OctaneRender® 2026.1 Alpha 1

[linograndiotoy]

Primitives don't provide smoothing angle options. With FBX it works as long as smoothing is correctly defined in the DCC software berfore exporting the file.
Try to "Shade Smooth" the box in Blender, and it will work fine in Standalone.

[J.C]

Primitives don't provide smoothing angle options but they work with previous displacement type. Same with the fbx I provided.
Anyways. I'll wait for the next iteration of Octane 2026 to see if displacement has improved with next build.

[tombyrom]

It's still in development, but very impressive already:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DDEr5JWtmOt ... BiNWFlZA==

Once it works with other projections such as tri-planar(a must have) and box and it's as well optimized as current displacement it will be amazing I am sure!

Side by side a 2k displacement in 2026 almost looks as good as an 8k in 2025 minus some small detials and you don't get any jagged bits.

As for not needing to bake procedural textures that will be nice as well although not been a huge problem for me to be honest even with chaos textures

[Elvissuperstar007]

Meshlets - will it work with Itoo Forest pack?

[abstrax]

Meshlets - will it work with Itoo Forest pack?

It will probably not work well. I haven't seen the tree geometry myself, but I expect there to be many separate island in the mesh topology for the leafs, which can't be reduced in a sensible way as far as I know.

You are probably also thinking of instancing the heck out of the trees, this doesn't work too well either at the moment, since an instanced meshlet mesh will end up with a meshlet selection that makes sure that the triangles of all instances don't cover too many pixels each. So you end up with far away instances having way too many meshlets. However, this can most likely be improved and we will try to find a better solution for instanced meshlet meshes when we are done with all the basics.

[skientia]

Nice! I just tested the new displacement feature on an RTX 4090, one 8k material from Quixel on a simple imported plane and it completely locks up on anything over a 1024x1024 displacement texture, is that expected currently? The viewport becomes unusable and renders 1 sample every 30+ seconds or more. Memory usage is fine, only using 13gb according to GPUZ

Same issue on my system. The displacement is usable on 1k textures. Everything above starts to slow down viewport considerably.
Old displacement system is really smooth with 8k textures.

Moreover the displacement still breaks the geometry apart.

displacement 2025.png

[/color]

If interpreted as intended, It's seemingly an anticipated outcome as suggested in the bold-highlighted paragraph:

New Real Time Per-Pixel Texture Displacement

Octane's texture displacement system is being given a complete overhaul. The quality of the displaced surface, especially with high frequency input data has been much improved. It is also now possible to use OSL textures directly with texture displacement.

The implementation in Octane still has several issues left to solve, including feature interoperability, the Metal implementation, UV mapping, and most importantly, there has been no performance optimizations yet. VRAM consumption in this alpha is far heavier than it will be with the next set of changes. Please also note that you must use a Mesh UV projection in the input texture, at the moment. We are planning for this requirement to be lifted when we get to stable.

Note that at least in this version, old scenes using texture displacement will continue using the old method for compatibility issues, if you wish to switch to the new mode you must change the node's compatibility mode to use the latest approach.

[Tugpsx]

"Neural Rendering Modules and Nodes (experimental): Launch ML and Neural Filters locally or through the Render Network with integrated local and remote neural rendering within the Octane Node Graph." Where are those? I don't see them in 2026.1 Alpha 1.

That is under: "2026.1 Roadmap: New Features in Active Development"

As an option, can we use ComfyUI as the local AI?

[jobigoud]

As an option, can we use ComfyUI as the local AI?

Right now in the development version, yes, it can talk to a local ComfyUI install. We have a few test nodes working.
We are also planning on having a remote Comfy server option to make it easier. I don't know at this point if both will work in the released version, it may depend on demand. (For local it requires installing some custom nodes to Comfy).

[Tugpsx]

As an option, can we use ComfyUI as the local AI?

Right now in the development version, yes, it can talk to a local ComfyUI install. We have a few test nodes working.
We are also planning on having a remote Comfy server option to make it easier. I don't know at this point if both will work in the released version, it may depend on demand. (For local it requires installing some custom nodes to Comfy).

Sweet, would love to test this out.

[Tugpsx]

Anyone with a working sample of a MaterialX scene? curious on how to setup the nodes in Octane Standalone.