Refractive Software (Octane), purchased by Otoy.

[Carl S.]

Pixelrush you seem to be forgetting about "Your beta license will also be valid for the final v1.0 Edition release, and subsequent dot releases such as v1.1, v1.2, etc, and will allow a reduced upgrade cost to future v2.0 releases." Do you think there is going be to be a stand alone 2.0 version now that they are moving to the cloud which is subscription based? We are over a year past when 1.0 was supposed to be released. To act like they lived up to all the commitments we bought into is delusional. Vaporware is what I bought.

[matej]

What happens to my lifetime license

Yea, I wold like to know that too

[pixelrush]

No that's nonsense to talk of vapourware. You have something on your pc you can and do use right now. After beta 2.61 say for all intents and purposes they could declare v1 to be done and it would be correct.
v1.1, 1.2 etc might only be maintenance releases or they may have some new content, who knows.
I expect they will honour the discount for v2 and lifetime licenses. Perhaps with new ownership v2,v3 etc will arrive on a yearly basis. It would be more practical and in keeping with industry practice.
No doubt with new ownership they will want to do things differently but they won't want to destroy their customer base by pulling a crooked deal so don't fret about things going sour.
While progress has been less rapid than most people hoped, including Refractive themselves no doubt, Octane is still good very good value for 99 euro. Really I think the value is more like 299 euro presently so don't confuse frustration on rate of progress or uncertainty about the business changes with the value of the goods.
I can't find any info that says Octane is moving to the cloud. Don't know where you got that from.
People have their own hardware for Octane and I don't see that changing. There are some over the internet aspects to Octane and they did talk of offering a render service but I don't think the delivery plan would change at all.
Again its important to stay with the reality that the ownership has changed, nothing else.
Re stand alone, at present to have an operable plugin requires the stand alone as well.
Unless they rewrite all their code I expect things to continue as now.
Also there are a fair few customers out there who are Blender users and need a stand alone. I don't expect the stand alone to disappear. Don't stress about things that are largely imaginary.

[ROUBAL]

I agree with you Pixelrush, but I hope that RS Team will break soon this heavy silence ! It is worrying, and for a Blender user, probably even more than for 3ds users...

[a.boeglin]

ok dudes, I just got an answer from the contact of otoy. Here is his answer :

"Hi Arnaud,

Thank you for your email!

Octane's future is secure and its roadmap isn't being altered.

The team in NZ will be free to discuss all this in the forums shortly, once a formal announcement has been made on the site. The timing of the news getting out publicly came sooner than expected, and I am very sorry we weren't able to post anything about this prior to today.

BTW, I am an Octane user too, and I want to see it fulfill its promise as much as anybody. We're going to do everything we can to make that happen as we move forward with this lager team

All the best,
Jules"

Then no worries for now, it all seems fine, and the dev may even go faster. Let's see what comes next

[t_3]

Octane's future is secure and its roadmap isn't being altered.

what roadmap?

seriously, this is good news; nice speech. looks like they care. and if they do, somebody should monitor the forum more frequently in the future, to not let start such unnecessary rumor-building...

[radiance]

Hi All,

Sorry for not replying earlier but i have been quite busy lately...
The venturebeat article came out too early and i was going to write an official announcement on the site today. (will follow soon)

First of all, I sold Refractive and Octane to OTOY Inc.
As you all know, our baby is growing up and needs to leave the home into the world, to grow up.

I have worked myself into hospital (twice) over the last years to create almost single handedly (and with the help of a few other excellent programmers after the first 6 months),
a renderer that competes favorably with iRay, Arion, you name it.
I cannot continue like this, it is bad for my health.

Also, due to the recession, It is not possible for RS to grow past 3-4 employees, limiting growth.
There is also a possibility that RS goes bankrupt within say the next year and then nobody has nothing anymore, and I am stuck with debt for life.

Here are a few very important answers to your questions:

1. Nothing will change for you and your licenses. Prices, free v1.0 final for beta licenses, etc... everything remains the same.
2. v2.0, which is still a long way off, will not become expensive.
3. OTOY Inc. is only 40 people big, so not a big corporation.
4. They develop cloud technology and actor capturing technology so they do not have people right now (at this very day) to start work on Octane, they will be hiring/expanding, so expect things to slowly chang during the next few months, it's a lot of logistics work. I can say that Sam Lapere is joining us in a couple of weeks (a coder with an excellent blog), and much more coders during the next months, development will skyrocket.
5. We will have offices in NZ (development) and LA (development, management), so we can offer faster support in different timezones.
6. Octane standalone and the plugins will remain as they are, and cloud versions will be optional, eg, you will be able to buy Octane v2.0 or whatever in the future to run on your machine.
7. Autodesk HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS. OTOY Just develops cloud tech for them that's it. They have no say or any contact at all with the octane team. They cannot interfere with it either as they do not have any control whatsoever. I personally don't even know anyone at Autodesk, it's a cloud thing between the cloud department at OTOY and Autodesk only. The AutoCAD plugin is purely coincidental.
8. Regarding blender, we are still evaluating options for a blender plugin product. It's quite difficult due to the GPL restrictions on linking the octane engine into blender, and we wonder if the demand is big enough, since brecht joined our company, only to vanish 2 weeks later with a copy of our engine code and 4 months later announce 'cycles', which is now integrated into blender. Maybe a poll would be in order here to see what demand there is, as it costs time and money to develop these plugin products.
9. I (eg, Radiance) will stay working in the OTOY New Zealand and LA offices, managing octane development, aswell as all the current staff of Refractive Software LTD, eg nobody is going to go. I will be titled 'Chief Graphics Architect' at OTOY Inc. (sounds pretty spiffy eh I don't care much for titles though, they came up with it )

I understand some of you will reconsider helping new customers with questions on the site due to this announcement, but the truth is that it's going to take us at least 1-2 months to train people to provide support, so I ask everyone considering stopping offering help to reconsider for a short while, until we have the trained manpower we need. Just do it for me, and my gift to you of a 99 Euro GPU engine


I hope this answers most of your questions, and please ask me more, I will respond here...

Radiance

[pixelrush]

Do you still have a job with Octane development or are you moving along?

Thanks for 99 euro gift. I make a gift of 1000 + detailed helpful posts for fellow users = probably 80+ hours of my time = 999 euro

Edit: btw we have been through the brecht bit before and Cycles is different code based on nvidia

[t_3]

thank you radiance - clear phrases, good tenor; very welcome!
now back to business as i already wrote earlier

[Lutze]

Thanks Radiance,

very much appreciate your informations. Would love to see Octane getting even better (and with an Blender and an Houdini plugin... ) with the new money from otoy.