Clarification sought - Octane Renderings

[PMahabir]

My comment has to do more with what I'm noticing to be a signature of Octane renderings. I'm not sure whether to ascribe this to method of the artist or methods employed by the software but there always seems to be something amiss with lighting (gray midtones), unnatural sharpness of objects, and a very saturated look to materials. A good example of what I'm trying to descibe would be the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ1IRQTqMMY

I find it difficult to achieve a good color balance with Octane and to also render interiors that are not noisy/grainy (normally I leave renderings to "cook" for atleast a few hours with both video cards active) and still have firefly remnants. Just to state:

A. I do utilize PMC or Path depending on circumstance.
B. Utilize portals
C. Try to minimze my use of specular materials and substitute glossy where I can.

I have a pretty powerful workstation:
Core i7 950 @ 3.07 Ghz
12 GB RAM
Windows 7 64-Bit
2 - EVGA GTX580 3GB GPUs

Basically it was purpose built for rendering, and costly as well. However, I'm just not happy with the output I'm getting from Octane. Naturally I'm not the most experience Octane user, but I do have a sound understanding of rendering concepts and utilize V-Ray for my normal day to day work.

Would be hugely appreciative of any advice, or at the very least some confirmation that it's just my method causing me grief!

[PMahabir]

I'm positively sure it's my method now Just saw Enrico Cerica's post!

[glimpse]

Depending on your setup, you can cut walls or even ceilings in order to have just wall (or two) and the flor =) in that case if You can get out with good lighting and camera angles your rendertimes can be cut at least twice =) try it, a lot of guys use this technique even with vray =)

[enthewhite]

I'm positively sure it's my method now Just saw Enrico Cerica's post!

Can you give a link to the post you are referring to?

[PMahabir]

Sure thing, http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... =5&t=21040

On a different note, I'm trying to utilize Octane for some basic product renderings and I am still struggling with getting the lighting correct. I'm providing environment lighting through HDRI and utilizing Octane lights for specular/glossy highlights on the product - however the rendering look's nothing like it should (atleast what I'm trying to achieve). Attached I've provided a shot from Octane and one from VRay. Any advice is much appreciated.

[mib2berlin]

There are some settings you could try:
Set Camera Response to Linear
Set Vignetting to 0
Mesh Preview Camera aperture to 0.01 (smallest level)

Cheers, mib.

[roeland]

If you set the camera response to linear, don't forget to set the gamma value to 2.2 (it should match your monitor gamma).

--
Roeland

[PMahabir]

Hi Roeland,

Would it be possible for you to take a look at this file? Many thanks!

[roeland]

You have a different material setup in the two renderers. For instance in the Octane render the pole is made of glass while in the V-Ray render it is made of metal. For a render like this you also need to make sure the maximum depth setting in the kernel is high enough.

The environment needs to be an latitude-longitude map. Cube maps don't work in Octane.

--
Roeland

[PMahabir]

Thanks Roeland,

The glass pole was corrected in a later version, I suppose I sent one iteration back. I was pretty sure that the HDRI is spherical and not angular/cube based. Will give some other options a try - will take it back to basics where I'll utilize the HDRs provided with the Octane Demo pack. Thanks for the help!

Kind regards.