January: Octane License Competition *CLOSED*

[havensole]

I've found that going between photoshop and octane equals a guaranteed octane crash. Might be something in the GPU resources. I was using it for the screen capture, but whenever I went back to octane to tweak the angle it crashed. I've switched to using MS Paint and that's behaving, although octane will refuse to use the mouse to change the angle and I have to enter it manually. Odd. Also try reducing your image texture resolutions. Orginally I was doing my image textures at 4096x4096 and that would eat my vRAM in no time. I reduced them to 2048x2048 and all works fine now. Makes me want to get one of those gtx285's with 2gb vRAM.

[pixelrush]

Are you using Photoshop CS4 with gpu acceleration?
perhaps this is conflicting with Octane.
try turning it off in PS preferences.
see this page http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404898.html

[ROUBAL]

Most of my textures are smaller than 1024x1024. Often under 512x512.
I use an old version on Photoshop Elements. I find it easier to use than Gimp.
I also have Photoshop Element 7.0, much more recent but less handy. Anyway, in Photoshop Elements preferences I didn't found the ability to disable GPU acceleration.
Adobe recommends also to work with a single monitor, but I'm on dual screen because but I have not a wide screen and I can't get enough room for the 1024 resolution screen capture and the nodes panels on only one of my two 4/3 screens.

[d.welshhons]

ROUBAL,

I don't even know how you are getting that many objects in the scene with all the textures. I am using a GT240 with 1Gb vram and I can maybe get about 200,000 triangles tops and no more than about 150 MB in use out of my total 1023 Mb. The first beta seemed to be more stable as far as how heavy the scene was ram-wise but it crashed non-stop for those types of scenes when you changed materials. The new beta seems not to handle as big a scene and I also noticed that glass is not rendering as well as the first release, there are artifacts in it and maybe this is a result of not having a minimum depth setting now when you are using pathtracing - actually I don't really see much of a difference between directlighting and pathtracing either in UI speed or render results.

[radiance]

ROUBAL,

I don't even know how you are getting that many objects in the scene with all the textures. I am using a GT240 with 1Gb vram and I can maybe get about 200,000 triangles tops and no more than about 150 MB in use out of my total 1023 Mb. The first beta seemed to be more stable as far as how heavy the scene was ram-wise but it crashed non-stop for those types of scenes when you changed materials. The new beta seems not to handle as big a scene and I also noticed that glass is not rendering as well as the first release, there are artifacts in it and maybe this is a result of not having a minimum depth setting now when you are using pathtracing - actually I don't really see much of a difference between directlighting and pathtracing either in UI speed or render results.

Hey,

The windows version is a 32bit version.
You can however, by tweaking your windows boot.ini,
enable the large adress extention, which octane supports.

This allows you to have a process realistically using up to ~3GB in size instead of ~1.5GB (these are practical sizes)
I used this to render my iguana scene,
which had about 3 million triangles, a very large EXR hdr map (3000+ x 2000+ pixels),
and a handfull of large textures, in my GTX260 with 892MB ram.

here's some information on how to do it (use at your own risk though):

http://en.wiki.mcneel.com/default.aspx/ ... Aware.html

Regarding the glass and pathtracing, i just removed the mindepth from the user interface,
it's hard coded to 3 internally.

The directlighting integrator was'nt very optimized yet, i've got a much faster implementation now,
which will be in the next release. (double the speed)
Now it's dramatically faster than path tracing, ideal for using during navigation and editing.

Radiance

[ROUBAL]

My CPU RAM is already enabled to 3GB (I use it for Blender). Windows sees 3.25 GB of my 4GB.

I'm trying something else : while exploring the scene, I disable all textures on object that will not be in the camera field.
Not many, because some textures are shared by several furnitures, and the wall paper is everywhere, but it helps keeping the GPU memory load around 65 %, and Octane seems to be more stable at this load level.

Still doing trials

[creativeinput]

My first post, render and submission to this contest
Been checking out this new and fabulous software for a couple of days and i must say i am impressed with the rendertimes!

My inspiration for this picture was something i saw in the magazine Hauser a few years ago and i tried to use my memory to recreate this photo (i have no idea if i hit the spot or not!)
I hope to take more pics from this scene, but it keeps on crashing alot so it's alot of work to put in all the new textures all over again.

Posting screen and picture.

*edit*
Uploading more and more pictures here. Original is the blurred out with the juiceglass in front.

[havensole]

Not sure why it keeps crashing for you then. I've had scenes roughly the same size (somewhere near 1.5million tri's) and just as many materials as you have. I am using a 8800gt, not gts though. I've never had a problem with it not using all the RAM or capabilities of the system. Only thing I can figure is that photoshop is eating some of vram of the card, or something else in windows for that matter.

I don't agree that the last version had better spectra materials. I don't get anywhere near the amount of fireflies as I did before. This version is a thousand times more stable. Anyway, my 2 cents.

[pedrojafet]

There's another try.
I used a real reference, from Natura, a brazilian makeup products.
There's the reference picture, the Lightwave model and UV textures.
Comments are welcome.

'HotPixes' software was used to remove fireflies. Also, it destroyed
the botton line, with tech specs...
So, there's:
2048 steps
2:28 minutes
143918 Triangles
GTX 275
41.7MB used

[havensole]

Well I guess its time to finally throw my hat in. Here's 5 images I did for a building remodel here at work. Sorry if this take up a whole page.