Redshift VS Octane ..thoughts? Tweet

[justix]

Hi and forgive me for open this silly 3d about the usual engine comparison BUT I hear so much about Redshift speed in render that I wanted to check, and being in Love with Octane since his early release I find hard to swap for another engine BUT like many of us I'm curious and will to test, so, I'm not in the animation industry ( sigh!) so I'm not a maya user and I registered for their Alpha release for 3dmax, I understand Redshift is a bit of a Vray on steroids, running a Biased engine. Now, how you stand on the matter, I know each and everyone of us has different needs , software and approach, but anytime I try to test for another render engine so far I just thought that Octane was simply fast and quick to get.

Anyone thoughts?

Thank you

[grimm]

As a hobbyist who doesn't have a time schedule or clients, my opinion is probably going to be the odd one out. Going to a biased raytracer is a step back for me so I will never consider using one again. In the mid 1990's there were several papers that came out about pathtracing and I was immediately intrigued. At the time the hardware couldn't handle the amount of calculations needed for a quick render. But did it look good! I even considered programming my own pathtracer, but it didn't happen for many reasons. Then when I found Indigo in 2006, I was so happy that the technology had finally caught up. Then when they priced Indigo out of my price range I was very unhappy. Then Octane came out, at a price I could afford and happiness was mine again, at an unmatched speed too.

So, in short, biased renderers will never get my attention as they can never equal the lighting and quality of an unbiased renderer. Speed is nice but it's the final render quality that means more to me. Plus unbiased renderers are just so much easier to use and definetely more artist friendly IMO.

Jason

[justix]

Thank you jason for your reply and hopinion.
Im in this line of business since Mac II FX and Abvent Zoom and Strata..long way..I hav the demo but no benchmark found or much resources considering Softimage now dead and maya...well..$500 for an alpha plugin on Max that seems not even yet material gloss compatible..confused about so much fuss on their speed and quality...I mean..with due respect to the programmers of course...So far Octane i ls what awaken me up again in investing in hardware again...I wish to compare but anytime I do..( maybe because Im now familiar with the interface) ..Octane wins..

[pixerati2]

One big difference is the refresh. Redshift has a solid pause before iterating a new render. Octane almost instantly updates the screen. That's a huge thing for me in terms of speed of workflow.

[itsallgoode9]

One big difference is the refresh. Redshift has a solid pause before iterating a new render. Octane almost instantly updates the screen. That's a huge thing for me in terms of speed of workflow.

Not in the Maya plugin 5-10 secs anytime i make an update. sigh.

[RickToxik]

I can only offer my own personnal very biased opinion, and I must specify that concerning octane my opinion is based only with my experience with the maya plugin - I don't like the standalone. But here it goes.

I have moved to Redshift, I just bought a license two days ago. I've been a supporter of octane since before there was even a maya plugin. Currently, they are completely rewritting the octane to maya plugin, so the past experience was not pleasant for a lot of people and we are at octane 3 and still no "production version of octane in maya. But if we forget this decisive fact, I would still not go in octane because of my needs vs what both can offer.

Here are so far my pros and cons list of Redshift and Octane:

Octane:

Pros:
- superior image quality
- fun to work with
- awesome camera film presets

Cons:
- Binded to its own logic (that works great, but), very different from all the other renderers
- Shaders philosophy (layered materials) is too different from the basic physical shader model (vraymtl, aiStandard, mia_x)
- in maya, my software, could not be integrated with anything and was not scriptable in production pipeline
- in maya again, crashed many of my scenes, corrupted files when I was on a tight deadline

Redshift

Pros
- very well integrated in maya
- can be easily scripted in a production pipeline
- reliable, does not crash and is extremely memory efficient
- has all the features its competitors have
- philosophy is similar to other renderers
- supports alShaders (wow!) and is open-minded with the rest the the 3d world


Cons
- in my opinion, image quality is not the best in the world of 3d renderers for photorealism, perfect results are hard to achieve.
- looks like a vray rip-off


So for the first time in my life, image quality is not the #1 criteria in my choice. The reason why being not too far from the other renderer's philosophy is so important for me is because I am not a freelancer anymore and I work in a large 3d production environment. So the need to be able to script, integrate, rely on and understand workflow easily has become more important for me now than before. Also if we were to integrate Redshift in our pipeline (we work with Arnold... currently...) it would be very easy for the artists to translate their knowledge to redshift, which is very similar to vray and arnold a little bit too. As for the image quality, the time we spend on cpu-lookdev'ing is more than enough to produce nice results with any modern renderer. So I'm switching to redshift in maya , but I wish it would produce in my case as nice images as I was when I was in octane : )

[imensah]

It will be nice if octane had a similar license model. all plugins are free at the moment which makes it very attractive if you use multiple applications.

[Goldorak]

Going to move this to off topic section, ( we prefer to keep this part of the forum focused on Octane, although we like the RS guys - the GPU rendering world is a pretty small club still).

With subscriptions coming, we plan to introduce bundles of related plug-ins at a low cost, as well as individually, to make something like this cost effective for those looking to get multiple plug-ins on one machine. Very few ecosystems have 24+ active plug-ins (and more coming via 3rd parties) as we do, so doing this right takes more time, but we're on it.

[prehabitat]

I like the idea of plugin bundles: I'd prob grab Blender, 3DS and UE4 if there was such a bundle system... (All likely 1st party plugins so that makes it easier right)

[Tenth_Old_Man]

It will be nice if octane had a similar license model. all plugins are free at the moment which makes it very attractive if you use multiple applications.

Imagine a world where ONE LOGIN credential worked across all product lines per license?

Not having a different login for the forums, the main user account, and another for EACH AND EVERY plugin purchased beyond the standalone (which btw is another credential) would be king.

When will this horrible licensing system be gotten rid of in place of one that actually works properly? God help you if you accidentally put your user credentials into the Maya plugin. It will download a license, say its invalid credentials, THEN locks you out of the standalone saying "No license could be found".

Competitors like Redshift are coming for our beloved renderer that is unfortunately cobbled by he worlds WORST licensing model. Once RenderMan goes completely GPU, Octane will collect dust unless the licensing/DRM crap gets fixed and gets out of the way and lets the app just get to the rendering.