Refractive Software (Octane), purchased by Otoy.

[jamnique]

A lot of anger here ;] The way i see it: to me Octane was worth its price times a couple the way it was two years ago. And then development exploded. It was really really fast and well documented every step of the way.

I'd like to remind those of you that are angry right now that before Octane appeared we were waiting what, 5-7 years for the "GPU revolution"? It was promised to be just around the corner by one company after other, and time after time they failed to deliver for years. Then Radiance appeared and singlehandedly did it! ;] And decided to sell it... for 99 Euro! ;]

So even if i may not like the idea of Octane's fate in someone else's hands now and development having slowed down, hats off to all Refractives. I will always be greatful for what you did, and I am really really glad to hear that you were finally compensated for the hard work. You guys are real pioneers and it would be a really crapy end to this story if your brainchild eventually ruined your health and pushed you into debt and poverty.

As for the "excuses", Octane isn't a copy of a copy of a copy of some well established technology. It's the bleeding edge of GPU rendering! How can you expect things to go smoothly all the time when what they're doing has never been done before and there's only a couple of them? So i see the "excuses" for what they are - honest information about what was going on on the battlefield.

Once again, thanks for the last two years guys, you have made rendering a pleasure ;]

P.S. What's the timeframe on better motion blur?

[matej]

Octane development exploded when Marcus got the reins and then slowed again when he left

I hope now with the money injection, we will see new devs coming in. Octane is awesome of course, but don't forget it's still missing a lot of stuff, even basic tools.

[jamnique]

Octane development exploded when Marcus got the reins and then slowed again when he left

I hope now with the money injection, we will see new devs coming in. Octane is awesome of course, but don't forget it's still missing a lot of stuff, even basic tools.

Damn. I didn't know he's gone...

[Refracty]

Yes, Marcus aka Abstrax is great.

Please come back Marcus!!!

[FractalBuddha]

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.

Maybe I am off topic but, Blender stole Octane with Cycles?!
Is it the first announcement of this on the forum ?

[mib2berlin]

No you are not, it it easy for refractive to prove for sure as cycles code is open, but nobody do it.

Nonsense, mib.

[ROUBAL]

I still have no answer to the question I asked several times about the ability of keyframing the camera and its parameters inside Octane Standalone in a close future, as well as some very basic and necessary features like Shadow Caster, Shadow Catcher and No Shadow materials, I sent a PM to Radiance, but I have no answer as well so far...

We were adviced around 4 months ago to not use a third party tool like OPT to animate the camera, and wait to the soon upcoming built in solution... but there is still nothing else available currently to do walkthrough animations of big scenes.

About Shadow Caster, Shadow Catcher and No Shadow materials, I have no ability at all in coding, but I am almost sure that they are not the most complicated features. However, they are some of the most needed !

Maybe some priority could be done to some basic and most needed features.

I would really want to have an estimation about when we will have these features, as well as instances... because I have put a project in standby that requires them, four months ago, expecting a good surprise for Christmas, but nothing happened...

I have put much hope and trust in Octane since the beginning and I invested a lot in hardware to use it at best, but I need some basic features that don't come as fast as expected, and I have really to know if I have better to search another tool to complete my projects.

[matej]

@Roubal, if OPT works for you then use it, regardless of what is the official RS position. Maybe now the development will speed up, but I wouldn't put much hope for camera keyframing inside Octane standalone. It's just not their priority (since it's viceversa of what they are focusing on now - embedding octane in other apps).

+1 for a roadmap

[face]

Otoy and shadow catcher, wrong thread?

face

[ROUBAL]

@Face :

Radiance wrote :

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

As he is not much present on the forum, I asked him my question here in this topic as he said he will respond here... but no response so far.

So I don't think it is the wrong thread, even if my question is not directly linked to Otoy, if it is the only topic visited by Radiance.

@Matej : OPT works, but every time you move something in the interface you have to recalibrate all parameters targets, and it is very tedious !

Even if RS priority is to embed Octane in other packages, I think that Blender users desserve the same attention as other clients. Even if Octane is not expensive, it has required a lot of investment in hardware to be used : High end graphic cards, connection to network due to Internet activation, switch to 64 bits OS, add of RAM on motherboard, purchase of a Cubix box in my case as my mother board didn't support the Graphic cards... A total of 4200 Euros.

For my own, I think that It would be very unfair now to leave faithful Blender users without the aforementioned basic and necessary features.