Maybe someone from the "team" would give us a small insight of what is it all about because new Blender renderer looks almost EXACTLY the same as Octane...
Well I dont think anyone knows what Brecht has actually coded yet but there isnt anything exclusive about unbiased renderers nor making use of GPU.
Rather than being exactly the same though it seems to be a bit of a hybrid of various approaches with somewhat different objectives. Obviously it benefits from close integration with the Blender UI.
I dont think its a reproduction of Octane or Luxrender or anything else...
Brecht wouldnt do something like that anyway.
There is no point doing again what other people are already doing and also no point running foul of any legal issues.
Looks interesting so far. Blender folk will have more choice than ever and the BI renderer is starting to show its age.
Wait and see what the basis is before getting upset about it.
The good news is if you have hardware for Octane it appears you can use it for Cycles too. Win, win.
Last edited by pixelrush on Sun Apr 24, 2011 6:52 am, edited 4 times in total.
What parts are exactly the same? Changing mat. params in real time and node work flow? Well then, the same could be said for all Octane competition out there.
You can't base your conclusions on how the program looks like on a video - and since he will be releasing the source code, it won't be difficult to analyze if stuff has been stolen or not.
i dont know if i should be happy or nervous
Why nervous?? You should be happy that Blender has such an awesome community
I noticed this a few hours ago blendernation and i am very upset about it.
I can't explain everything in great detail as it's private information,
but Brecht has broken his NDA/contract here.
Brecht joined our company late last year, started work as a developer,
and a few weeks into his position, he resigned for no reason.
He was asked to train his successor which he did not do. (Roeland, who you all know)
He had a copy of the source required to do his job, of which he kept a copy of his laptop for working at home etc...,
so the probability of him having kept a copy of it is very large.
Judging from the video/demo and features, this seems to be based A LOT on Octane,
and having a copy of our sources at hand makes it possible to develop an alternative in a short amount of time.
I guess if this continues we will lose the Blender users on the site,
but the issue that upsets me the most is that my hard work will, in a derivative form, be 'open sourced' and our commercial competitors will have access to it. (Arion, iRay, Indigo, etc...)
Brecht signed NDAs and contracts to prevent him from doing this, which he agreed to and has signed.
Even if it's not based directly on Octane source, many of the concepts of it can be reimplemented loosely, and it took me a lot of work & research to develop them.
Sorry guys, I don't want to start a war here but this is completely unacceptable to me, he's taken 2 years of my hard work and repackaged it, this could end up damaging Refractive Software permanently.
Well you dont know that. I wouldnt get too excited by it yet and start with accusations.
Saying he repackaged it is libelous and I think you should refrain from statements like that.
When the source code comes out you can look at it and go from there.
As far as I can see it is artist orientated rather than aiming for accuracy.
It just incorporates into a Blender renderer some recent technology developments.
The Blender community pick up on all sorts of stuff and implement papers.
Brecht has been involved with improving Blenders renderer for quite a while.
I dont think he went away and made use of his short time with Octane to reverse engineer it.
That would be silly.
Octane has been out there for a while now and is bound to pick up imitators and competitors.
Refractive is the unbiased-on-GPU leader so you should expect others to be at your heels.
When the source is released, RS could prove that some of it is based on Octane. Of course that means wasting money and time on legal shit
I guess if this continues we will lose the Blender users on the site,
I would really hate to see this, because if would also mean a decline in Octane Blender support. But I think Blender users have enough reasons to continue to use Octane, especially with all the new features coming. As I see it Octane is still the best thing that happened on the photo-realistic CG field - mostly because it works with/on FOSS, so even if it's not a free renderer, it's the closest best thing you can get.
The reasons you might lose Blenderheads would be:
a. failing to deliver on your stated v1 mission.
b. hiking the price for v2 and putting it out of their price range.
c. having a go at the BF legally over perceived similarities and pissing the community off as well as wasting $ and precious time and energy.
d. Blender users have a strong allegiance to open source software and prefer to support it when it exists - this is a fact of IT life. People do drift off nakedly commercial ventures - remember Indigo..
With the availability of Luxrender you are possibly fortunate to have as many Blenderheads here as you do and lets face it when Octane came onto the scene originally you would have upset the status quo of a few big players as well. I seem to remember some rather odd GPU depreciating forum posts
It does come around unfortunately..
The best defense would be to keep your heads down and keep coding and deliver something even better than what gets into Blender so your customers are happy to keep paying for upgrades.
People have chosen to buy into Octane over using other solutions.
I dont think Octane and Cycles are the same animals at all.
The problem is neither that we lose Blender users (everyone can use whatever he/she wants to use) nor that Brecht just copied and pasted code from Octane and plugged it into Blender, which is rather unlikely. Most of the stuff used in Octane is not new and can be found in other render engines. But taking the right approaches, integrating them and making them run on a GPU is the tricky bit and Brecht certainly could learn quite a few things from Octane. I'm not saying that he couldn't pull this off on his own, but his stint at Refractive Software certainly helped him a lot.
And to be quite frankly: Leaving the Blender Foundation, working for a few weeks for the competition and then going back with a bag full of ideas and knowledge is not only unfair, but rude (and potentially illegal, but I don't know the contract details). And remember: He gets paid by the Blender Foundation...
So what happens next? The Blender Foundation releases the code and then we will see, how many ideas and concepts have been copied. Unfortunately then it's too late to do anything about it, even if there have been some serious breaches of the NDA, because everybody (including our commercial competition) had a look at the source and concepts and we can't wipe their hard disks and memories.
Of course, the world will not stop spinning, if the worst case happens and RS has to close shop, but it's definitely not a nice way to be forced out of business. Anyway, we will continue working on Octane, improve it and add new stuff and time will tell, if that's enough.
Think about it,
Marcus
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
pixelrush wrote:The reasons you might lose Blenderheads would be:
a. failing to deliver on your stated v1 mission.
b. hiking the price for v2 and putting it out of their price range.
c. having a go at the BF legally over perceived similarities and pissing the community off as well as wasting $ and precious time and energy.
d. Blender users have a strong allegiance to open source software and prefer to support it when it exists - this is a fact of IT life. People do drift off nakedly commercial ventures - remember Indigo..
With the availability of Luxrender you are possibly fortunate to have as many Blenderheads here as you do and lets face it when Octane came onto the scene originally you would have upset the status quo of a few big players as well. I seem to remember some rather odd GPU depreciating forum posts
It does come around unfortunately..
The best defense would be to keep your heads down and keep coding and deliver something even better than what gets into Blender so your customers are happy to keep paying for upgrades.
People have chosen to buy into Octane over using other solutions.
I dont think Octane and Cycles are the same animals at all.
I agree.Even if the code is a snapshot of Octane.It is a snapshot of code at a point in time a few months ago.All the new features you are promising will take octane on a different path from the others.The biggest advantage I see for Octane at the moment ironically are the thousands of beta users out there with vast amounts of experience of 3d rendering in various industries who can offer good ideas on how to improve Octane as well as ironing out the bugs.I.E.S. lighting was one recent suggestion by the users that moved it up a notch in my eyes.
Just keep on octaning and don't get distracted by what the others are doing.
