3.1 hopes and Rant

[justix]

Happy New Year!
AMD made its own free OpenCL render so they must be working on improving their drivers.
http://developer.amd.com/tools-and-sdks ... echnology/
About Octane render I think Otoy should have a bit more information about Octane render development or setbacks during development, because usually Otoy keep us in dark without information of when will 3.1 be out and members of this forum becomes grumpy .
I saw news about Octane Imager posted on facebook by Hayssam Keilany but here on forums I didn`t saw any news about that, some users don`t have facebook:

"Hello everyone, OTOY guy here.
I've decided to update everyone about the ICEFX (name subject to changes...) part of the OctaneImager.
"What's this ICEFX thing you're talking about?"
Well, I'll create a proper forum post in the future with pictures but i'll enumerate some features here :
* Colors
-----------
- Customizable tonemapper
- 3D LUT support
- Correct white balance and color temperature
- Fast HDR chromatic aberration (axial & lateral)
- Bleach bypass, Fade, Blacks, Levels...
- Vibrance,saturation,contrast,gamma (classic but necessary)
- HDR Sharpening
- Highlight / Midtones / Shadows color grading (Log & Linear)
- RGB Curves
- Film Grain (because sometimes it's better to just add it than making your render noisy )
- Customizable vignetting
* Artistic
-----------
- Multiple customizable cartoon effects (Painting, drawing, etc)
- Contour effect
- Digital and analog glitch effects (can be animated)
- CRT / VHS / NTSC & more... artifacts creator
- Scanline / ASCII & random effects
- And more...
* Lighting / Camera effects
-------------
- Super fast bloom
- Light streaks (Glare on OctaneRender)
- Anamorphic lens effects
- Customizable Lens Flare
- Lens Dirt effect
- Customizable depth of field (blades, etc)
- Fake fast god-rays (useful for quick terrain)
* Rendering
----
- Real-Time Ambient Occlusion / Indirect lighting
- Real-Time Raytraced reflections
- Customizable artistic fog (Total control)
* Others
---------
- Denoiser (WIP, not sure yet if my approach is worth it)
These are the most important features,
For the Rendering part, I must specify that they will not replace path-tracing at all. They are meant for quick tweaking or fixes and might not be integrated in the end as they were created for real-time purposes (VR/ Mobile and more)
Keep in mind that ICEFX is at first a real-time post-processing solution usable in video games to produce high-quality photorealistic rendering.
Please let me know if i'm missing out an important feature in terms of color or what you guys are used to do in Photoshop/Lightroom/Nuke...
Thank you!"

Ouch..Actually damn right 3dMax does not have C4D features as I reckon C4D to be the best plugin so far and I fell frustrated about Max in many ways but I'm so use to now that I can only hope for a Breaking news, that ICEFX is sooo promising, just last night I did another conversion ( and what a sad one it was compared to Redshift and Fstorm results ) I always stated that the materials and image of Fstorm was much crispy and color alive compared to OCtane but after that I used a Kodachrome 25 I got something so close to that and because we miss some imager feature as listed, burn,contrast for instance..so the LUA implementing would be a bless but again..we need more support for the plugin section, look at the multicolor script that is only useful in standalone..to give you an example

[Scottiefeng]

Question simple as this: when is 3.1 and when 3ds max plugin can improve?

[Elvissuperstar007]

a lot of pain in the words of the driver ATI Radeon some glitches)

[justix]

Question simple as this: when is 3.1 and when 3ds max plugin can improve?

If you read the 3D is simple to gather.

They have to wait 2 months for AMD to fix their drivers ( which we as Nvidia users don't care the slightlest ) and that will take up to March probably in order to polish the code and optimize god knows....then I assume probably April but there is no Alpha test yet so don't expect much happening and I hope to be mistaken on that...but I gave up asking, the 3Dmax plugin is constantly on the progress as one fix broke something else and then they need to re-issue with another one ect.. So you need a Core release FIRST and then it passed onto the PLugins programmers and it is up to them to Make it work on the respective Version.. so far the C4D is definitely the best and supported plugin that make me think I got it all wrong with MAx as since that guy went it just almost stopped with due respect to whoever is in charge now.

[voltaire585]

I say forget about Octane 4, forget AMD, we are all happy using NVIDIA, and focus some support on OTOYs current customer base instead of supporting more and more platforms (autocad - seriously?). When Otoy can offer functionality found in Corona, Fstorm, etc , hopefully with the release of 3.1, then maybe move back to developing Octane 4.

Im talking about
- adaptive image sampling - like Fstorm
- post noise reduction inbuilt (like corona or altus)
- Imagemixer - like Corona

As director of a team of 12 octane users, we are now moving some of the team over to Corona because they like it better!!!
Seriously disappointed after spending so much on GPU hardware and Octane licenses.

Thats my rant

[Scottiefeng]

I say forget about Octane 4, forget AMD, we are all happy using NVIDIA, and focus some support on OTOYs current customer base instead of supporting more and more platforms (autocad - seriously?). When Otoy can offer functionality found in Corona, Fstorm, etc , hopefully with the release of 3.1, then maybe move back to developing Octane 4.

Im talking about
- adaptive image sampling - like Fstorm
- post noise reduction inbuilt (like corona or altus)
- Imagemixer - like Corona

As director of a team of 12 octane users, we are now moving some of the team over to Corona because they like it better!!!
Seriously disappointed after spending so much on GPU hardware and Octane licenses.

Thats my rant

Totally agree!!

[Goldorak]

Hi all and happy new year.

Some brief updates on the core engine development as we get into 2017:

3.0.x is very solid, and stable and we will be closing out this version with final Pascal support (and new OctaneBench). ORC is coming out of private invite this month as well as subscriptions, with a new Octane VR offering.

We're all on the same page as far as features and V4 will not be taking any Octane resources until 3.1 is done. Most of the initial V4 work is going to require the ingestion of Brigade with Octane,and that can't begin until all major 3.1 features are as stable as the current 3.0 ones.

We have an AMD branch we made for 3.0, but as I said earlier, we can't support a commercial release (or spend time optimizing) until AMD brings their driver stack to the level they have conceded they need to achieve for Octane to be as stable as it is on NVIDIA - so this is on them, and we are moving onto other features until this changes.

For AMD/OSX users, we are adding headless rendering before or in 3.1, which will allow you to use slave only rendering from the master - because even if we did get AMD and OSX support on MacPro/MacBook Pro, those GPUs are ancient and would pull down the VRAM size for network rendering.

Denoising - we already support Altus and are exploring our own denoising solutions (based on experimental research that hasn't been done in other engines AFAIK) in tandem to 3rd party solutions.

Adaptive sampling is very much on the near term roadmap, and I think will make old-school denoising less important and provide higher quality since it isn't destructive.

Since Dec. we've also brought on two more developers to accelerate core engine features such as AS and improvements to displacement, RE and major refactoring around OSL in 3.1.

Please note that plug-ins are developed outside of the core engine, so having more or less plug-ins for Octane doesn't change the core features timeline at this point.

[milanm]

@Goldorak

Thank you for the info. Just to clarify because i think some users here got the wrong impression, AMD drivers are not holding down development of other features and the rest of 3.1, right?

Regards
Milan

[Goldorak]

@Goldorak

Thank you for the info. Just to clarify because i think some users here got the wrong impression, AMD drivers are not holding down development of other features and the rest of 3.1, right?

Regards
Milan

Correct - the currently working AMD build we showed in the spring was cross compiled from a snapshot of the 3.0 source code (by the Brigade devs), and this didn't take any time away from Octane development.

At some point that would change for final release, as there is work to be done to tune and optimize the AMD branch for performance, just as we did recently for Pascal. That would take dev time away from features, but we are pushing that off until AMD drivers are fixed. They promised this would be done in two months and it is now past that point, so we are moving onto other parts of the 3.x roadmap for now.

[rappet]

thank you for the update Goldorak