What's next

[roeland]

Hello everyone,

Development has been slow the months before the beta 2.58 release, this was mainly because a lot of work went into setting up the material preview system. This was necessary to allow plugins to have meaningful previews of Octane materials.

With the beta 2.58 releases this preview function was added to the standalone version, along with some improvements to the node inspector and the node graph editor.

Our first priority now is getting instancing done. This will also take a lot of work, so there will be again a period with fewer releases. We are expecting to be able to make the first 2.6 release with instancing support around late summer on the northern hemisphere. If it turns out to be too time-consuming we may do another release before 2.6 with some other features, like support for the new Kepler GPU's. We can't put a time frame on that one though.

I hope you can bear with us for a bit longer. I will post some screenshots if we make progress on instancing, probably one of the coming days.

--
Roeland

[pixelrush]

OK thanks for giving us an update. Just in the nick of time.
While I appreciate you doing this Roeland I was hoping an Otoy person would be address their customers in some formal capacity because I see it as their responsibility now. I think enough time has passed for them to decide what they are doing and take the lead including finding more staff as required/appropriate.
I have decided to put my forum participation in recess until things pick up again. Maybe I'll see how things are again come the release of 2.6 in 3-4 months.
BTW will the advent of instancing mean a transition from .obj to Octane .xml or whatever??

I have just been reading about the new Tesla ahead of the official launch...it is said the new Tesla chip apparently is not ready yet and this one is a stop-gap card based on a GTX690 but with 8 gb vram. Probably then SP will be weak too and it will also be $$$
In that case probably there isnt any real hurry for optimised Kepler support in Octane.
Still those that bought them might like an update of recently added Octane features if/when you do a 2.59.

[manalokos]

Thank you Roeland for the update!

I am enjoying the software very much!
I hope you can boost development, as I am sure that it will be one of the top renderers in the future!!

Best regards
Filipe Alves

[wireframex]

thank you for keeping us informed about the development of octane. It would be nice to make us a regular item to keep us in suspense

I think also about integration in Softimage

Best Regards

Phil

[matej]

Hey, thanks for the feedback (coding, pr, support, announcements... - Roeland does it all )

4 - 5 moths time is a long period to go without any updates, I hope you will consider to do some fixes or small updates (requests of which will probably pile up is this time period).

What changes can we expect in regard of non-integrated exporters? Will a new file format be introduced to replace .obj? Will you release information ahead, so that exporter developers (I'm mostly thinking about Blender here) will know how to adapt the exporter to the new changes asap?

[Jaberwocky]

Thanks for the update Roeland.

Any future postings on how things are going as you code would be good.....

and would keep the zombies at bay

[polytek]

I appreciate the honesty off your post, i am a bit disappointed at the moment with the pace off progress, but hey it's software development (i am waiting 4 a big change to lightwave for years now..)....if you guys keep us informed, maybe with a kind off "future tech-view" every 2 weeks or 1 time a month, maybe the wait will be bearable and you can keep people interested.....(lack off information buggers the hell out off me).

Anyways put your brains to good use and start programming

Best regards
Poly

[glimpse]

That's great news!

Octane stands now as a powerful engine in GPU scene anyway!
& I'm willing to wait as long as it needs to see those updates! =)

thanks for information!

[necko77]

thanks for feedback....this comunity RESPECT that !

[gabrielefx]

many guys are porting instances on gpus...they are synced together...

I moved definitively from Vray to Octane for Max.

I tried to do some renders with Vray-RT, iRay and Arion...no way

The only tool that really works with gpus is Octane.

Thank you for your efforts, one single bit added to Octane will be appreciated.

Regards.