Octane 1.5 features revealed!

[FrankPooleFloating]

It has been so quiet around here the last couple weeks... Is most of Octane Team on extended vacation?
A tumbleweed just rolled by...

[mbetke]

I cannot resist to quote jedi Yoda: "Decide you must, how to serve them best."

Average CG project takes about 2-4 weeks.
Developing of such things as MB or displacement takes 6-16 weeks.

You just have no chance of waiting for new features during the project. You definetely will fail.

This is what I meant. All this crying for a roadmap is pretty useless except it stresses/annoys the developers.

[xxdanbrowne]

Personally speaking I think we've got a pretty good community which makes up for lack of documentation which in itself is a result of the product being so new. Most of the moaning is coming from those who are being pressured by clients. That's pretty understandable but at the same time bar in mind we're barely out of beta on this and it's already amazing in the areas in which it has features. Like someone else said (Gordon?), for now you can always finish off in post.

[manalokos]

I love Octane.

[LudovicRouy]

Idem

[kurtjn]

The Octane team is doing an awesome job, don't feel stress about some of the negative comments because I'm sure you already know it can really distract your attention & inspiration away from creating a superior product. I hope that all the main features found among other top renderers many here are asking for appear in a 1.5 release as a free update rather than jumping into a paid upgrade to V2.0 if that was the plan. If these features many of us have asked for currently exist in other top notch renderers for "Production" then maybe without these features Octane may almost have a resemblance to being in some kind of beta version. The plug-in is fast/awesome as it is right now.. so perhaps if you need to break into complete rendering functions I would not focus on improving the speed if you don't have the manpower to develop all these features. Also consider that people are in bliss with the helpful small features you've created (all making the process a little easier/dynamic) that no one has talked about/complained.. the silence maybe golden but I will thank you for all the work you've done so far. If people want these other features in a renderer right now for their production obviously they should use a renderer that already has it until octane finishes developing it - problem solved. Jim is fairly new to the team I understand and much progress on creating a usable plugin on many popular 3D progs has been delivered. So far I've seen that Otoy has developed the features they said they could/would and some just need more time to be developed into what we all hope can be done with them.

[FrankPooleFloating]

Um, okay.. but Octane Team are grown men that chose to go into a very competitive field and presumably are competitive individuals. Me and guys like cfrank have been keeping a fire under their asses to get some desperately needed features in Octane - so that it will be the best engine it can be - and completely smote all competitors. All the while, we have also been praising them with attaboys-o-plenty and giving credit where credit is due. But in my opinion, they do not need to be coddled like a gang of 10 year old little league baseball players that just came in dead last place and need to be given a trophy - so that they are not scarred for life... I would bet good money these blokes can handle the pressure. They will be fine.

I can only speak for myself, but temporarily switching engines (while waiting for some features we want) is not any kind of option. I am invested heavily in Octane and completely built my pipeline around it.

edit: Sometimes I re-read stuff I posted and think: I am pretty sure I come off as a total a-hole to many... That is not my intention at all guys. I think that the frustration is really getting the best of me. This engine is so f-ing close to being completely 100% usable in production. A handful of the top features from The Wishing Well added and there is no stopping us... that is what is making me a grump these days. And it doesn't help that it has been so quiet around here, with no indication of when the next candidate is coming or anything.

[gardeler]

@Marcus

"Regarding UV transforms: It's not UV transform nodes, but you will be able to apply a transformation to image texture nodes and choose a border/wrapping mode which defines how image textures are rendered outside of the [0,1] UV range."

will that mean it will support things like UDIM maps? (will apply multiple textures to different parts of the same object and UV space, like mari outputs.) We use that here all the time, but it does not work with Octane as far as I know. Would love to be able to use that!

Cheers

Martin

[prehabitat]

Something from the end of that enthralling video of Jules Urbach's presentation:

...."If you have a box.. one of those VCA box's with 16 GPU's you can download Octane today and use those 16 GPU's right now"
"One other thing I want to add; and y'know this is something thats in BETA currently, we're also going to be bundling with octane 1.5, with the blender plugin, Octane Server - which allows you to take something like the VCA appliance: put that in the closet somewhere and then have the apps themselves connect to that rendering service...."

So will Octane Server be tied to the VCA (GRID by Nvidia) or can those of us in small offices/practices run Octane server on our own baby servers and offload octane rendering to Octane Server as a selectable rendering device from within Octane (client end)??

surely the next step from this is something akin to Backburner for Octane?

A practice (like the one I work part-time) with 50+ workstations all with at least 1 GPU; yet only 3-5 staff performing any rendering duties regularly could run Octane server on thier existing hardware stock (or any systems w/ 2 GPU's or more) and borrow spare GPU cycles from within the building to speed workflows.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying the complexities of distributed rendering - seems like you could steal the next hardware upgrade cycle from dell/HP/Nvidia by capitalising on (currently) underused existing hardware?

[mikelmnj]

Let's not forget those pesky rounded edges

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=28863