by RickToxik » Sat Jul 16, 2016 12:40 am
RickToxik
Sat Jul 16, 2016 12:40 am
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 : )