Octane Is Incredible - But We Desperately Need One Thing

[Empire-Arts]

I have gotten my hands on, at some point or another, just about every rendering engine under the sun. Be it demos or friends on campus, I have been fortunate enough to play with Maxwell, Vray and even Arnold. I have tinkered with Blender Cycles and had an affair with Modo during a project I did about a year back. And I can tell you unequivocally that Octane is one of the best, fastest and easiest to use rendering engines that exist.

As I am still learning Octane, I feel like the below images can be improved upon. They are however striking in their potential for photorealism right out of the box. The material system is easy to use. There is none of the fuss that comes with Vray and the results are as good as Maxwell in a fraction of the time. IMO the quality is better then what you can get with Arnold or Mental Ray. Everything just works and there is no need to "fake it". I am continually amazed by this product and impressed by it's performance, and even out-performance, of other render engines that I have encountered.








What Octane Desperately Needs


Octane however is in desperate need of Hair strand rendering and a legitimate Hair shader. I have been spending a great deal of time working with fiber meshes in an attempt to get around this issue, but it has severe limitations. Octane is a born animator, and even with the GPU vram limitations it seems to be handing extremely complex scenes surprisingly well, to the point where I barely even notice there is a limit at all. So Kudos to Otoy for programing this little gem.

However without hair, and the ability to render hair dynamically in a realistic way, for all of Octane's amazing and easy to use features I and others that I work with are basically stuck at a pitfall that we cannot cross. Without hair we are limited to rendering car commercials, monsters and/or Low Poly hair which looks out of place verses the beautiful photorealism of everything else in the scene. So as much as I love Octane, and as much as I want it to become our primary rendering software for the foreseeable future, without hair this transition cannot be made.


I am sure that Otoy is doing everything that they can do in order to develop this incredible product, and I can only imagine how hard coding hair for GPU rendering must be. I hope that we will see hair strand rendering, and a hair shader, in Octane sooner rather than later so small studios like mine can truly begin to bang out quality work like the major studios in Hollywood at a tiny fraction of the cost. To be frank I am pretty much there now, if only I could put realistic hair on my character's heads.



So thank you for all of your work developing this superb GPU based rendering software. I do not intend this to be a whine thread and I know that you cannot possibly work faster then you already are. Here is hoping that we can see Vray type hair in Octane in the foreseeable future.


Best regards
From Empire Arts.

[RayTracey]

Thanks Empire Arts, this is at least a proper feature request with some background and a clear explanation why it is needed, not the kind of WE NEED HAIR ++1111 requests we usually get (I've heard Propecia can do wonders by the way). For the moment I can say hair support is on our roadmap.

Cheers

[xxdanbrowne]

At the risk of sounding like I'm trolling RayTracey....

+1111

[Reality4]

I fully agree with you Empire-Arts.

Over at Lagoa they have a great shader:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread. ... &t=1106903

But I understand it's CPU-based and getting something like that to work on a GPU is quite different...