iRay VS Octane

[gabrielefx]

After 2 years finally I want to publish a new test.
The first tests I did (you can find them in this forum) were done with Octane standalone, before Octane for Max was released, it was only announced: August 2011

I want discuss here only about the speed and interaction that we can find in these two Max plugins.
I tested both in Max 2014

My conclusions are that iray is free and we can disable it...
There is no interaction, forget what you find in Octane, the plugin often crashes my gpus (Titans) using the new brand feature called "caustics"
Ok, caustics probably is the best iray part (when it works)
Another cool feature are the Jeff Patton mats (not include in Max 2014) http://jeffpatton.net/2012/07/iray-laye ... -released/
I would like to see in Octane all those scripted mats, I don't speak about downloadable materials but scripts

Ok, watch yourself these two renders
At the fifth minute Octane for Max had reached the 30 minutes iray noise level.

Regards

[mbetke]

It is always interesting to see that unbiased render modes deliver different looks. Shouldn't unbiased not just deliver the same output?
Never used iray a lot. But it see,s nvidia struggles a bit to get it running on their cards as it should.

[darkline]

Iray for me is almost unusable, it's so slow to update and you often have to refresh/reload everything if you make some changes other than materials. The connection can break easily. Activeshade is flakey. Navigating around the viewport is a magnitude slower than octane. Just a headache in comparison. In short its like going back a generation.

That said Iray has it's uses over octane too -it's CPU so I can render larger scenes on there if needed, works with mental ray materials and object motion blur looks great (and fast). I think (could be wrong) that DOF renders much quicker and cleaner than octane too. I think DOF in octane is not optimized at all. The matte/shadow material is more advanced than octane too.

It's nice to have options, but the slow interaction in Iray puts me off using it. Once octane catches up with that small feature gap I'll have little use for iray.