We are proud to announce the first public unveiling of Octane 4.
The Octane 4 introductory video below will give you a tour of what's new (and what's coming) in this major update.
Octane 4 has been in development for some time now, and we would like to take the opportunity to bring you an experimental release of it as a preview. If you have a V3 license, you will be able to try this build.
As with all test releases, please do not use this build for production work, and please note that we are aware of a number of issues in this experimental release. Scenes saved with this version may not necessarily be compatible with future releases.
All features of 3.08 are included. For more info on those, please read the 3.08 new features thread.
For outstanding issues in this build, please see the list at the bottom of this post.
New Features of V4
AI Light
With the introduction of AI Light in Octane, you will see a great improvement in light sampling, especially in scenes that have many lights with localised distributions. As a learning system, AI Light improves as you render more samples. When used with Adaptive Sampling, AI Light gets even better, since it will learn that other lights become more important, as some pixels are no longer sampled.
To enable it, see the settings under Light in your kernel settings.
AI Scene
AI Scene in Octane brings you much faster scene loading times, and a dramatic improvement in viewport interactivity. You are able to position and modify geometry in real time, even in scenes with several millions of triangles. Vertex animation with constant topology is updated in real time in complex scenes, as you move the time slider. Using the gizmos in the viewport on massive scenes is also in real time.
AI Denoiser
The much anticipated Spectral AI Denoiser allows you to render noise-free in a fraction of the time. You will find the settings to enable it in the Camera Imager settings.
Out of core geometry
Octane now supports out of core geometry, allowing you to use a significant portion of your system memory for geometry data. Multiple GPUs are also supported with out of core geometry.
In your preferences, you will see four sliders under Out-of-core. System RAM usage limit allows you to limit how much system memory Octane will use for out of core geometry and textures. Geometry data GPU RAM usage limit allows you to specify a limit on how much GPU VRAM you want to use for geometry, and underneath, you can set the same for textures. This allows you to balance the level to which textures relative to geometry are evicted from VRAM.
Current issues
The features above required changes across the entire application, and we are working hard to address them all. Issues we are currently aware of in this release are listed below.
- Network Render is currently disabled.
- As you modify your scene, AI Scene will cache the changes to speed up render, and this may cause some temporary freezing of the viewport.
- AI Light processing is sometimes slow on scenes that have a large quantity of emitting triangles (millions for example).
- Occasionally if you make changes during the first AI Scene caching, emitters will stop working or the viewport will freeze temporarily.
- Occasional render failure while changing time slider on rigged mesh animations
- Render speed and VRAM usage profiling is still an outstanding task, therefore we expect to improve both render speed and geometry usage in future releases.
- AI Scene and AI Light are not yet fully working with hair/sphere primitive types.
- AI Denoiser currently supports only one GPU, which can be selected from the devices tab in the preferences dialog.
- AI Denoiser is not yet working on Volta.
Download links (for licensed customers only)
Edit 1:
Current known issues
- AI Denoiser will not denoise volumes and hairs.
- AI Denoiser currently crashing on the machines which don't support AVX instructions.
- AI Denoiser will not work on Fermi cards.