Questions about octane

[idtasos]

i am thinking of buying octane. It is simply amazing. Rendering that takes 6-9 minutes to be completed in vray (amd quadcore 3.2 ghz) takes 30 seconds in octane! But, i have some questions that really bother me:

1. Is there any other way to set camera because i can only do it with the mouse and is frustrating! (i mean like artlantis where you can use a plan and adjust the position of camera, target, fov etc)
2. Are there any material libraries? this is major point in my opinion
3. Whats the difference between direct lighting and path tracing (the second creates some white dots and takes forever to complete!)
4. Sometimes Octane crashes (creates an error about debugging, c++...)
5. Does octane support caustics?
6. Why there isnt preview when you select material nodes?
6. If i buy it now will i be entitled to receive the commercial version free, or there is an additional price to pay?

thank you very much for your time!

the product really rocks!

[matej]

Hi.

1.) Exact camera orientation is usually set in your modeling app and exported through the respective exporter (which are available to licensed customers)
2.) Yes - the Live DB will be a global repository for material (also emitters, textures..) sharing... And maybe other stuff, who knows.. Currently the system is not yet 100% operational (buggy, little amount of uploaded materials), but it will be in the final version.
3.) Pathtracing computes global illumination so it delivers a more realistic result and it's meant for finals. Fireflies are not that an issue anymore in the current 2.3 beta, end will be even less in the future.
4.) Octane is still beta, so expect occasional crashes and other nuisances.
5.) Of course
6.) In the Graph editor window bar there are toggle buttons that control for which action the material ball shows up when you click on nodes
7.) By buying the license now, you actually buy the 1.0 final commercial version and its sub-versions 1.x up to 2.0 which will require an additional payment.

Note that the 2.2 beta demo is quite outdated. The current 2.3 pre-beta is more feature-full (but a little less stable).

[GregP]

Hi there, I've got a question concerning Octane licence. I want to buy this renderer, that's for sure, but here is my problem: a little bit embarassing, I know, but I'm currently running my machine on 32bit vista; It will be however replaced with 64bit system (either win7 or ubuntu) soon. So, if I buy octane now will I be able to swap my version later to 64bit windows or ubuntu? Or is it better to get my pc sorted first?

[matej]

Once you have the license you can download whichever version you want - be it a build for 32/64/win/Linux... So, you are not limited in this regard. You are just limited by one license per one machine at the same time (you can move the license from machine to machine).

So it's pretty flexible.

[andi]

As radiance said in an other threat, you buy the licence for one Computer. It doesent matter wich os you are running. you can also have more than one os installed and so run in your case the linux and the windows version of octane on that computer.
Even so i'm a pretty new customer i'm pretty sure you can download octane whenever you like, as often as you like and the version that you like, once you bought the licence.

[GregP]

Thanks guys, all my doubts have now vanished!;)