Production Rendering Tweet

[mradfo21]

Hello Octane users and developers !

I've been quietly following Octane renderer for some time now. The moment the first Alpha came out I was using it at home and delighted by the results. I have used Arion as well. It is my personal belief that the Refractive developers have created a better, more flexible product.

Now the lack of quality animation support is really the greatest setback with these new Unbaised GPU renderers. However, nothing is impossible.

I'm starting a staff job at Method in a couple of months and am intrigued by this technology and would love to spend some of my time trying to develop a way to use Octane in production.

Now one thing necessary to make this happen is compositing. Despite the cool-ness of doing it all in a single pass, the reality is, compositing gives artists more freedom and creativity, especially under strict deadlines. The little I know about the technical side is that pathtracing apparently considers diffuse, specular, and reflection as pretty much one thing. This however, does not suit production. For instance, I like to comp with a Diffuse, GI pass, Specular, Light pass, Shadow pass, Reflection, Refraction, Matte ID, and Occlusion. Now it doesn't seem Octane (or Arion,) can split things up that specifically. which is fine. Occlusion and matte ID we can just do in another renderer, but I would like to be able to get at-least a diffuse, light, and reflection pass.

Now Arion is separating some things out. But not the three I just mentioned. Id like to have a discussion about the possibility of separating out passes inside of Octane. For instance, Maxwell render can re-create a complete framebuffer. Now I am in no way at the level of Octane's developers, or any software developer for that matter, I'm just an artist. So If It's not do-able, it's not do-able. But I am very impressed with the results to rendertime coming out of Octane combined with a material system that is much closer to industry standards. I'd really love to experiment with Octane in a production environment and see if we can make this work !

[radiance]

Hi,

As octane is an unbiased engine, there would be a lot of different passes, so it's not that easily to implement.

Also, the fact that you've got a limited amount of GPU memory does'nt really allow you to store 5 or 10 different films for all these passes,
you won't have enough memory to keep them all.

We're adding an alpha channel now and we'll probably add a z-depth map in beta3, but passes for all the different kinds of BRDFs (eg octane is a pathtracer, which can bounce on a variety of BRDFs when it intersects) on a GPU is really difficult given the memory constraints.

Radiance

[mradfo21]

thanks for the quick response !

Well, I'll just have to keep my eye on things then.

keep up the great work !


- Matt Radford