OctaneRender™ Standalone 2.02

[Seekerfinder]

[*] Changed the behaviour in numeric fields: A left click (or right click) will switch always to edit mode, while a left drag will change the slider value (if there is one).

This to me is a big improvement! Thanks guys.

Seeker

[ROUBAL]

@Seekerfinder :

I reported since the beginning of 2.0 that the Edge Rounding feature seemed to have influence slider inverted, but got no response to my post.

[merid888]

hi abstrax i have a problema, the objects have a strange form, like faceted triangles
add image in the wáter mirror yo can check this appeareance
maybe you know what is this
thank you

[Seekerfinder]

@Seekerfinder :

I reported since the beginning of 2.0 that the Edge Rounding feature seemed to have influence slider inverted, but got no response to my post.

I remember seeing that Roubal and that seems to be an issue too. In my case - for now at least - I would like the next build not to have edge rounding on by default for existing materials. I mean, if we want to add it, we can add it. I don't want to be 'fixing' older models to suite a default that should not be there in the first place. Not sure why they did it this way. I'm probably missing something something...

Best,
Seeker

[matej]

I'm confused as how to use the "region render" feature. When I select the region, the projected render time stays exactly the same as if it would be sampling the whole frame. And in some cases the projected time actually raises!?? Isnt this feature supposed to save you time by (re)rendering some extremely noisy parts of the image?

Also the workflow is a bit strange; you have to have the picker always selected, else it reverts back to rendering the whole frame (which does in any case, considering projected render times)? In Cycles, for example, you select a region and then you can use all other tools as normal, everything outside the region is clipped and does not sample.

[resmas]

I'm confused as how to use the "region render" feature. When I select the region, the projected render time stays exactly the same as if it would be sampling the whole frame. And in some cases the projected time actually raises!?? Isnt this feature supposed to save you time by (re)rendering some extremely noisy parts of the image?

Also the workflow is a bit strange; you have to have the picker always selected, else it reverts back to rendering the whole frame (which does in any case, considering projected render times)? In Cycles, for example, you select a region and then you can use all other tools as normal, everything outside the region is clipped and does not sample.

Hello mate the RR works in 2 ways.

Mode 1 - Increase importance sampling in a specific area

example - rendering a room, some areas are more difficult to clean, so we can use RR to select those areas and GPU power will redirect more to those places, cleaning them faster. Instead of all the image is being calculated, only the selected area is calculated. Faster way to clean grainy areas.

Mode 2 - make changes to a object/zone, without losing the entire rendered image

example - rendering a room, after the render is almost clean we realize that is a object/spot with a problem (material, color, shape...etc etc) we can correct that selecting a RR and making the changes we want. The only thing we cant do is move the camera, but that is obvious (in normal mode if we do, the render restarts).

So we can use the RR in many ways, for example (mode 2) to test different colors off a couch in a room, witout having to render all the image again.
But even more cool that that is the (mode 1) ability to concentrate the render on some areas that are harder to clean.
Most 3d have 75% easy render zones, and then around 25% that are really hard to clean....this is a great way to tell the GPUs to concentrate on what we want when the rest 75% are done and don't need and sampling.

. There are two modes in region rendering: If you don't make changes in the scene and select a render region, it adds more samples and will have feathered edges. As soon as you make a change in the scene that would restart rendering, the rendering is restarted in the selected region and there won't be any feathered edges anymore.

In other words you can make changes to the scene and render only small parts of the image to get faster feedback or you can use render region to focus rendering on a selected region.

IMPORTANT:
Region Render Speed and s/p displayed....

abstrax wrote:

The speed you see is the samples/pixel averaged over the whole image. In other words, to bump the total by 1 sample/pixel with a small region you have to render multiple passes of the render region (to be exact: image area/region area).

So why is it still getting slower, because although you have to do multiple passes, each pass is a smaller amount of work, right? Well, there are two reasons, why it still gets slower:

- The render speed is not uniform over the whole image. Some parts are slower to calculate than others. Most of the time you will place the render region around areas that are hard to calculate and therefor slow to calculate.

- If you render a small region, the GPU can't hide latencies so well, because it has less threads to work with.

Hope this helps to understand RR.

cheers

resmas

[FrankPooleFloating]

Yeah, I think some of us were picturing/wanting region render as a cropped version of full image... This is what I would have preferred. In LW plug (1.5) we were able to do region as cropped (Juanjo was able to tap into LW's region interface), and it was damn fast! It is probably just as fast now, considering that all the samples are getting tossed at region - and one can zoom in during render and observe noise disappearing etc. This style definitely has its pros too of course. I just wish there was a way to do the cropped region render as well. All good I guess. Nothing to get panties in a bunch over...

[ROUBAL]

As soon as you make a change in the scene that would restart rendering, the rendering is restarted in the selected region and there won't be any feathered edges anymore.

For what I actually see, the part typed in bold font in the quoted line is false : the feathered selection is always present.

My usual use of Region Rendering is to make patches to repair a render when something ugly appears in a small area.

Currently, I can't use it for that. In the image below, I set the max samples per pixel to 128. I rendered the whole image in 16 seconds. Then I rendered a very small grainy area with the Region Render : it took 1 minute. The region render is very clean, but it is totally useless as a patch, as Octane doesn't tell me how many samples per pixel I should allow to get the same quality on the whole image. Currently the obtained patch doesn't match the grain/quality of the rest of the image and can't be used.

IMHO, to be useful, the region render should be able to do two things :

1 - Render the Region Render window with the same quality as the rest of the image.

2 - Render improved quality as currently AND displaying the real amount of samples per pixel necessary to get the same quality over the whole image.

[matej]

@resmas, thanks for the extensive clarification

I was expecting it to be a cropped version of the render, where all power is used to sample only that region, ie. to fast prototype certain parts of the image (while keeping the original camera setup) and to eventually composite that region onto the original render - first doing the whole render, then re-render the problematic part(s) (but then there's the problem that Roubal describes)

E:
So, the correct workflow is: render the whole image to desired result, then select the RR which will continue rendering the region (now with added power, even though it shows longer render times), but not what's outside. If you then prompt a render restart it will restart only in the RR?

[FrankPooleFloating]

Regardless if RR is tweaked further to make us all happy -- if anyone is in a pinch, you should add a layer mask to tweaked chunks in PS comp and blend as you see fit: feathered selection, brush strokes, pen tool... I have done this many times on region chunks that I have done in LW Octane - before 2.0 and after. (we had cropped version before 2.0)

Just yesterday I had a client change to something that was a mere tiny chunk in the bottom left corner of full render. Did a RR down there for what I guessed was enough time (couple minutes) > popped into comp > blended with layer mask > done. Not elegant, by any stretch, but it works...