why couldn't have Otoy and the Octane team coordinated the announcement? Why wasn't the SIGGRAPH presentation given more publicity here in addition to being mentioned on Otoy's facebook page and Nvidia's webpage? It's almost as if the CEO needed something to present and the Octane team reluctantly gave him a features list not because they wanted to announce anything but because the felt compelled to for marketing reasons. I understand that the dev team is working hard behind the scenes and that PR is of low priority when you're focused on making major improvements but there's a disconnect between what the suits are saying to the general public (who are ambivalent for the most part) and what the actual userbase is being told.

There's nothing wrong with leaving an abbreviated post ahead of a more formal announcement saying: "These are the short term features that we're working on within the next few months that our CEO announced at SIGGRAPH. We're not ready at the moment but we'll give you guys more information as we get closer towards releasing Beta builds."

This is what was mentioned yesterday:

Octane 1.5 will be coming out in a few months. Besides the Render Cloud beta program, improvements have been made to the lights algorithm that will net a 4x improvement in speed (nice!!!). Alembic support has been added primarily to facilitate moving data to and from the Render Cloud (No clarification as to what Alembic features will and will not be supported at this time). Octane standalone will receive improvements to UV tools. Improvements are being made to the API.

There was a Q&A where you could submit questions online via chat but I wasn't able to stick around past the initial Octane update announcement. I inquired about a rough timeline for 3D motion blur and displacement. Another viewer asked something about improved texture handling and memory usage. Again I couldn't listen to the whole talk so I'm not sure if either question was asked or what the reply was.

Thank you Mosfet for info !

Those are nice improvements to be looking forward to. I did think we would get more info on the cloud like detailed pricing options.

I still can't find any info other than the bit above by MOSFET (thanks man)
I did find reference to a partnership between Otoy and Silicon Studio from the 22nd but I can't tell if Octane is an asset in that? Otoy don't even mention Octane in their press release. I wonder if Octane would get more customers if people knew it existed

Anyway a 4x speed improvement kinda seems like it ought to be impossible to do with the present basis of Octane. I wonder if the core is being ripped out for a Brigade based product instead and that will be the basis for the cloud version? Something more like Nvidia Optix perhaps? Octane tech does seem to be a bit of a limb in the wrong direction given Otoys other activities/direction and the animation/film/visualisation industry has more of a real time emphasis. Alembic support would be another nod in that direction.

Who am I to say but it has seemed to me for a while the number of new customers for Octane probably doesn't cover the wages that go into it and the pace of development is somewhat reluctant.. Maybe a fundamental shift is in the pipeline....
Hopefully someone from Otoy can provide some useful detail about their future activities 'soon'

Alembic implementation HalelluhjaH !!!
I asked for that( for all of us) , actually on a busy topic,at this forum, long ago.
How sensible they were skipping FBX and jumping directly to Alembic instead.
Sigraph 2013 has a kind of discreet octane participation , thougth.

BSN is doing an article on Octane, and there will be a link provided by NVIDIA with the slides and the video presentation from SIGGRAPH.

The 4x speedup is for complex mesh emitters, and it is dramatic, as you will see in the image when they are online. Just to clarify -the 4x speed boost for emitters was originally planned as a 2.0 feature, but it is far enough along that there may be time to squeeze it into 1.5. If not, it will be in the 2.0 beta1 which will start once 1.5 is out of RC.

Here is the video link:

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/36313045