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Would rather have instancing that SSS.

picajol wrote:Would rather have instancing that SSS.

Just the opposite for me ! SSS ! Bring it on !

instancing can make you fortunes! - +1000+ instancing

I had to decide what to use on my next project. Would love to use Octane but had to stick with Maxwell again beause of instances and proxies to the sake of waiting longer for my renders...but SSS will be a blast.

mbetke, have you tried comparing the two engines, MW and Octane?
Just rendering a simple scene to compare the images and render times?

mbetke wrote:I had to decide what to use on my next project. Would love to use Octane but had to stick with Maxwell again beause of instances and proxies to the sake of waiting longer for my renders...but SSS will be a blast.

I too am a Maxwell user and I would like to know how you choose which render you use for each project...
Is it always Octane for interiors? Maxwell is terribly slow sometimes and although it depends on the material settings, I simply don't care! I just want my scene as I made it! So, although I own an Octane license for some months, I don't have a fast GPU so I don't use it.... I would really appreciate some info, even with pm so that we don't go off-topic...
Thank you in advance...

mbetke wrote:I had to decide what to use on my next project. Would love to use Octane but had to stick with Maxwell again beause of instances and proxies to the sake of waiting longer for my renders...but SSS will be a blast.

Cycles supports instancing since the beginning.
It even supports directlight through glass (with a glossy and transparent shader mixed ("add shader"))for interiors of architecture.
And it supports sunlight, arealight, ... now.

There are some lacks with alphatextures (maybe its because of my wrong settings).


Kind regards
Alain

JJTTBB wrote:

mbetke wrote:I had to decide what to use on my next project. Would love to use Octane but had to stick with Maxwell again beause of instances and proxies to the sake of waiting longer for my renders...but SSS will be a blast.

I too am a Maxwell user and I would like to know how you choose which render you use for each project...
Is it always Octane for interiors? Maxwell is terribly slow sometimes and although it depends on the material settings, I simply don't care! I just want my scene as I made it! So, although I own an Octane license for some months, I don't have a fast GPU so I don't use it.... I would really appreciate some info, even with pm so that we don't go off-topic...
Thank you in advance...

Whats slow in case of Maxwell?
I see people talking around 12hours per image with 2 powerfull graphic cards.
If GPU is around 5 times faster then CPU rendering (as advertised here) that would mean that Maxwell users usualy wait around 2-3 days per image ?!")"(#)"&%%
Can you confirm this.

Choosing a renderer for a project is not as easy as yers ago. In most cases lots of materials would have to be converted.
I don't think Maxwell is so slow. With interactive "FIRE" mode you can tune materials and camera angles as fast as in Octane.
You also can get both renderer to their knees. I had a complex material with a large node in Octane and went down to 0.5 samples/s. Maxwell also can be very slow with lots or reflections, and other realistic setups.

With this in mind you can use both fast if you don't set up material with the tiniest bumpmap for a material which is only rendered from 3m distance. I mostly evaluate if my client needs unbiased rendering. If not, Octane is the winner right from the start for single-archviz renderings or even movies. If I need more renderpower I just plug in additional GPU and have a excellent scaling. With a CPU I would need to build nodes plus buy node-licenses for Maxwell. This fact makes Octane a winner for me from the economic point of view too.

As it comes to the choise which I use for a project I look at the aboove mentioned needs (unbiased vs. biased and movie vs. still). This time I have to render an aerial for a whole residentail area with forest hills in the background. I will go over 12-13mio triangles which is the biggest my machine can pull so I use Maxwell. If it would be roughly consturction site billboard I even would use MentalRay for it. Both support proxies and instancing which is a must have in a large rendering.

So as a rule of thumb I use Octane for: product viz, interiour archviz, exterior renderings up to 12-13 mio tris.
I use Maxwell for: large scale outdoor areas, polycount intense renderings, very high-res product viz (its unmatched there)

As you can see I look at what tools fits best for the task. Its just a tool which has to fit.

Cycles supports instancing since the beginning.
It even supports directlight through glass (with a glossy and transparent shader mixed ("add shader"))for interiors of architecture.
And it supports sunlight, arealight, ... now.

I have a large and growing library of models and dont want to convert my stuff for each new project to another render-engine. Plus I'm not a Blender user. Spending time learning even another render-engine is not very productive in my opinion. At the moment Cycles seems to me to concentrate on features where Octane users are waiting for a longer time now. Maybe to make some users migrate or have a unique selling point (yes i know its free) to get more new users.
Every render misses of some things another one have. I think the best newcomer is Octane at the moment. But we talk again in one year. GPU rendering is a growing field.

Maxwell fire is a great addon for Studio but the problem remains... a clean interior scene is really difficult and this is not something we understand when tweaking materials... Sometimes you have to let it render for 10 hours and then you realize that the left side of the image has not enough light and it will always be noisy!.

Actually I was always jealous of Thea Render, and now Octane, because of the ability to choose between biased and unbiased rendering.. I would love to see this in Maxwell too...
However, I must say that I prefer Maxwell's UI... I don't really like nodes, not even the new mat editor in MAX...
But this is just my opinion...
What interests me a lot, is the new MAX plugin for Octane...

I also think that SSS should come after instancing... but I guess the devs know better... maybe most Octane users want it for product rendering...