The future of Blender + Octane

Forums: The future of Blender + Octane
Blender (Export script developed by yoyoz; Integrated Plugin developed by JimStar)

Re: The future of Blender + Octane

Postby Faizol » Mon Oct 17, 2011 11:57 pm

Faizol Mon Oct 17, 2011 11:57 pm
arexma wrote:Let´s stick with vray for compariosn:
The standalone costs 350 Euro, the Blender exporter is free - well donationware.
The integrated version, for example for 3dsmax costs 1350 Euro.

Would you buy a more costly Blender integrated version of Octane? The development has to be paid somehow. I guess Refractive just sees no economical reason to do it. After all it´s a company trying to generate revenue, not to please all communities.

Just let the community a chance to develop the plugin. At least it wouldn't be as crude as it is, and at the same time it shouldn't be too far behind compared to other commercial Octane plugins.

arexma wrote:Beyond that, is should be possible to create a Blender integration without any license violations. You can always write your stuff, make a DLL and use python to integrate it, without dropping your pants (reveal code) or violate the GPGPL.

Agreed. And hopefully Octane internal will support a few of the standard formats for exchanging animation data and the community can hopefully take advantage of that to develop a complete exporter. Otherwise the situation will remain as it is, exporting objs frame by frame.
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Re: The future of Blender + Octane

Postby kivig » Mon Oct 24, 2011 8:00 pm

kivig Mon Oct 24, 2011 8:00 pm
arexma wrote:Would you buy a more costly Blender integrated version of Octane?


There is a blender badge on index page. Support of blender etc. platforms is a reason lots of people went Octane.

As far as I know there was no such statements, but it would be strange if suddenly Blender would not be supported anymore before even first official version comes out.

I mean - at moment Blender is not supported, but there's no final Octane version yet, so one can hardly complain, I just hope the reason will be winning in the end.
Does it really takes so much professional man-hours to develop a proper blender plugin that it won't pay off? Provided, blender is much more plugin-friendly compared to MAX etc. and even has a community of supporting programmers. Who cares if it will be GPL? No one will loose money if the plugin will be open source.
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Re: The future of Blender + Octane

Postby matej » Mon Oct 24, 2011 10:18 pm

matej Mon Oct 24, 2011 10:18 pm
RS could just take Lionel's exporter and work on it. So basically they need just to find someone that would be the official maintainer.

I don't know for the full integration, though (how much difficult it would be to do it)

And Blender users are certainly not a negligible part of Octane users.
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Re: The future of Blender + Octane

Postby Alain » Tue Oct 25, 2011 5:37 am

Alain Tue Oct 25, 2011 5:37 am
Cycles does a very good job for architecture visualisizations already: Supporting instancing, direct light thourgh glass, dif. lighttypes (sun, arealights,...).

So I guess for Blender the winner will be Cycles, even if I didn't believe in Cycles before ;-)

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Re: The future of Blender + Octane

Postby MadMinstrel » Tue Oct 25, 2011 2:09 pm

MadMinstrel Tue Oct 25, 2011 2:09 pm
When I was buying Octane, I was certainly not expecting Blender to be hung out to dry like this. I've only paid the 100 euro for the beta, sure, so it's not like I have that much to complain about, but still, right now Octane is kinda useless to me. My workflow is model->test->tweak->test->tweak... and so on. Using the standalone version without an exporter means I have to spend lots of time exporting, importing, reimporting, reloading, saving out minute changes to textures, setting up, etc., even after I've done the exact same thing in Blender. Tedious. Cycles on the other hand gives me immediate feedback. Depending on the length of the animation, the resolution and scene complexity, it may still be quicker to use Cycles even if it renders slower.

Given that Blender's render API is maturing rapidly, I strongly suggest that Refractive finds a legal way to make it work. Great respect to Yoyoz for making the exporter, but neither the users, nor Refractive should really expect him to develop and maintain it for free ad infinitum, and I don't think many of us can take the risk of using an unsupported exporter on a live project (and that's in addition to a beta renderer). It may work now, but will it still work in 6 months if I need to rerender? Please Refractive. This touchy-feely community driven approach is not really working out.
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Re: The future of Blender + Octane

Postby Refracty » Tue Oct 25, 2011 2:49 pm

Refracty Tue Oct 25, 2011 2:49 pm
You can't compare a build in Plug In with a standalone. Of course the stand alone approach takes time to import, export and reassign materials but on the other hand with Octane you have a nice beta renderer.
I also wait for a tight integration with Rhino (in my case) but good work takes time so at this point there is no reason to complain.

MadMinstrel wrote:I strongly suggest that Refractive finds a legal way to make it work

I don't think that there is any legal issue that hinders the implementation of Octane.
The only contradiction in my view is that Refractive Software would have to lay out the 'source script' if it wants to go with Blender because this is based on open source.
But maybe there are other ways to solve this.

MadMinstrel wrote:but neither the users, nor Refractive should really expect him to develop and maintain it for free ad infinitum

In the SDK announcement there is no statement that the work (as a plug in developer) should be unpaid.
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Re: The future of Blender + Octane

Postby MadMinstrel » Tue Oct 25, 2011 5:08 pm

MadMinstrel Tue Oct 25, 2011 5:08 pm
Cycles is standalone too. It's written entirely separately from Blender (in C++ in fact, where Blender is in C), and there's no reason you couldn't code a Maya or Max plugin for it if you were so inclined. It just happens to have a well maintained, well integrated python plugin for Blender. There's really no reason I can see for Octane not to be just as well integrated (other than Refractive's unwillingness to tackle the problem). And if there's something specific that's blocking such integration, Blender is open source, and the team is very open to patches. In fact, right now would be the best time to do it, before the development on the render API is finalized.

As far as the source code is concerned, I can't really see a problem with that either - they don't have to publish a single byte of it. The standard way of dealing with this is to package as dll. Or they could use python to communicate with the standalone executable via an exposed API. Moreover, there's no way Blender, a standalone modelling and animation package, and Octane, a standalone renderer, would ever be considered an inseparable whole in the spirit of the GPL. I'm not a lawyer of course.

Yes, good work takes time, but at this rate, 2.5 came and went without ever getting a stable plugin (Yoyoz' work is excellent for a community plugin, but it's far from what you could call stable). There is no indication that this is going to change, that Yoyoz is going to get paid for his work, or that Refractive is taking this seriously (cryptic forum posts aside).

But hey, I'm not complaining. It's just that I like Refractive and hate to see them lose the Blender market just because they were too cheap to do proper integration. At this point, once multi GPU rendering kicks in on Cycles, the case for a Blender user for buying Octane will look really not very good at all.
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Re: The future of Blender + Octane

Postby Refracty » Tue Oct 25, 2011 6:15 pm

Refracty Tue Oct 25, 2011 6:15 pm
I also wish that Octane would be implemented into major applications already.
I hope that after setting up the next big features (SSS and Instancing) they focus on the tight integrated PlugIns (beside solving some left limitations like transparency with sun system,...).
It is really a GPU race that has started.
Lets hope that the users will be among the winners.
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Re: The future of Blender + Octane

Postby Keen » Wed Jan 11, 2012 9:42 pm

Keen Wed Jan 11, 2012 9:42 pm
MadMinstrel wrote:When I was buying Octane, I was certainly not expecting Blender to be hung out to dry like this.

+1

So true. MultiGPU for cycles should be coming out some time this month. Though Cycles is still far off from Octane, the instant feedback is a big plus.
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