So far so good...

[samartin]

Hi,

Hope Radiance gets to see this. I was wondering is there any way of throttling the GPU a slight amount, or adding controls to do this as when rendering, I can't do basic tasks such as using the internet as the GFX card just chokes!

I'm using a 9800GT currently so I don't know if that's one of the reasons for unresponsive feedback!? The GTXs' may not suffer the same issue!?

Here's my 1st render with it, various renders with a little noise which I hope will be sorted for your beta release.



As it's late here I will post my findings/problems, one thing I did note was an object I loaded into Octanerender was that all the material settings were set to glossy! I need to investigate...

[PhilBo]

It's looking good and I understand what you're talking about.

The quick solution would be to install a second video card if you computer can take it. You can then dedicate one video card to handling the OS and the other can be dedicated to Octane. This is discussed in the FAQ.

If you need the computer badly, you can simply pause the render and then get back to it later.

As far as the noise, typically that gets better with more samples. It usually takes over 1000 samples to get clean images, but that depends on the complexity and materials in the scene. I noticed that the most samples on any of your scenes are 334. It's also one of the cleanest renders. If you let them go a while longer, you'll get a cleaner image. The little white dots are "Fireflies" that are the result of several rays of light converging. The MLT functions that are being added to Octane will solve that issue.

Phil

[radiance]

Hi,

Nvidia does'nt supply a solution for this currently, there's no way to throttle the GPU to leave some room for the OS.
But there are other things we can do to make this a bit better, expect better response with future versions

Radiance

[samartin]

Thanks PhilBo,

I let one render go through to 4096 samples :-



The tests I did last night were just quick to see how the quality of rendering would come out. I'm impressed by the quality and look forward to seeing this renderer progress. I'm currently a modo/LW user so want to try various setups within those programs to see how they compare.

Radiance,

Will there be controls to allow the sharpening of the anti-aliasing, such as catmull-rom/box/etc...?

I'd also be interested to see how animation holds up, for example running at 512 samples across a series of frames. I noticed you will be supporting RIB animation, do you plan on using MDD's per chance? I'm not sure my packages will export to RIB format. Something I need to look into obviously.

As for the throttling, I look forward to seeing what you come up with, I don't think I'd invest in another GFX card for a good while. I was hoping to wait a while longer...

cheers and you have a very nice product so far, for an alpha build I am very impressed

[samartin]

Oh and I've just thought, would it be viable to see the mesh materials in a node based way? I ask as all the materials coming in seem to be set for glossy, would be nice to see the immediate attributes and knock down certain materials to diffuse or whatever.

*edit*

I noticed the GFX card memory is much higher this morning, I'm using the same HDR and same mesh!?

[radiance]

Hi, thanks for your comments

we'll be adding various filters soon, there also crept a little bug into the demo version that gives slight aliasing/stairstepping effect for shallow/near horizontal sharp edges,
which will be fixed in the next demo.

Radiance

[samartin]

Loving the render quality,

Here's a comparison, I didn't spend much time in modo to match the octane render, using the same HDR.



There are no blurry reflections on the bomb as I couldn't match up the HDR to reflect the same! While modo is faster when using irrad caching, it just doesn't seem to be there on the quality. Octane is producing far more bleeding into the main model which gives it a more natural feel.

[radiance]

Hi,

nice renderings
can i take one of them for our gallery ? we don't have any fun characters in the gallery yet.

I don't know about the modo renderer, but i assume that it only does a few bounces ?
octane does up to 8 bounces in the default preview settings, so it does produce a bit more bleeding.

if you can find what maxdepth modo does with it's bruteforce GI, then configure octane the same,
you'll get a better comparision.

One thing to take note of is that octane renders with spectral light calculations which is also much slower than classic RGB renderers,
and i think MODO is a RGB renderer, so that's also another handicap for octane.

comparing irradiance cacheing is'nt a good thing, it's a biased technique so it's difficult to compare.

Radiance

[samartin]

Hi Radiance,

Sure you can use them, I'm offline for a while now but I'd be prepared to setup a similar scene again and do a larger res version. I also want to try a few different HDRs, is there any way of replacing HDRs yet?

I tried deleting the node last night and replacing it but the old one stayed intact!? Mind I was tired last night.

[radiance]

Hi Radiance,

Sure you can use them, I'm offline for a while now but I'd be prepared to setup a similar scene again and do a larger res version. I also want to try a few different HDRs, is there any way of replacing HDRs yet?

I tried deleting the node last night and replacing it but the old one stayed intact!? Mind I was tired last night.

you just swap them in the node inspector.
click on the environment node in the preview macro,
change the RGB spectrum node to image, then load your hdri.
if you want to swap to another hdri, change it back to rgbspectrum,
then change it back to image and load another hdri.

i'm extending this functionality in upcoming releases so you can reload maps without swapping.

Radiance