Octane 3 for 3ds max

[Goldorak]

Feedback is never ignored when it is actionable. We want it.

As a group, the OR community has been constructive in letting us know when we're not addressing something as well as we ought to be. It has helped improve Octane many times over.

3DS Max is our first Octane plug-in and it is near and dear to us. We are going to be adding more dedicated resources shortly, as we recently did with Maya.

including motion blur for liquids, i hope

viewtopic.php?f=27&t=53516

As Jim mentioned, in this case, the 3rd party API appears to have a bug preventing us (and even other plug-ins) from reading correct motion vectors. We're investigating this further.

[DonFarese]

If any of you have a license to vray try it for yourself. Unfortunately I can't share the scene I worked with nor do I have the test shots I rendered with times on it. It's been a while. I was using I think Octane 1.9 or maybe 2.1 something. I used vray RT which has lightcache for RT now and RT also has really good Adaptive sampling for speed. Octane rendered the interior scene close to 9min where vray was like 4 1/2 minutes. Now with vray 3.3 things are even faster.

[DonFarese]

If I have some time I will try to do some new tests, I am just slammed right now. For the record, I hope that Octane would surpass RT in speed and options as a GPU renderer. But I've been hoping a lot ever since I got a license long time ago and still can't use it in production.

[oguzbir]

Guys hi,

I can add few more points to this debate of your comparing VrayRT and Octane.
Octane is fast. full stop. Vray is very very very good in speed.

if you're comparing live viewport performance other than the production render it's different.
When you add and move some objects in the scene while live viewport is on octane wins the lot.
Vray is slow in computing newest changes to the scene. Sometimes doesnt update those changes. depending on the material or modifier object has.
but VrayRT had nice region render, also has live zoom. Gives you nice amount of time to help you zoom in without camera change. So you can test out and see the changes in your scene even smallest details camera position intact.

Sincerely it's not the speed that counts anymore is it?
Altus, Adaptive sampling, unbiased ray tracing hacks like coherent ratio etc. These all are here for us the speed up the final render.

Vray has the very best native compatibility available. Why don't you go ahead and try archiving your scene or use resource collector with Octane or try to cope with asset management. Would max collect your ies hdri or other maps correctly when you use octane? In somecases it does not work.

Does octane work with viewport canvas correctly? How about targeted ies Lights? Lightlister? Disp., Rounded edges. We've been creating these lists of features essential to us for years.

I myself tried bunch of times to help devs to see what is needed for max. Also prepared a user base supported collaborative features wishlist.

Hi all - thank you for keeping track of this. It is useful and we want to update the converter using this feedback. Right now we are focused on final bug fixes in 2.x core rendering features and migration to 3.x alpha release. We will try to fit this in before 3.0 alpha. Jim Star will be taking on some of this work shortly.

Link to the post- viewtopic.php?f=82&t=45142&start=20
This Goldorak's reply was dated 1 year ago.
Since then we had a refactoring of plugin. maxscript ability, lost material information for previous scenes, added max gamma support (which is a problem on its own), animation of background, perspective correction, multi-material support for Forest Pack, etc.

I believe we had ~25 updates since the 2.0 plugin version but most are bug fixes and such.
If we're going to get a lot of new features for max with the v3 that's fine.
But if we're to get exactly the same plugin features as in v2.25 - 2.21 ( excluding new v3 core features)
I guess I'll have a problem with this.

To summarize my thoughts:
- Octane is fast but it lacks so many features and nativity with Max.
- VrayRT is fast enough and has so many features already implemented.
- It's not the speed that counts. It is speed vs. features
- Octane for Max needs to have a roadmap for us so that we can continue paying for it and collaborating with bugs etc.
- Selling a super secret surprise feature without mentioning no other feature improvements means no feature improvements are planned.
- I sadly find Otoy, ruthless towards Max community.

P.S.
I'm so sorry if I offend anyone. but I personally have/had no interest in heckling Goldorak, JimStar, Karba(in the old days) with these comments.
I respectfully applaud their work every time.. I try to see the problem as a whole and try my best to raise alarms for the sake of our beloved renderer.
Otoy has to prepare a roadmap at some point, and share that with us. That is the only way to provide a healthy progression for octane4max

Best,

[gabrielefx]

fortunately there are many new renderers on the horizon that already have all features that I've requested for Octane for Max in 5 years.
I wrote also privately to Otoy one year ago because I needed some simple features like target ies lights. My requests are deleted from the forum...
Otoy is not interested to upgrade my 4 Octane licenses.
To do an example iToo software sends every month news about the development of Forest Pack and Rail Clone.
Every year I pay 200€ to iToo.
For 3 years Otoy never requested 1 cents to upgrade my Octane licenses, I don't understand how Otoy makes money.
No upgrades = No money
What the investors say???
Probably Daz, Poser, Revit and Autocad are better programs with thousands of users. Max and Maya are the worst software to make 3D modeling, animation and render....
We have to convert our scenes for Octane for Revit.

regards

[Goldorak]

fortunately there are many new renderers on the horizon that already have all features that I've requested for Octane for Max in 5 years.
I wrote also privately to Otoy one year ago because I needed some simple features like target ies lights. My requests are deleted from the forum...
Otoy is not interested to upgrade my 4 Octane licenses.
To do an example iToo software sends every month news about the development of Forest Pack and Rail Clone.
Every year I pay 200€ to iToo.
For 3 years Otoy never requested 1 cents to upgrade my Octane licenses, I don't understand how Otoy makes money.
No upgrades = No money
What the investors say???
Probably Daz, Poser, Revit and Autocad are better programs with thousands of users. Max and Maya are the worst software to make 3D modeling, animation and render....
We have to convert our scenes for Octane for Revit.

regards

TBMK we sent you back a message to your PM and got no reponse.

[riggles]

Not for nothing but even Vray RT has caught up and surpassed Octane, and renders much faster. It's a real shame, Octane has such potential but lack of 3dsmax needed development, and not enough or very slow forum support makes it almost impossible to rely on Octane for a production environment. I feel it all falls on def ears reading how disappointed everyone is, year after year it's the same complaints when I come back here. Look at Corona, came after Octane and is being upgraded and developed into a reliable production ready renderer, and when you ask a question in the forum or have a problem, they get back to you instantly.

Forum response/support appears to vary by plugin developer. When I was using Octane with MODO, Paul was very prompt and helpful whenever I had a question, hit a bug, or made a suggestion. In general, C4D plugin users seem to be satisfied with the speed of response by Aoktar. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's the good C4D integration that is keeping Octane relevant in the public eye (just look at how often it's C4D/Octane work that's retweeted by OTOY). It also seems that the most unhappy customers are the native plugin Max/Maya users. Likely because their developers are getting pulled off into other things, unlike the 3rd party devs, and the support section has at times felt unresponsive. Hopefully with a larger staff, that will be history.

As for V-Ray and Octane, I can't say that V-Ray RT renders much faster. V-Ray RT speed has certainly improved, and in some situations may be considered comparable -- but in my limited testing, "much faster" it was not. And yet, I still bought V-Ray for Max and not Octane. Why? As was mentioned earlier: features and ease-of-use. Render speed is exciting, yes, and we all love the idea of super-fast renders. But that excitement quickly turns to frustration when your speedy render engine doesn't have the features you need, and the plugin integration is also lacking and makes you jump through hoops. Very quickly, you realize that render speed doesn't make up for the road blocks. V-Ray Adv. does almost everything. And if the features you need are supported, you could move to V-Ray RT GPU with no extra work involved. And the plugin integration and tools are very good. It puts Octane's plugin in a poor light honestly.

The good news is that these are all things that can be fixed. The bad news is that, until they are, I won't be a Max plugin customer. And if things don't turn around, I won't be an Octane customer anymore in general. There are other renderers, backed by companies who make it clear that rendering is their priority.

[Goldisart]

MAX NOISE - VRAY RT - -----> the initial necessary function for patch trace !!!!!

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Max. render time – Specifies the maximum time (in minutes) for refining the image.
Max. paths per pixel – Specifies the maximum samples per pixel for refining the image. This option is useful when V-Ray RT is set as a production renderer to ensure consistent quality of the different frames.V-Ray performs adaptive sampling on the image, trying to put more samples into areas that have more noise.
Max. noise – A threshold that determines when to stop refining a pixel. Higher values allow more noise in the image. Lower values try to reduce the noise. A value of 0.0 traces the entire image unconditionally.*Show mask checkbox is removed in 3.10.x versions, please use VRaySampleRate Render element as an alternative.

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I think that with this algorithm + implementation denoise - task with noise will be solved
....
all advertised denoise ... it's not a panacea for noise - take a thin hair and denoise from kill - - sometimes you need to truthfully visualize the image

[Goldisart]

full support for all of all of features of standard cameras - - - - for OCTANE RENDER the edification of VRAY walked away from his camera !!!!!

[Goldorak]

The good news is that these are all things that can be fixed. The bad news is that, until they are, I won't be a Max plugin customer. And if things don't turn around, I won't be an Octane customer anymore in general. There are other renderers, backed by companies who make it clear that rendering is their priority.

Thanks for the direct feedback. We're adding more resources to speed up development and feature request ingestion, just as we recently did for Maya.