Hello all, this is a summary list I made of the posts from Alpha 1, 2, 3, broken into categories of Issues, Wishlist, Developer Notes, and then my own notes for the posts. I put the user name at the end in parenthesis.
It might help see what was going on with user encountered issues (Issues), see who else had requested something (Wishlist), or get up to speed on the V3 development within context of release (Developer Notes). Also, if you see your name by an issue, and its not an issue or you have a workaround, you could note it...
I had fun reading this all, hopefully I didn't misquote anyone! Wishlist and Developer Notes are more fun to look at
OCTANE RENDER 3 STANDALONE ISSUES
Alpha 1
1 - Just like any previous version it's 4-8 times slower on OSX. Slower rendering of character animation, cloth sims, point cached animation on OSX. ( milanm)
2 - every time I try to activate my account on the v3 standalone it says it doesn't recognise the details, although when I login using the same details on the Otoy site it works fine. ( MikeJCTyler)
3 - I made a couple of manipulations scattering in the sun, function does not work Archived packages, also I saw these bands with fog, if you move the slider to the scale of octane Freeze for 2-3 minutes, video driver stopped responding after displacement, the scale is broken (using NVIDIA 355.82) (Elvissuperstar007 )
4 - getting 20-40 % slowdown in OR3 compared to OR2.24 on simple demo scene, Insane memory consumption compared to 2.42 for the same scenes. ( uncia)
5 - Octane 2 uses up 10MB for some simple cubes, while the same scene in Octane 3 uses 350MB. If I set parallel samples to 16, it uses 690MB. This is a massive difference (35 times greater mem usage than octane 2 using defaults) (funk)
6 - I noticed that many times rendering stops updating, but updates imediately when pausing. Also it doesn't updates sometimes when changing parameters. ( manalokos)
7 - It looks like IES lights are broken. Simple cube and a single IES light. Version 2.4 renders fine, version 3 shows almost no light (wimvdb)
8 - Volumes cause light to enter inside closed spaces. I attached an image illustrating what happens inside a closed box when a volume intercepts the surface. (manalokos)
9 - Using the built in environment medium node with a color other than white (ie. blue like atmospheric haze), I get a lot of strange hotpixels (that the hotpixel setting won't fix). ( profbetis)
10 - Not sure if this is a known issue, but info passes are being tonemapped even when the tonemap toggle is off. I have my imager gamma set to 2.2, with info pass tonemap off.
- In octane 2 the geometric normal pass has deep blues and background is black.
- In octane 3 the geo normal pass is tonemapped and shows light purples with grey background (funk)
11 - I also noticed this change if info pass distributed ray tracing is enabled
- In octane 2, if I enable the motion vector info pass, it disabled motion blur.
- In octane 3, the motion vector pass actually gets motion blurred (this is completely wrong) (funk)
12 - when OOC feature is used (a bit slower than the 2.x), As the kernel has changed, I have a system crash when I use with all my 8 GPUs. (itou31)
13 - The volume loader drops all of it's settings if you save and open your octane file. (reverts to default)
14 - If you have loaded some animated alembic files in your scene, and add volume sequence using the animation option in the loader, it changes the whole timeline to that. That does not seem right. (gardeler)
15 - as you bump resolution up & up You see multiple GPUs utilised worse & worse. Let's say if You rendering 1kx1k output.. three local GPUs are 99% load 99% percent of time.. however..if You push resolution higher.. one GPU stays fully loaded all the time, while others keep dropping down.. & You see those 0% GPU loads for longer & longer periods (Glimpse)..It's the tone mapping which blocks rendering, even if only GPU does the actual tonemapping. That's why you can now increase the tonemap interval to up to 120s to reduce the overhead. I haven't looked into this yet in detail so there may be a different issue, too. (Abstrax)
16 - with 12 GPU that the view-port display has choppiness . as I reduce the # of GPUs towards 1, the display linearly smooths up. effect occurs despite the fact that I have a dedicated card for display not used in the rendering. linear increase in display choppiness does not occur in 2X build, in any range between 1 and 12 active GPUs, it is always smooth. (Notiusweb) The next version will have a workaround for an issue that occurred when Octane tried to page-lock host memory for usage on the GPU. For some reason this operation got blocked by kernel calls on other devices. This issue affects mainly tonemapping and I think it's what you experience on your system, since you have many devices. (Abstrax /Alpha 3 post)
Alpha 2
1 - fix the spikes on some meshes when subdividing the object in version 2 and 3 (Zay)
2 - differences in the glossy reflections (RobSteady) I think the differences are due to the slightly different behaviour of bump mapping. If you remove the bump maps, it should render exactly the same. Otherwise there is a bug somewhere. (Abstrax)
3 - script for simple animation paths...With 3.00 it doesn't work anymore (cannot set output folder, and render button doesn't work) (ff7darkcloud)
4 - meshes with displacement applied render out a black texture. (Rikk The Gaijin)
5 - the AO render pass has limit of 1024, which is still very noisy. (Rikk The Gaijin)
6 - I imported a mesh with 43 million polys, and Octane closed down without warning. (Rikk The Gaijin)
7 - tangent normal render pass output a flat RGB 128,128,256 color image. (Rikk The Gaijin)
8 - Object layer works only if the render target node is connected (Smicha)
9 - Looks like displacement is killing the motionblur (gardeler). That is a known issue, we have not found a way to make triangles with a displacement render correctly with motion blur without artifacts (Roeland)
10 - Octane 3 Alpha 2 crashes when saving an image while using network rendering, when slaves are still finishing their samples. (manalokos)
11 - testing SSS and plugged an emission texture into it with "cast illumination" disabled. It's still casting light on the object around it though. I tried this in octane 2 and see the same issue. (funk)
Alpha 3
1 - when 'O' for picking mode is used to selected any geometry that has an active object layer pin, all settings for obj are gone (only the object layer is shown) - see the screenshot. I have to manually select an obj node from the node graph to access geometry settings. (smicha)
OCTANE 3 WISHLIST
Alpha 1
1 - Would it be possible to implement in version 3 a feature which would compile only objects that are being added to the scene ? For instance if I compiled a scene with 10 million polygons and I need to add a 10 poly object currently I need to reload entire scene which takes quite a while. ( BorisGoreta) ( Seekerfinder) (FrankPooleFloating) (smicha)
Alpha 2
1 - i'd like user adjustable priority to get back in octane very much. (Lewis)
2 - hotkey which could toggle an 'active GPU profile' without having to pause the render, go to File>Preferences>Devices, and then select GPUs by clicking the little check boxes. (Notiusweb)
3 - If parallel samples / max tiles, could be adjusted without restarting the render, then we wouldnt need render priority (funk).
4 - if Dev Team can make rendered images more crystal clear. or let us give more settings to make that happen (oguzbir)
5 - atmospheric effects like bluish objects that are far away, can it be added to the Octane Sun where we can control fog, haze etc. (coilbook)
6 - possible to alter or add the functionality of Random Color Texture to the elements of the objects.(oguzbir)
Alpha 3
1 - V3 manual and downloadable version (prehabitat)
2 - export to JPEG option (Notiusweb)
3 - ability to save renders with any loaded background image (Notiusweb)
4 - sub. div. level pin. , e.g., in the object layer pin or anything else on the obj node. Or at least a global button in a toolbar to turn on/off all sub divs. Same for displacement - global on/off button would be so helpful. (smicha)
5 - render priority (Techie) (FrankPooleFloating) We will have a look at how we can implement render priority in the new system. Don't know yet how it can be done. (Abstrax)
6 - seems the volume step length in the kernel setting makes a huge impact on how an imported VDB actually looks like. It seems currently the volume step length can only be set on a scene level. Is there any chance that the volume step length can be set on an object level in the future? (livanchene)
7 - support for OpenCL (Yan) (smicha)
DEVELOPER NOTES
Alpha 1
1 - In simple scenes where you've got plenty of VRAM left: Increase "parallel samples" to the maximum.
In complex scenes where VRAM is spare: Set it to the highest value without running out of memory. It should usually still be faster than before or at least render with roughly the same speed. (Abstrax)
2 - It's not yet possible to add noise to volumes, or to convert a mesh to a volume inside Octane. We might introduce these later in 3.x since OpenVDB's sdk has some special features for these, but, as for now, we're on a tight schedule to get 3.00 stable. (Haze)
3 - V2+V3 Upgrade will be EQUAL to outright purchase of V3. (confirmed by Goldorak)
4 - Baking is a well known lighting tool in games, and also used in in archvis walkthroughs. If you have a static scene, it allows you to store all the GI in textures and move around in real time, even with very simple game engines.
The more sophisticated work we are doing with the ORBX player down the line will take this to another level through light field and volume rendering. This will allow you to move with 6DOF, with reflections, lighting/object layers and support for almost anything that Octane 3 can render (volumes, hair for example). (Goldorak)
5 - OSL support may give you greater procedural control over BRDF material properties, and possibly allow you to create completely new BRDFs (we will support this only if we can validate the shader is energy conserving). In Brigade, where this code was first implemented, we can confirm much of this is already working - for example GTX BRDF materials can be added to Brigade via pure OSL. So we'll see how much of this can be brought into Octane 3 (which has different constraints than Brigade) once OSL is further along in the V3 beta. (Goldorak)
Alpha 2
1 - Jim Star is currently developing an important part of 3.x that we are planning to introduce in Max/Maya/Blender/SU first before rolling it out to all plug-ins. (Goldorak)
2 - can I pre-purchase a license for c4d plugin(3.x) ? cuz I need to buy a new c4d plugin license(right now it's still 2.x and 199euros) but I don't want to pay an extra upgrading price(say 99 euros?) in the future??? I need 3.x license(assume 3.x will be 199 euros too?) (c4d) No, the v3 final cost will roughly be like v2 + v3 upgrade, so there is no difference in buying it now or later on in terms of costs, but if you buy it now you can already use the new v3 features during the development (bepeg4d)
3 - beside playing with the medium node, (try) to reduce or enlarge, based on your scene, the Medium radius value in the Environment node...It has a great impact on the deepness of the effect (bepeg4d)
Alpha 3
1 - in the long run it will be possible for 3rd parties to create plugins for OctaneRender standalone (confirmed by stratified)
2 - OpenSubdiv 3, set in mesh node (preferences, the "wrench" icon) (Abstrax)
3 - OpenCL has been on hiatus for quite a while and we will continue working on it after OSL has been done, i.e. it may become available around middle of the year. Please be aware, that there is a chance that we may run into insurmountable problems and we can't get it working (Octane is not a simple path tracer anymore). I didn't run into any issues during my initial tests, but everybody tells me how bad it is, so we will have to see. There is also a small possibility that AMD's CUDA implementation as part of AMD's Boltzman initiative could be used instead of an OpenCL implementation, but we will see, when we get there. Most likely it will not be useful for Octane. (Abstrax)
4 - We are still busy working on major feature enhancement to the volumetric support you're seeing in alpha 3. The volume node will look substantially different very soon, but in terms of priority, colour ramps for volumes will be done before the step length enhancement. Some more information on the step length: We use raymarching for rendering volumes, and each step along the march is a fixed size in metres. This is the step length you are seeing in the kernels. The smaller the step length, the more accurate the results. When you have a larger step length, one that goes across many voxels, Octane must pick a single density for the whole step. Many voxels will get missed, and when it misses a few voxels with a high temperature, then the emission will be lower in that area. This is why lowering the step length changes the look of a volume. The same goes for absorption and scattering. (Haze)
5 - Working offline is not possible with v3 alpha beta test versions. You have to use v2 if you need to work offline (bepeg4d)
USER NOTES
1 - Render Speed difference between V2 and V3 appears to be understood as a trade-off:
- Lower res/ram scenes slower compared to V2, much higher res/ram scenes faster compared to V2
- V2 faster with Direct Lighting vs V3, V3 faster at PT and PMC vs V2 (Notiusweb)
2 - Many Volume / VDB discussion / tutorials are in Alpha 1 (Notiusweb)Win 10 Pro 64, Xeon E5-2687W v2 (8x 3.40GHz), G.Skill 64 GB DDR3-2400, ASRock X79 Extreme 11
Mobo: 1 Titan RTX, 1 Titan Xp
External: 6 Titan X Pascal, 2 GTX Titan X
Plugs: Enterprise
I made this test scene in Blender to test using the sphere around the camera method. Here is what I was able to get with scattering set to 0.0002 and scale set to 80:
