general questions for the future

[mradfo21]

Hey Octane, great Job on the new release ! Looks promising as always!

I'm just checking in again.

I have some long-term questions, I suppose not even as much about Octane, as about GPU rendering.

How does the GPU rendering community hope to overcome memory limitations? To my knowledge (which surely is narrow) no one has yet to implement a system for instancing and proxies ? I know Cebas is making claims that they are simply GPU accelerating the entirety of Final Render - but I couldn't make it to Siggraph this year to see.

Because modern production standards require immense amounts of textures and millions to billions of polygons.

for example, we're doing this commercial right now and every-one of our textures is 8k (we convert them to tiled-mip-mapped .exr so there is no slowdown by putting them in memory), and everyone of our objects is subdivided heavily, then converted to a proxy - even animated objects.

After this project, we'll be getting Vray-RT to help with shader development (we use Vray brute force in production right now). We will also use the GPU version the moment it becomes available, the plan is we test shaders with the GPU, then render with the CPU because of the memory limitations.

Do you see the future of Octane being in production? or more of a testing tool?

Again, props to refractive software for developing such an incredible tool! You've got my vote and admiration!

[pixelrush]

Hmmm well Refractive arent spokesmen for the whole 'GPU rendering community' whatever that is.
Unfortunately I dont remember you visiting before but I can tell you users of Octane are happy with it and doing fine in regard of their memory thank you.
I agree the developers are doing well. Our community sure appreciate their efforts.
Have look in the Gallery to see what people are doing with Octane beta and doing it very well.
People are already using Octane for 'production' purposes regardless of the early status of development.
Not many people would bother with 8k textures though. Seems like overkill to me.
I dont know where you would need to have 'billions' of polys either but certainly tens of millions arent an issue.
Perhaps Octane isnt for you but never the less keep calling back to voice your admiration and congratulations.
Dont forget to mention to your friends your regard for Octane.
We like good publicity and are happy to see new members in forums and of course Refractive welcome new customers.

[mib2berlin]

The new quadro fermi 6000 series got 6 GB DDR5 VRam, and this is not the end.
NVIDIA nows about the VRam barrier, so hopfully "Kepler" or later on (Maxwell) should solve the problem.
Except for performance explosion.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/21/nvid ... 11-maxwel/

Cheers, mib

[radiance]

Hi guys,

Don't worry, we're working on a solution.

Yours,
Radiance