OTOY Forums

Hello,

Could anyone who uses M1 Macs for 3D production share your M1 Mac experiences here please. (especially for Octane + Cinema4D tools would be great to hear off course)

Thank you

I have a M1 Mac Mini I got one year ago. Its been pretty useless for Octane but I did not really get it for that. I continue to invest in PC’s for serious Octane functionality and other PC boxes with NVIDIA cards for network rendering. I do think future Apple silicone and Octane eventually optimized for it will be exciting - especially when we get cross platform network rendering. But we are not there yet.

My direct experience using Octane in M1 Mac Mini with 16 GB has been filled with glitches and crashes. I have not actually tried to do real work on it. Just opening and manipulating projects from my PC. However, those were some of the earlier versions. I only recently updated to Mac Monterey and have not given Octane X PR 13 much of a spin.

Even though it is excruciatingly slow rendering on the M1 Mac Mini the fact that I can do it at all is still pretty amazing. No idea how the more recent M1 Pro and Max chips perform with Octane though. I also use Octane Blender but last time I tried could not get the Mac version of that working on the M1 Mac. FYI Blender Foundation already has an ARM version of Blender that works natively with Apple silicone. It performs well and their devs have been doing a lot of work to get Cycles ready for metal.

For me Octane on an M1 Mac Mini is just a curiosity. Something to play around with and test in anticipation of upcoming power and compatibility.

Thank you @pegot

Try the latest version on the latest OS. I use M1 Max for all my work and it's great at 64 GB and 220 OB or so. Octane X 2022 will be heavily optimized for native Apple Silicon and start leveraging unified memory in novel ways.

Hi, first of all I am a fan of Octane render and I am not a super pro user.

I used Octane Blender in Intel macs and was ok for my requirements, but since I changed to M1 I noticed it is faster rendering, unfortunately there are so many glitches even from an interface level that just pushed me to use Blender3.2/cycles.

The glitches I encountered are; being unable to select or transform/move objects from the viewfinder (just able to to those thing via menus), the top menus usually are overlaid between themselves so the UI is not right, and as far I understand that the denoiser is not working in M1 properly yet.

The above glitches slow down the workflow, so sometimes I just bring down very simple files from Blender 3.2 to render them on Octane, knowing I will have to re-do materials

Hope to find the solutions to those glitches and hope Octane is available soon for newer versions of blender.

Cheers!

OctaRamen wrote:(...) knowing I will have to re-do materials

Not necessarily. The ORBX file format leverage that, if "Octane" implied Octane Standalone.