Considering to buy plugin and have a few questions

[asennov]

Understood, thanks. Had to do it myself.

[Sighman]

I think that native renderer is a way to go.

Looked into rendering part of C8 SDK and found that higher-level API of final renderer is rather simple, basically you have to implement I3DExFinalRenderer2
which returns custom I3DExTileRenderer with support of (most) Carrara layers (GBuffers) and that will plug into existing render manager. (well, didn't see a tiled render in Octane yet but you can have single tile that covers the whole frame )

What is confusing is the existance of CreateRaytracer method that must return quite low-level object that does actual raytracing. This doesn't fit into GPU raytracing model. But seeing the NPR and preview renderers give us hope that this object is optional.

So far I like Carrara's renderer API more than DAZ Studio - there you have to basically implement the Renderman-compliant renderer or at least compatibility layer.

Hmm, maybe it worth to make Cycles plugin, as a competition What scares thou is need to convert Carrara shaders to SVM if I want a GPU-accelerated rendering. Kidding, but if to be serious I have to think about plugging the Appleseed as it has the best deformation MB implementation (within my budget). Currently I'm going to use Alembic to import scene into Appleseed but maybe more integrated way will be better.

As a 'final' renderer, maybe. When I first looked at this project I considered using the Render Room but I could not figure out how to get past the tiling size. No matter what I did the renderer always asked for a 128x128 tile. I also did not like the fact that you had to switch to the render room to see the render. With my approach the octane view port acts like a live preview window. Changes you make in Carrara are applied almost right away so that you don't need to constantly switch to the render room to see the effect of your changes. This is very popular with my users. There are other things you cannot do in the render room like region render, material picking and OpenEXR. The final nail for me was the fact that you can only have one renderer defined in the render room. It would either be Octane or Carrara you could not combine both. This would kill your idea of combining Carrara and Octane renders. I cannot justify the effort, at this time, to integrate into the render room for the gain of one feature (batch rendering).

[asennov]

To have continuous preview in separate window is good thing, especially for Carrara on multiple monitors. (It doesn't remember the position between sessions thou ).

But to have a render room is good thing too:
1. for me it is a matter of discipline, going there means: "enough tweaking, time to get things done"
2. organize your shots, all required settings are in one place, hit "Render" and go to bed.
3. in Carrara you also have a nice option to compare different renders side by side and... return to tweaking things

As I mostly worked in DAZ Studio I've ended having something like 'Render room' there too. DS do not have batching so I use self-made ugly script for that.

About tiles: reading API I've got an impression that it's renderer who defines the size, maybe I'm wrong, but there is a slider in rendering options for that too (128 max, indeed).
Combined rendering is possible too - you can create the native renderer object yourself and pass the calls to it in parallel with yours, then composite tiles from it with the ones from Octane.

On the other hand, if you'll have a tab named say 'Final render' in settings window that will allow to do the above mentioned tasks (except the compare) then it will be your 'Render room' and I'll be switching there

[asennov]

Got very first something rendered with plugin

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=43947