I just wanted to share a couple of quick tests I've been doing with Unity/Octane. Firstly a disclaimer, I'm an independent film Producer NOT a digital artist. So my work will always be a bit crusty. I'm more interested in finding out what a tool can do and then working with actual artists to make it look good
Firstly a quick character lighting test. This was exported as an EXR then graded in Nuke:
Next up was a proof of concept test involving an alembic camera move into Unity and rendering it out as a sequence. Then taking the sequence and camera into Nuke doing a 3d projection and dropping some live action footage in. Tested using both depth and object id pass to generate masks. Again exactly what you'd expect:
About the only tricky thing here was as I don't have the full Octane/Nuke license I had to do quite a bit of testing to get the Nuke camera aperture settings correct. Someone who knows their stuff can probably talk the math, I did trial an error.
Currently doing some tinkering with recording a virtual camera move in Unity as an alembic capture with a vive tracker and re-rendering. Capturing at 50fps, but the Octane render at 25fps is looking a little stuttery. Will post that if I get something looking reasonable.
Overall I'm thinking Octane can potentially put Unity at an interesting place in a visual effect pipeline. Unity is not a asset creation tool, but games engines are arguably superior to those when it comes to "scenes" and complex interactions or timings between elements. It's just a bit more what their workflows are geared for.
And while there is a lot of talk about using game engines to create filmic content, but anyone who has spent time in Nuke/AE/DaVinci would likely say they are some years away from that kind of compositing/finishing capability.
Octane for Unity can potentially bridge that gap which is....interesting.
Anyway, thanks for making the renderer available to hacks like me and the Unity community in general. We'll see what we can do with it
Ahren M