BIG Feature Request: Procedural Emitters

[treddie]

Hi, and some questions for the OctaneRender Team,

After experimenting with baking mesh emitters to an HDRI, and although the speed increase for rendering is dramatic, using HDRI's in this way has drawbacks that cannot easily be addressed. The main problem being that doing lighting this way creates errors in the alignment of the lights in the scene compared to the original mesh emitters.

My questions are:
- 1. Can a new feature be added to Octane...Procedural emitters to decrease render time as compared to mesh emitters, while incorporating IES information if desired?
- 2. Being procedural, can't the emitters be based on shape primitive equations, therefore avoiding any reliance on meshes at all? When a ray bounce makes its way back to the emitter, all Octane needs to know is where on the emitter's surface equation it collided. If IES information is included, then Octane needs to know where it landed in the light's illumination field.

The big question being, will those algorithms run faster than their mesh emitter or HDR equivalents?