native blender cuda support vs octane Tweet

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Hi

I recently downloaded and installed blender with the intention of learning/using it for future projects. I noticed in the blender documentation on the website that blender appears to already have built in cuda rendering on nvidia gpu's. I am curious. what is the difference between the native blender cuda rendering vs octane rendering whcih also uses cuda. is octane better/the same or worse? is it still worth buying the octane plugin for blender?

curious to hear about this.

Thanks in advance

Angus

[ROUBAL]

There is currently no official plugin for Blender. There is Octane renderer standalone usable with Blender, thanks to some good exporter scripts gently made by some Octane/blender users.

For the choice, it is a matter of taste and needs. Octane is more stable than Blender/Cycles for what I have tested, and it is faster and easier to setup materials in Octane.

However, Blender/Cycles may be more usable for animations. Export time is currently a problem on big scenes for animations. So a native internal render will skip this long process. This said, currently the rendering speed of Cycles is slower... for what I know, if I am not wrong.

[matej]

The main quality difference between Cycles (Blender's GPU renderer) and Octane is that Cycles is not a spectral renderer. They are both good renderers; Cycles is integrated, has more flexible texturing & compositing pipeline + support for stuff that we will never have in Octane (mostly regarding compositing & passes). Development is also much faster than Octane. In Octane, otoh, you can get decent results easier than with Cycles and its strict physical realism can produce amazing results in the end (but is also the source of Octane limitations).

There is no such thing as an integrated plugin for Blender (and probably will never be), only an unofficial free exporter that works very well.

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oh right, I see. I thought there was an integrated plugin because there was a section for it in the forums. hmmm. this puts a damper on things.

I have another question. I am racking my brain tryin gto figure out how to best use vue infinite (e-on software) and octane together at least in terms of animation. I am already modelling in vue and exporting .OBJ meshes into octane standalone to render and it works fine. i get the impression that the octane standalone version has some limited support for animation with the turntable and moving sun. is there a way to export some kind of universal animation format out of vue and into octane where octane renders the animation frame by frame? kind of like a .OBJ file but for animation? does such a cross application animation file format exist?

if not i think this is a definite must for another feature for octane standalone. it would make me a very happy man if otoy did this.

Angus

[matej]

Octane doesn't import anything else than .obj. They are supposedly coding a new exchange format that will support instances and other stuff that .obj doesn't (like camera parameters), but I'm sure it wont support any advanced animation features.

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i just noticed in this forum an advert for a developer to write a blender plugin.

i dont need any advanced animation anyway. just simple move this car from here to here. thats it. would cover about 80 % of what i need

angus

[matej]

i just noticed in this forum an advert for a developer to write a blender plugin.

That advert is kinda misleading. To integrate Octane into Blender RS/Otoy would need to change their SKD licensing to GPL and it seems they are not prepared to do this. At least for the time being. Their semi-official position is: "Its not possible to integrate Octane in Blender, atm".

i dont need any advanced animation anyway. just simple move this car from here to here. thats it. would cover about 80 % of what i need

If you noticed the focus of their development goes into integrated plugins. Even a while back, when integrated plugins were not even speculated, there were some requests to introduce timeline logic into Octane to help with basic animations, and it was declined by Refractive Software as not being their priority. Lots of users were also asking about Alembic support, without any official reply from RS -> safe to assume they are not interested into animation support in Octane standalone.