Rendering interior architectural spaces with Octane?

[David Hard]

Hi,
I work for a interior design firm and currently use Form Z to model our projects and use Maxwell to render. I would like to find an alternative to Maxwell as it is too slow (~24 hours to render a single clean image). Someone suggested I look into Octane. It looks promising from what I can tell from the projects gallery. However, I don't see many examples of interior spaces rendered with "artificial" light sources. Most of the images seem to be illuminated with light coming in through windows from an exterior source (like an HDRI file). The bulk of our work is showroom design where there is a lot of artificial lighting from track lighting and such. Are there any good tutorial videos that explain how emitters work in Octane? How do they affect the over all performance of a rendering? What is the quality of light one can expect? Is it realistic?
I currently do not have an INVIDIA card in my computer (a MacPro - 2x 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with ATI Radeon HD 2600 GPU) So I cant play with the software myself.
I would be willing to go to the expense of installing a new GPU in order to use Octane if it is indeed faster and at the quality I am looking for.

So my questions are:
How well does Octane perform when rendering an interior scene with up to 300 individual light sources?
What are the render times like for high quality renderings of interior architectural spaces? is it hours? days?

Attached is a WIP of a scene I'm rendering in Maxwell. As you can see, it's very grainy and this is even after 12 hours of rendering and not all of the geometry is in the scene.

Let me know if anyone has suggestions.
Thanks
David

[Refracty]

Depends on the size of the lightsource, the intensity and of course the polycount as well as your GPUs.
I would advise you to export your scene as obj (materials seperated) and install the demo at somebody's computer with a GTX or other Nvidia card to test.

[David Hard]

We do have a Mac here that has a NVIDIA GeForce 6600 card installed. But NVIDIA's site doesn't say anything about that card being CUDA supported. Does that matter?

[t_3]

We do have a Mac here that has a NVIDIA GeForce 6600 card installed. But NVIDIA's site doesn't say anything about that card being CUDA supported. Does that matter?

afaik there are members which use a 6600, so it should work. the point is, you'll get a 10 times more or better performance with any sinlge up-to-date nvidia consumer card, so don't count possible results with that setup as the maximum possible. also stacking more cards together would ramp performance up even further...

[David Hard]

I see.
Well, I think it would be good to at least see how it renders with what I have. I can then judge from that whether or not I will see improved render times over what I have now with Maxwell. I'll give it a shot.
Thanks.

Also, Do you know of any good lighting tutorials I can look at that would be relevant to the type of scenes I typically render? See the image in the original post to get an idea of the kind of scene I'm talking about.
I'll keep looking around.
D

[gabrielefx]

300 photometric ies are work for a different rendering engine.

[David Hard]

Well... I can group them as one source and multiply it by the number of original sources. I usually do that anyway for Maxwell.

But right now, I'm not able to get the Demo to work with the OBJ files from my modeling software. It just crashes each time I try to add a mesh. I can open the sample OBJs that I downloaded from the Refractive Software website just fine so I know the GPU is fine and that I have all of the proper drivers installed. I don't know what I'm doing wrong with the export from my modeling software. I'm using FormZ 6.7.
Attached is a screen grab of the wireframe scene and the export window. the scene consists of a sphere and a slab. nothing else.
Any thoughts?

Also, attached is a screen grab with the details of the GPU I have to work with.
It's a NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 card. It's not the most powerful GPU in the world. But, like I said, I am at least able to open the sample scenes and navigate around. It's only when I try using the OBJs exported from FormZ that it crashes.

D

[convergen]

Does the object have a material assigned to it in your host application?

octane seems to freakout on me when there are no materials in the obj file at all.

[David Hard]

It does have a simple shader applied to each. FormZ exports a seperate materials file along with the OBJ. Not sure if that's typical.

[radiance]

It's extremely difficult to try to guess what part of the OBJ file is incompatible in this scenario, the OBJ standard is implemented differently in many applications, and it's probably one or more of your export settings.
Either send us your OBJ file, zipped via e-mail (support at ourdomain dot com) so we can try to find the syntax issue in it,
or start with a basic, no-option export and try to add options in your OBJ export configuration as you need them to 'hunt down' the one that's causing the incompatibility.

Radiance