A Few (new version) Blender-Octane Plugin Questions

[Empire-Arts]

I am very happy to see that the new Octane + Blender plugin is available. $99.00 is more than worth it, but I have a few questions first. This plug in does not actually seem to be a plug in but an actual modified release of blender.




Question 1: Am I correct? Is this in fact a complete blender build that we have to download and use. It is not actually a standard plug in? What about all of the other plugins/scripts for blender that I already have? Is everything intact and normal in this build? Has anything been disabled?


Question 2: What does "Our render server that blender communicates with to do the rendering" mean exactly? (on the download page http://render.otoy.com/shop/blender_plugin.php) Does it mean my computer has to have internet access to render? I hope that it is merely referring to activating the blender-octane license.


Question 3: Can we really expect, within reason, for otoy to keep up with blender's breakneck pace of releases? I do not wish to be stuck using an outdated version of blender 6 months into the next release.




I would appreciate it if these questions can be answered. Thank you for your time.

[FooZe]

1. You are correct - there are two parts to the blender "system". A process that runs in the background (the "OctaneServer" ) and a modified version of Blender to provide Octane's material nodes etc.

2. Sorry this is perhaps a bit confusing, I might update the wording for that, it is a process that runs on your local machine that is the "Octane Server". So the communication is between the blender process and the octane server process, on your own local machine.

3. Yes, we will need to keep up with Blender releases as best we can, unless the blender foundation decides to add our source code changes into trunk, or there is a change to blender's such that we no longer need to modify the source, we can just provide a standard plugin.

I hope that helps

Thanks
Chris.

[Empire-Arts]

Ok thank you, that does clear it up for me.

[megacal]

$99.00 is more than worth it

....actually it's 99 Euros = $132.58 US at the moment,
but still worth it.

Time to get it before the dollar sinks more.