Maya Octane rendering vs Octane Standalone rendering

[NEWLOGIC]

Hi Everyone,
I've noticed there is a big difference when rendering scene from Maya(using Octane plugin) and rendering it from the Octane Standalone version:
Octane Standalone version provides a lot cleaner interactive rendering without noise/grains,whereas trying to render scene from Maya(using Octane plugin) was a big pain. Basically, I provided equal sampling rates for each of the renderers - 256 sample rates with 1024/756 resolution. Octane standalone had no issues with grains,whereas Octane plugin for Maya 2013 shown incredible amount of noise. I wish I could just export my animation to Octane standalone and render it there, but since the standalone version doesn't support animation rendering, the only option I've got is to render it in Maya.Seems to me the Octane plugin for Maya 2013 needs to be improved somehow to avoid problems with grains. Did anyone have this problem before? Any advice?

[FooZe]

Hi Newlogic,

There shouldn't be much difference at all between rendering speed (Ms/sec) in plugins vs standalone (the plugins use the same core rendering codebase as the standalone).
If you are going to compare, you need to make sure you have exactly the same scene in both (including environment, camera FOV and position etc), and also that there are no new features in the standalone that are being used that are not in the plugin version yet (things like HDR importance sampling). Also double check you are using the same kernel settings in both the standalone and plugin.

Thanks
Chris.

[NEWLOGIC]

I've tuned the settings in Maya to match the settings in Octane Standalone,but still there are lot of grains:

[NEWLOGIC]

Settings from Octane:

[NEWLOGIC]

Settings from Maya

[NEWLOGIC]

However,I've been able to reduce those grains a little bit in Maya by lowering the aperture down to 0.010(the minimum), but it's still far from looking similar to the initial image rendered in Octane Standalone

[RickToxik]

As said earlier, it looks like the hdr importance sampling is making the difference for the noise, and that the gamma is managed differently in your maya session.

The HDR importance sampling is a super neat feature of the native octane engine that is currently in development for the maya plugin. It gets rid of the noise and renders faster with HDR environments. It should be available soon for maya.

[NEWLOGIC]

Thanks a lot for the explanation.

[FooZe]

Hi Newlogic,

Sorry RickRoxik, but this doesn't look like HDR importance sampling after all (see the texture environment node does not have that option so this will be v1.0 that does not have it).
This is most likely the hotpixel removal. Try putting this to zero in maya, looks like this was missed as it is zero in the standalone.

Also tweaking the exposure etc may give more similar results (as it seems to be brighter in the maya one for some reason - possibly some gamma handling somewhere).
In maya the floor reflection seems to be missing too so you may want to check that as well.

Thanks
Chris.

[NEWLOGIC]

Hi FooZe,
Thanks for your reply,
Initially, I didn't add the floor in Maya mainly because my focus was on reducing noise that were reflecting from the car.However,later on, I spent little time,added the floor and experimented with its properties(opacity,specularity etc) in Octane Standalone only.Anyway, I could add the floor later in Maya and play with its properties if I could eliminate the noise first.
I didn't touch other values except tweaking the exposure and putting the hotpixel removal value to 0(see the images below):