Is Octane more photorealistic than Blender Cycles?

[Midphase]

I posted a similar thread in the Blender forums, but I was curious what the opinions would be here in the OTOY forums.

To my eyes, I am seeing considerably more believable photorealistic renders come out of Octane users than those using primarily Blender Cycles. What I am picking up from Octane is not only a more organic and tactile overall feel, but also a considerably more believable sense of large scale.

Don't get me wrong, both are remarkable render engines, but when it comes to photorealism, to shots that seem like they could be mistaken for something shot on a camera in the real world, I feel like Octane has a perceptible edge over Blender Cycles.

One of the most believable large scale renders that I have seen come out of Octane is for the World Creator video "I am" which looks to my eyes, at times indistinguishable from actual real-world footage.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/VwNaoD90UJo?si=PlCuw8-fLWv56ph2[/youtube]

I have yet to see anything even coming close to approaching the degree of realism from Blender Cycles, despite the fact that many incredibly talented artists use it as their primary render engine.

Perhaps a good example of what I am trying to convey are the short films by Paul Chadeisson.

His first one "Migrants", rendered with Octane, to my eyes conveys a grandiose sense of scale with tactile and physically realistic visuals.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/G2dGWH90aew?si=tDyOmXvGsaBG0V1m[/youtube]

However his more recent short film "Solstice 5" which was rendered in Blender Cycles, feels considerably more CG and the scale at times almost like I am looking at miniatures, despite being the superb work of an incredibly talented artist,.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/cntb3wcZdTw?si=wAl5RMoX-UwAcUNf[/youtube]

I am curious what Octane users thoughts are about this topic. Am I completely wrong, or is there something about Octane that just seems to yield inherently more photorealistic results?

I realize that this is a touchy topic so I hope that we can keep the conversation civil, but I am very interested in everyone's opinions on this, both in favor and against.

[offrench]

I am making some research on Cycles as I find C4D/Octane is lacking lots of things that Blender has: a very lively community and loads of plugins being the most interesting. I also find that my Octane landscape renders lack contrast and are difficult to get perfectly realistic.
Anyway, there are interesting works by some Blender users in Landscape:

Rudi Heinrich (Facebook 3D landscape community)
The most impressive small scale landscapes I know.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1472718 ... cale=fr_FR

Adrian Kulawik
Some of his renders share the same look as the ones or Rudi
https://www.artstation.com/adriankulawik

Sweeper 3d
Not photorealistic, but impressive illustrations anyway
https://www.instagram.com/sweeper3d/

Florenaux
He used C4D/Octane and switched to Blender recently. Has a YT channel with lots of tuts. Not photorealistic, but also nice detailed illustrations.
https://www.instagram.com/florenaux/

+ other examples on Artstation.
https://www.artstation.com/search?sort_ ... _include=2

However, I am not sure about the amount of training it takes to produce these. And compared to C4D, I find Blender awkward to use and am not sure it can handle very heavy scenes easily. It does have powerful object scatter plugins, though.

[nuno1980]

OctaneRender (OR) is more realistic because examples: OR has nested dielectrics support while Cycles not yet;...

[skientia]

Photo-realism is no longer a matter of renderers but skills and knowledge, and has been for quite some years now.

To the nit-picker, trained eyes or technical-minded individual, surely some differences are observable and undeniably factual (for instance, Octane shines at having plausible rendering components such as (layer-based) shading, complex light calculations such as caustics and so forth).

This is a bygone discussion that is no longer relevant to the present.

Plenty of outstanding Octane renders online, but this forum isn't the most practical to link them all in a reply.
An alternative will be found and shared in a follow-up reply.

[sethRichardson]

I am making some research on Cycles as I find C4D/Octane is lacking lots of things that Blender has: a very lively community and loads of plugins being the most interesting.

As a professional artist this is not a positive. Anytime you have to rely on a 3rd party to get something done or get something updated you are asking for trouble. What if you built a blender pipeline with several plugins and then 6 months later that community plugin just ceased to exist? Also having software that is so ... whats the word im looking for... convoluted that you have to rely on a community to get answers to things that just work in other programs like houdini is also not a positive.

People talk alot about the blender community without noticing that its probably also a negative in many peoples eyes. This is why blender hasn't made it into major studios. Reliability and stability are the biggest factors as well as being able to scale up.

When Blender users use this argument as the biggest positive to why people should use blender that screams "im not ready for the big time" and a large community is needed to figure stuff out. Thats bad design.

My 2 cents.

The reason octane looks more realistic in many case is because its a spectral render engine and treats light interactions and color as we see those interactions in real life. Most render engines are rendering a RGB space, not a spectral one. This is why when you render in ACES and choose a color its pretty spot on as well vs something like Redshift where you choose a color but they have 4 different ways to choose it, in c4d anyways, to get it to match closer. I would also say that octane nodes are probably one of the deepest things you can get into. You can create pretty much anything, but it has steep learning curve and the layout tools for it suck complete ass. No way to organize the nodes in groups or anything so you end up with huge networks that dont make sense if you go back to them months later.

[skientia]

It would take pages of replies on this forum thread to elaborate why Blender is what it is today.
But this isn't the core of this discussion and a community is the pillar of software programming and development.
Octane (or any renderer) wouldn't exist or be what it has become, without all the world-wide contributors (at sampling, shading, software architecture levels, adoption...).

Regarding the spectral part, it does play a role and is elaborated on this post.


There is no secret on how to achieve photo-realism, any renderer in skilled hands is capable, ad nauseam.

The other substantial factors that differentiate a renderer from another is in its design, ease-of-use, learning-curve, pricing model, plugin ecosystem, stability for certain cases (companies, studios, individual level collaborators) and so forth. Octane is a one of one in that aspect, from as early as its first versions, it remained consistently "authentic" (design and dev).