Real-time Engine Interaction and Octane

[mbetke]

How can a client get his desired interactive walk-through plus state of the art CGI renderings and movies for his marketing without making him paying two times? As most of you know todays game-engines offer a good feature set but it's a long way to CGI quality. Especially if it comes to GI and interior design.
So I took a look and thought out a way to reduce this double costs with todays tools I have at hand.

I started with the real-time version and used MentalRay for baking lightmaps. The only way to get good (static) light distribution in real-time. Since I offer a stand-alone application I just can do some levels (to keep this gaming term) with different light conditions.
I worked out some technical key elements like not making all the models to lowpoly.
Then Octane entered the game.

I converted all my standard materials with the nice Converter in 3dsmax and after 20min of fast tweaking I got a good looking realistic scene.
Now I could tweak it further, add some more stuff and so on.

All in all I was really happy with the result and a large advantage is the good rendertime for the "hybrid" setup.

Below are a few images and a YouTube link with a movie I recorded.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqF5WfnC ... rofilepage

[paoloverona]

i don't know how the difference between the first and the third render: the third seems to be a close-up ot the first, but the first looks like a toon render when the other looks photorealistic....can you explain?

Thanks, Paolo

[mbetke]

The first "render" is a screengrab from the real-time version made in a game-engine with custom features I added for arch-viz (mostly reflections, AI and mocap data). You can walk/fly around and take a virtual tour in the house with free movement.

The other two are rendered static in Octane. YOu can't move in real.-time but do better visuals of course as in a game engine.
THe good thing is taht the scene is the same but with OCtane the conversion was very easy and I saved a lot of time for modifications.

[paoloverona]

yes, the conversion integrated in octane works good (with not too complicated materials), i've tryed to convert some evemotion scenes and they worked as they come out with the conversion.

...great Ocatne!