No love for the bleeding edge users

[adamnerva]

First, let me start by saying that blender octane is coming along nicely, and the developers seem dedicated and passionate... that said:

Does anyone else just end up using cycles because they are no longer on 2.8x builds of blender?

For any other 3D DCC running the nightly or alpha builds is a recipe for disaster, but that is not the case with blender. Even the nightlies are stable enough to do contract work in. I have been getting actual work done in 2.9.

I really am not going to jump back to the older builds just to use the octane for blender plugin. I wish there was a better way... having to use Otoys custom builds is kind of a deal-breaker for me now. I could understand if this was needed for performance, but the octane viewport is super laggy to navigate.

Not trying to be negative or overly critical, it's just that blender is an entirely different beast compared to the other commercial DCCs. It is developed at break-neck speeds and updated constantly with real quality of life improving updates that are often way too tempting to wait 6 months or so for it to end up in an Otoy blender build.

[linograndiotoy]

First, let me start by saying that blender octane is coming along nicely, and the developers seem dedicated and passionate... that said:

Does anyone else just end up using cycles because they are no longer on 2.8x builds of blender?

For any other 3D DCC running the nightly or alpha builds is a recipe for disaster, but that is not the case with blender. Even the nightlies are stable enough to do contract work in. I have been getting actual work done in 2.9.

I really am not going to jump back to the older builds just to use the octane for blender plugin. I wish there was a better way... having to use Otoys custom builds is kind of a deal-breaker for me now. I could understand if this was needed for performance, but the octane viewport is super laggy to navigate.

Not trying to be negative or overly critical, it's just that blender is an entirely different beast compared to the other commercial DCCs. It is developed at break-neck speeds and updated constantly with real quality of life improving updates that are often way too tempting to wait 6 months or so for it to end up in an Otoy blender build.

Critics are always welcome!

Using daily builds for commercial work, especially for complex projects, always represents a very high risk in production, and that's true for Blender as well. There's a reason why those are called alpha and beta builds.

We're very close to release Octane 2020.1.2 for Blender 2.83 (it has been tested internally and looks very stable) and of course we'll be ready to update the build as a new Blender Foundation official release will be available or if something important gets fixed.

Currently Octane for Blender offers a performance we can definitely compare to the one you can experience in Standalone, and that's due mostly to the fact we're integrating our own API in the code. An addon could never offer the same.

I like to use the most recent builds to check for new features and improvements, but personally I would never do serious, heavy production work using a software in alpha.

You can always install alpha versions to learn the new feature and, why not, use it to model or create FX, taking advantage of the new sculpting tools for example. Most of the times you'll be able to export the result in a previous version without any issue.

Using Cycles instead of Octane because of the need to use the latest alpha version it's, of course, a repectable personal choice.