OTOY Forums

also looking forward for an official blender plugin and willing to pay for it if necessary! When I bought octane, I saw the blender logo among the supported programs list... I hope they won't let us down!

I would also pay. Please keep supporting Blender. Many many Octane Users are Blender Users too.

Is there any news about the blender plugin development? Will it happen? Would be good to know!
Thanks for your great product!

My personal opinion is that the integration into blender is not gonna happen.

Primarily because of Cycles, development of which is progressing way faster than Octane. Cycles is not an exact replacement for Octane, but even so it will (it does) move users away from it. Cycles already has some flexibility (render layers, a plethora of render passes, light sources invisible to camera...) that we will never have in Octane, integrated or otherwise. The next version coming in June or July will have SSS, volumetrics & motion blur, while we will be still waiting for the next bigger improvement in Octane (instances). Maybe for static (& "strict realism lighting") scenes like archviz, where composition flexibility is not that important, Octane could be the better option, but for film production I don't see it able to compete with Cycles.

So, will Otoy change their whole Octane licensing, only so that it could be integrated in an app where it will risk being ignored in favor of the native solution? Business logic says no. The radio silence on this topic also speaks for itself.

Octane feels like is meant for Blender users (affordable pricing for freelancers & small studios), but Cycles will most likely steal the show.

That's a shame because personally, I'm not a fan of Cycles. I much prefer Octane.

For my own, I mainly manage with very big scenes (currently without instances I am unfortunately too often way beyond my 3GB VRAM capacity) and I don't use the graph editor and material nodes in Octane (Too many materials: the screen would become overloaded and messy very fast) , and I find very fast to create my materials in the Node Inspector. I find it much more tedious in Blender/Cycles, and I 'd really like to render my animations in Octane.

I have to say also that cycles often crashes with scene that are supported by Octane !

I would love integration in Blender, and still hope that it will happen some day. Once the new instancing comes out and we can move objects and lights around in the scene (I believe these two go hand in hand), I think the integration wont be as big of a deal.

kavorka wrote:I would love integration in Blender, and still hope that it will happen some day. Once the new instancing comes out and we can move objects and lights around in the scene (I believe these two go hand in hand), I think the integration wont be as big of a deal.

Its not a problem of coding, it's a problem of licensing. Octane SDK is proprietary closed source, Blender is GPL. You cant integrate a closed source plugin in a GPL program.

There were people saying this could be still circumvented somehow (sorry, don't know much about this legal stuff) keeping the closed license of Octane, but the new owners of Octane don't seem much inclined to shed some light on to this questions.

sorry, what I meant is that fully integrated in Blender wont be as important because we can move things around in the stand alone version.

The only thing keeping me with Octane is the fact that Cycles doesn't support Shader Model 1.1