What happened to BRIGADE?

[gabrielefx]

if Brigade will be faster then Octane will be faster too...

mmmmh....

[Seekerfinder]

Brigade is meant to be real-time, for games / pre-vis, etc... while keeping the goodness of unbiased path tracing.

Unreal Engine can do both, it can do LPV (some kind of GI using SH) and baking. Baking is the most common option (see the latest works done with UE4 on archvis, very nice but it's a baked scene, so not much dynamic objects).

That's why games like Battlefield as they have fully destructible objects avoid baking (IIRC, they used Geometrics).
But for static scenes, baking is probably one of the best options.

The point of Brigade is having the quality of baked lightmaps but in real-time so you can move your objects, change the lighting... (You guys use Octane, I don't need to explain haha )

You don't need 64 GPUs to run Brigade, don't worry. The point of using the cloud is that anyone even if they have a terrible machine (Not everyone has 780ti's, especially normal gamers or architects) They still can use Brigade how it's meant to be.

Brigade 3 currently renders 720p@30fps on a single GPU (780, not TI).
And we're still refactoring some stuff there and there, so the performance is not even final...far from it. It'll be much faster soon.

Our main objective is the noise-free real-time rendering, we reduced the noise A LOT since I'm working on it, I can't judge too much about previous versions of Brigade, I'm working on it since Brigade 2.

Then all the ORBX workflow will be usable in Brigade too, Like you do your scene on Octane - you can render it on Brigade and vice versa.
For game devs, they shouldn't worry, there is enough CPU/MEM to do their game logic, sound, AI, physics, etc...

We'll give you guys updates about Brigade soon! Sorry about that lack of news, but no worries, it's actively being worked on.

Thanks.

A much appreciated response! Thanks icelaglace. Can't wait for Brigade. Incidentally, I hope to be working OFFLINE mostly for day to day iterative work (architecture and product design) and probably would use the cloud offering for final rendering out of presentation stuff. But client interactive client presentations would be great offline on a Titan or 3 in Brigade. Don't know how clean that 720p@30fps is but Brigade seems faster than Octane so that should be good.

I'm still a little confused as to why there should be 2 products and Brigade seems to me to have a bit of an identity crisis.

Brigade is meant to be real-time, for games / pre-vis, etc... while keeping the goodness of unbiased path tracing.

Sounds an awful lot like Octane... (except the 'games' thing perhaps)
Is the intention that Octane would remain the tool for texturing and high level composting and to create render passes etc and Brigade to be an interactive viewer of exported scenes only - like Octane's, only faster, but without the ability to update materials, add proxies etc? A 'dumb' viewer in other words. Would that be more or less correct? If so, would it not be possible to have an interactive Brigade window that offers live updates from Octane so that we can have the same brilliant interactivity we have with Octane, but faster interactivity in Brigade...?

Thanks,
Seeker

[riggles]

I thought I remember reading somewhere that a Brigade scene is precompiled, as in: no nodes. This sounds to me like shader properties (but not actual lighting/reflections) are baked to the surface in a way. This would seem to basically eliminate the scene graph and speed up calculations considerably.

It's possible I just made all that up, too.

[enigmasi]

I wish octane has lights as fast as Brigade

[Rikk The Gaijin]

I thought I remember reading somewhere that a Brigade scene is precompiled, as in: no nodes. This sounds to me like shader properties (but not actual lighting/reflections) are baked to the surface in a way. This would seem to basically eliminate the scene graph and speed up calculations considerably.

If that's true, then I would like to have a "compile" option for Octane too, so once I finished tweaking my scene, I will compile it, and it will render super fast.
I hope it makes sense?

[Seekerfinder]

I thought I remember reading somewhere that a Brigade scene is precompiled, as in: no nodes. This sounds to me like shader properties (but not actual lighting/reflections) are baked to the surface in a way. This would seem to basically eliminate the scene graph and speed up calculations considerably.

If that's true, then I would like to have a "compile" option for Octane too, so once I finished tweaking my scene, I will compile it, and it will render super fast.
I hope it makes sense?

ORBX export from Octane seems to be the current solution.

I would like there to be a 'live' link or at least a refresh scene option in Brigade that updates only nodes that were changed in Octane.

Seeker

[icelaglace]

Just out of curiosity, I thought Sam Lapere was the creator of Brigade, and now he's "missing". What happened to him? (if it's ok to ask)

Brigade was created by Jacco Bikker and Jeroen Van Schijndel years ago.
OTOY bought the engine and made the development continue, with Jacco & Jeroen.
Sam made Brigade popular by creating cool demos/games of the engine and changing little bits of the engine for demo purposes.

Let's fast forward to now, we are a team working on Brigade 3. We changed everything, the engine was remade from scratch, allowing us to create a stable, working product for future releases and less as an experiment

Brigade is meant to be real-time, for games / pre-vis, etc... while keeping the goodness of unbiased path tracing.

Sounds an awful lot like Octane... (except the 'games' thing perhaps)
Is the intention that Octane would remain the tool for texturing and high level composting and to create render passes etc and Brigade to be an interactive viewer of exported scenes only - like Octane's, only faster, but without the ability to update materials, add proxies etc? A 'dumb' viewer in other words. Would that be more or less correct? If so, would it not be possible to have an interactive Brigade window that offers live updates from Octane so that we can have the same brilliant interactivity we have with Octane, but faster interactivity in Brigade...?

Brigade is another project on its own. It's not because both of them do path-tracing that under the hood, they use the same techniques, methods, technologies, way of rendering path-tracing, etc...
Octane is meant to render a final quality production image, while being interactive enough to set up your scene.
Brigade is real-time, meant to render as close to the production quality but in real-time, there are sacrifices in quality but for real-time, you won't notice it. It's meant to run constantly, have animations, game logic, etc. while keeping the 30fps/60fps cap.
You can use it as a viewer, yes. After you're done with your scene on Octane, you can just export it to Brigade. But keep in mind that it's a game engine, you'll have to sacrifice some things at the moment. The objective is, of course, to not sacrifice anything in terms of quality in the future.

I thought I remember reading somewhere that a Brigade scene is precompiled, as in: no nodes. This sounds to me like shader properties (but not actual lighting/reflections) are baked to the surface in a way. This would seem to basically eliminate the scene graph and speed up calculations considerably.

It's possible I just made all that up, too.

You can modify your materials, shaders in real-time on Brigade too, like Octane.
You can light your scene, shade your scene, texture your scene in Brigade. See it like any other modern game engine.
Baking would be pointless and redundant for the final user, imagine that you have to do slight changes all the time on Octane then export to Brigade all the time... + the quality would not be the same with interactive environments.

Thanks.

[enigmasi]

I would like to have Brigade for some non-highend animations which doesn't require to be photo-realistic

[Rikk The Gaijin]

Thank you icelaglace!
Will it be possible to share a short-range roadmap of Brigade? What can we expect to see next year?

[ArchPrime]

Is there a test version available to play with that can take Octane generated content?