OctaneRender® pre-Beta 2.3 v4 (win/lin/mac) [OBSOLETE]

Thu Sep 16, 2010 8:22 pm

I have received today my two ASUS GTX 480 and installed them in my Cubix.

I have had some difficulties with the drivers. My previous Nvidia driver was 197.13 and my GTX 260 worked fine.

First only one GTX 480 was detected by the device manager. As the version delivered with the new cards was 197.03, in a fisrt step I leaved the 197.13. But due to the encountered problem, I downloaded the last available Driver at nvidia : 259.96. (displayed as Cuda 3.01).

The cards now work fine and I have a render time gain of 4.5 x from one GTX 260 to the two GTX 480.

I did my first test on my most recent scene and noticed that OctaneLive Pre 23_v4 requires a bit less of memory, which is a good surprise : 567 MB instead of 590 MB formy current scene.

On the bad side (but it can probably be corrected by modifying the settings of the scene), I noticed that the render looks different in term of gamma or contrast : the rendered scene is much darker !

On the images below, the first is rendered with 2.2 (same look as Pre 23_v1)

I have had very few time these days and haven't done tests with Pre 23_v2 and v3.

And the second image is rendered with Pre 23_v4.

It is exactly the same ocs file with no change at all in the settings.

A quick test done on a light bulb under a glass shows that light still does't pass through the glass...

kubo · Thu Sep 16, 2010 9:58 pm

congrats on your new rig, it souns totally awesome, also the building looks neat from this pow. On a side note, it hasn't been implemented light thru transparent materials yet, it's due for 2.3 final.

Thu Sep 16, 2010 10:05 pm

Have found a new? issue...

The blackbody emission power is max 100. If you use texture, you can use max 1000.
If you switch from texture to null and then to blackbody, then you can use max 1000 for blackbody...

face

Fri Sep 17, 2010 12:38 am

@kubo : Thanks, I wasn't sure about light passing through glass.

I have encountered a weird thing. Octane crashed, and I had to struggle with Windows 7x64 to make it work again, because Windows compatibility system said that this application was not compatible !

Finally I got it working again, but if I run the compatibility test feature, it says Not compatible !

Fri Sep 17, 2010 9:02 am

I'm afraid I'm finding a few bugs in this pre23 v4.

When I first went to render an old octane scene (created in v2.2b) it rendered perfectly in pre23 v4~ very stable, no problems at all.

Then I went to create a new octane scene in pre23 v4 ~ imported the wavefront obj, altered materials, saving as I go & all was fine. Until I get down towards the bottom of my very long list of materials & when I went to change a material Octane seized up. I get (Not Responding) at the top of my Octane Render toolbar.

This sounds similar to what happened to lechu. The only way to continue is to close octane.exe in the Task Manager & when Octane disappears I still have an octane.exe sitting in the Task Manager which refuses to go away. I have to restart my computer and then I get a blank screen where nothing is happening at all. I then have to reset my computer.

When I try to load the problematic scene in pre23 v4 it appears to load in fine and when I go to render it, it will only render 3 samples and then stops completely. Octane will then seize up again and the whole (Not Responding) scenario will repeat itself if I click on pretty much any button within Octane (select material, etc).

This is a shame because I've had to go back to v2.2b and I think that pre23 v4 gives really superior quality rendering when it works.

My operating system is Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, I have 2 graphics cards ~ 9800GT for my operating system & GTX460 2GB for rendering in Octane. I have the latest nvidia driver 258.96. My computer is a core i7, 920 with 12GB of RAM.

Fri Sep 17, 2010 10:10 am

Surely, someone has already ask the question... but...

How can we pre-order the new octane version ? Is there a launching price ?

Thx

Fri Sep 17, 2010 10:17 am

krys wrote:How can we pre-order the new octane version ? Is there a launching price ?

I'm not sure what you mean. You already paid for all the versions up to 2.0, you don't need to pre-order anything.

Fri Sep 17, 2010 1:02 pm

8Eggar8 wrote:Any chance an upcoming build will have the option to turn off the 'texture environment' background 'off' leaving just the reflections and/or refractions on?

+1 on 8Eggar8's request

It would make an awesome feature.

Fri Sep 17, 2010 5:31 pm

+1
But I think it is already on Radiance list. I asked for that feature since the beginning, as well as the ability of turning off shadow casting for meshes used for backgrounds (planes, spheres or cylinders), in order to avoid them masking the daylight environment lighting when the sun is low.

radiance · Fri Sep 17, 2010 7:58 pm

face wrote:Have found a new? issue...

The blackbody emission power is max 100. If you use texture, you can use max 1000.
If you switch from texture to null and then to blackbody, then you can use max 1000 for blackbody...

face

it's also relative to exposure in the tonemapper, so if you want 10.000, set light power to 100 and tonemapper exposure to 100,
100x100 = 10.000

Radiance