Makes sense to switch back to Octane Blender

[acoval]

Will Brigade be available for Blender? it could be used instead of Evee then in conjunction with Octane.

[Goldorak]

It will be in all plugins, same with embergen FX. The blender plugin will also be able to load hydra render delegate into blender besides brigade. I think that might shave off 10 years on the blender dev roadmap last time I checked in hydra support on the blender roadmap

[linograndiotoy]

Will Brigade be available for Blender? it could be used instead of Evee then in conjunction with Octane.

As Jules said, yes, we'll have Brigade in Octane for Blender. Which means Eevee will not be really needed anymore.

[acoval]

Awesome, is it anytime soon ?

[crackfox]

...and crickets.

it really is a permanent waiting for godot situation.
i am not hating, its fine, but honestly though, with the viewport denoise in e-cycles 2.83 i am good to go.
spent some time porting the scenes from octane blender to cycles and its just a far nicer experience especially if one uses more volumes.
on the flipside, i never could get the fog to act in octane in a predictable way and i have seen a bunch of tutorials.

i also encountered strange issue in octane where i could only rotate the hdr environement on its horizontal axis, not vertical, aswell as exposure issues.
several other problems culminating again with a displacement heavy scene not rendering all of the sudden. cant be bothered to list them all now.

like i mentioned, the rental only system makes this a waste of money.
as a comparison, jangafx rolled out embergen with a simple rent to own. pay for a year and if you drop out, you stay on that version.
i still cant say i understand the octane system.

in any case, i really cant bear to throw good money on software i am barely using.

good luck, so long and thanks for all the fish.

[pegot]

... i never could get the fog to act in octane in a predictable way and i have seen a bunch of tutorials.

+1 on the fog comment. I have never been able to produce fog that shows strong in the background and only subtly whisks around my foreground objects. Been very frustrating trying to learn how to do this and all the tutorials are for C4D and just never seem to translate properly in my attempts. PLEASE PLEASE Otoy produce a tutorial or sample file for Blender that show how to do this.

As for the rest of this post I barely ever use Cycles or Eevee so can't comment. I have enough on my plate just trying to learn and master Octane - so a fog tutorial dedicated to the blender plugin would be great!

[J.C]

... i never could get the fog to act in octane in a predictable way and i have seen a bunch of tutorials.

+1 on the fog comment. I have never been able to produce fog that shows strong in the background and only subtly whisks around my foreground objects. Been very frustrating trying to learn how to do this and all the tutorials are for C4D and just never seem to translate properly in my attempts. PLEASE PLEASE Otoy produce a tutorial or sample file for Blender that show how to do this.

As for the rest of this post I barely ever use Cycles or Eevee so can't comment. I have enough on my plate just trying to learn and master Octane - so a fog tutorial dedicated to the blender plugin would be great!

Have you tried simple plane (with normals facing camera) in front of camera with Specular material with medium node? Easy and controllable.

[pegot]

I think I saw some info on that in the past and may have tried it. Will have to try again but I understand there are limitations if you're animating the camera (I guess the plane can be parented to the camera or the camera can target the plane but still it is a workaround).

[linograndiotoy]

...and crickets.

There's no date yet.
Communication, both here and on the official Facebook pages, has been pretty lively, so your comment sounds a little odd to me.
Jules made a very detailed presentation of the Octane road map, providing a huge amount of information about the present and the future of Octane:
https://developer.nvidia.com/gtc/2020/video/s22153

it really is a permanent waiting for godot situation.

Current Octane for Blender (2020.1 RC4) version shows a huge progress, so, again, there's no Godot to wait for, just the opposite. You can quite enjoy the present as an Octane for Blender user.

i am not hating, its fine, but honestly though, with the viewport denoise in e-cycles 2.83 i am good to go.
spent some time porting the scenes from octane blender to cycles and its just a far nicer experience especially if one uses more volumes.
on the flipside, i never could get the fog to act in octane in a predictable way and i have seen a bunch of tutorials.

While I love Cycles, in my experience Octane still feels way faster and more interactive. Not sure which is the last Octane for Blender version you used, but my feeling is your judgement is probably based on some very old build/version.

i also encountered strange issue in octane where i could only rotate the hdr environement on its horizontal axis, not vertical, aswell as exposure issues.
several other problems culminating again with a displacement heavy scene not rendering all of the sudden. cant be bothered to list them all now.

Any issue has a solution. You can rotate, scale and move an HDR Environement in Octane on any axis. Did you ask for help about it? That's the perfect setup for Texture Environment trasformations:

About displacement and scenes not rendering, reporting issues and content may help.
I've succesfully rendered projects containing a huge amount of Megascans in 2020.
I've made a live recently (sorry, it's in Italian) where I'm showing Octane for Blender performances with some Megascans. Not a crash and awesome interactivity:
https://youtu.be/_togTU5Iub8?t=6606

like i mentioned, the rental only system makes this a waste of money.
as a comparison, jangafx rolled out embergen with a simple rent to own. pay for a year and if you drop out, you stay on that version.
i still cant say i understand the octane system.

For Octane you can go for rental or permanent, since several months now.
https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/purchase/

in any case, i really cant bear to throw good money on software i am barely using.

That makes perfect sense and is your absolute right.

good luck, so long and thanks for all the fish.

If you take the time to watch Jules's video, you may realise that we're definitely in good luck!

[acc24ex]

I guess it depends on what you need to render? Some of the advantages are that Octane supports OSL on the GPU, you can import VDB files directly, a better sky model, AI lights, and Vectron/Spectron to name a few.

Jason

Hmm...are there any example .blend files which reflect those advantages?


thanks in advance
richard

yup, there's stuff cycles still didn't pick up, and I'm not taking sides - I'm sticking mostly with cycles for compatibility
E - cycles I think still isn't up to the octane's speed, and octane still seems to hold that realism edge, I can see the shadows being nicer.. I'd go with e-cycles, but I wasn't convinced it will work that much faster - still missing support even for some cycles stuff as I remember

.. anyway - a good approach for octane would be to take advantage of blenders Material output - you can choose to export to eeve, cycles or octane - when we do convert material - it would be a good idea to leave the cycles settings there and octane setting, so we can jump to render engines naturally - it would be still great to use eeve while on octane

- really octane should upgrade the converter - or have like real time converter that is developed for 3dsmax plugin now - pretty amazing

- also - like for 3dsmax plugin - native cycles nodes like noise/musgrave - and bake on the fly - you would get a lot more people on octane - right now, I'm only testing octane here or there - and when I get a a few hard crashes I don't use it for another week or wait until updates -

..the team really has to get right on octane to make it pull through - I've seen like 1 octane test in the blender group in the past month

BTW anyone using decal machine has problems - the decal using normal maps go purple - only on octane blender version - not sure what's going on there

- anyway - are there any free material resources for octane blender - BTW you guys should check out lily surface scraper - it loads the maps directly from free cg texture sites like https://cc0textures.com onto cycles/eeve - all diffuse specular glossy normal displacement
- from there you can convert to octane - and it worked, but I got a crash after a few tries - you can't use the script while octane is turned on, because it cannot set up cycles/eeve nodes - thus we should be able to access both systems and utilize the material output for octane and cycles nodes .. anyone agrees?