Bendbox wrote:Nice work! Yeh, Octane has dethroned Vray at my studio as well. Glad to hear you are liking it!
Some comments and crits, and this is me being nit picky here in an effort to help the most:
1) your hanging lighting above the island looks terrific!
2) the brush on your range and hood is too wide, it seems a little off scale
3) I'd increase the bump, or use a slight displacement on your backsplash tile
4) your island water faucet and stovetop faucet look like different materials -- was this intentional5
5) the radius on the edges of your hood seems a little large -- typically these are made of 18ga SS, which is .048" thick
6) I'd take a look at overexposing your exterior images a little more, this keeps your eye in the kitchen more and would be more realistic
7) the back of the chair seats look a little blown out
8) this is totally personal preference, but I'd make the overhead kitchen lighting warmer, more like halogen instead of a fluorescent. This will give a more inviting feel to the image.
All in all this is looking really good.
As for render speed:
1) with any progressive type of renderer like Octane, Maxwell, etc. it helps GREATLY on interior rendering speed to place some additional lighting behind the camera -- NOT too strong, you don't want to throw off the image with false lighting, just enough to help lightly "fill in" the darkest of areas. This will help the image clear faster.
2) depending on which shots you need, you could also consider leaving the walls behind your camera out, so the model is open. It will clear much faster this way.
I hope this helps! Looking forward to seeing more from you!
Hey there thanks for your awesome tips and attention to detail

and your positive comments thanks!
Regarding lighting, the trick you said about placing a light behind the camera, it's already there, I'm learning but you're right that "fill" light helps a lot. Regarding the exterior, yes I'll probably make that cooler. And about the lighting over the kitchen, you're totally right about warming it up.
Also I'm looking into post-processing tutorials to make the images more "magical" but with Octane's built-in bloom and glares, it's hard to think of a way to achieve that. Anyone with tips / tutorial links welcome!

2x GTX780 3GB, 1 3930k @4.0, 3xAMD 1090T 6-core (for vray), 16GB RAM, Win7 64. + Octane (learning and hoping, lol)