A while back I was excited to see that some development time had been spent on improving the rounded corners implementation in Octane. Unfortunately I still find it very limited and therefore still do not use it on any of my CAD/Automotive models. It's the same issue where mesh topology seems to effect the result of the rounded corners effect.
A few months back I found my self playing around with Blender and Cycles, curious to see how it had developed since I last used it. I noticed a very nice new feature within cycles called the Bevel Shader. When I tried it on some of my models I was amazed at how well it worked. It feels on par with V-Rays patented Rounded Corners in terms of quality. I did read that it may not be particularly render efficient but I didn't notice any major slowdowns when testing it and thought it worth mentioning.
Perhaps the experts at Otoy could look into this technology/technique? Perhaps it might be possible to use this technique in Octane?
Here are the development notes from Blenders feature request/dev:
https://developer.blender.org/D2803
"The algorithm averages normals from nearby surfaces. It uses the same
sampling strategy as BSSRDFs, casting rays along the normal and two
orthogonal axes, and combining the samples with MIS. Needs some code
cleanup still to untangle it from the BSSRDF code.
The main concern here is that we are introducing raytracing inside
shader evaluation, which could be quite bad for GPU performance and
stack memory usage. A similar issue exists if we want to add an AO
node that can output values instead of closures.
For CUDA with a GTX 1080, stack memory usage goes from 23408 to 24560
bytes, and render time on benchmark scenes seems unchanged. For AMD
OpenCL I did not test yet. Adaptive compilation there means it does not
affect scenes not using the bevel shader, but it's still a concern if
one small object with a bevel shader slows down an entire scene.
Moving the ray tracing outside of the shader evaluation is difficult,
that would make linking parameters or having multiple nodes with
different parameters impossible, since splitting up shader evaluation
into multiple kernels seems impractical."
Bevel None
Bevel Radius 0.1 - Samples 4
Bevel Radius 0.1 - Samples 16
Bevel Radius 0.25 - Samples 4
Bevel Radius 0.25 - Samples 16
I'm sure there would be many grateful users if this were able to find its way into Octane
Cheers
Lee