The end of the road

[steveps3]

It is almost ironic that Octane has finally reached version 1 because I have taken the decision to stop using it. With Cycles improving at such an amazing pace I have now moved my focus onto using cycles over octane. Up until this point I've tried to ignore cycles thinking that it would never be as good as octane but I can ignore it no longer. Octane may still be the more "accurate" of the two engines but do I really care about accuracy? What I am looking for are quality renders that can be achieved in the most efficient way.

I was just wondering if anyone else in the Blender community was having similar thoughts? Maybe even you can think of a serious reason for me to stay with Octane. My main reason for deciding to use one or the other is that they have completely different approaches to materials. The way that you can create materials in cycles is wonderful. Materials in Octane are a bit more clunky.

So, what do you think, have I made the right decision to move my focus to cycles over octane?

[kavorka]

whats the speed difference between the 2 for you?

[pixie]

I think that you're on the right forum to ask for such a question!

[matej]

Render speed difference is really not that important. Workflow with Cycles is already faster then Octane and not only because it's integrated into Blender. It's also because Cycles texturing / shading workflow is powerful and flexible, Octanes is clunky and limited (waiting for improvements in this filed for years). Cycles node-graph is a joy to work with, Octanes is a mess. Cycles BVH build time is lighting fast (with dynamic / static option), Octane voxelizing is quite slow. All this things must be factored in the "speed" comparison, because the time you spend working with the tool is much more expensive than the render time. The time you spend pulling out your hair, because something is annoying you (say, awful camera navigation in Octane, lack of undo... ), must also be factored in.

I have an upcoming project with some other people, where we will need to do lots of animations in "ruined" / "grungy" environments (== lots of complex texturing). Cycles is an obvious choice here, because texturing workflow (texture mapping options, texture transformations, procedural textures, blending modes, ease of re-use, ease of loading / manipulating textures, a clean node-graph...) in Octane is quite poor. I think Otoy (and RS prior to that) is thinking too much about archvizers (where 95% of the time everything is clean and neat and generic), when planing feature priorities, cause the texturing field in Octane has not seen much improvements in the last two years...

That said, I see no reasons to completely stop using Octane, especially since you have a license payed up to v2.0. Even with slow exporting Octane is great for stuff like product-viz and it's realism quality is (and will be for some time or forever) superior to Cycles. It's great for simple animations too (archviz flythroughs, etc.), but for more complex animations where proper compositing support and a more "streamlined" work-flow are needed, I would pick Cycles.

But even with Cycles improving much faster, I'm sure I'll be using Octane still for a long time

[steveps3]

Seems like I am not alone in thinking that Octane is lagging behind Cycles in a number of places. I am sure that I will still use Octane, especially if they do improve things but at the moment I have a lot of catching up to do with Cycles so I feel that I need to concentrate on that for the time being.

It is good to hear people's views and if anyone else has anything to add then I'd love to hear it.

[kavorka]

RayTracey's post here seems to point to them having begun development on a Blender integrated plugin, or something similar. If this is true, would there be a need for Cycles in your case?

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... &start=110

[steveps3]

That does sound interesting. Maybe life in the old dog yet!

[ROUBAL]

Currently, I am working on a big project. Creating a large city set. I only render stills in this creation process. For stills, Octane works fine and gives excellent results. When will come animation time, I will see if a plugin for Blender is available. Time to upgrade to 2.0 will be a milestone, and I think that I will take the big decision at this moment if it comes when I' will need animation. It there is no plugin at this time, Cycles will be the solution for animation.

[matej]

RayTracey's post here seems to point to them having begun development on a Blender integrated plugin, or something similar. If this is true, would there be a need for Cycles in your case?

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic. ... &start=110

I wouldn't open the champagne, just yet.

JimStar, who is currently coding the Maya integrated plugin, expressed the availability and intention to code a Blender plugin already more than a year ago, so basically this is old news (assuming he's the programmer meant in that post). Unless Otoy solved the licensing issues, nothing really changed in this regard.

Even with Octane integrated I would say there will be still usage for Cycles. These two engines have different aims and priorities, so they complement not replace each other.

[vipvip]

i use cycles a lot for many jobs and it is really interesting and powerfull ( particulary with the material node editor).
But Octane has many advantages too, parliculary for "photographic" renders, cycles can't give the same results ( it is like between 2 cameras, on the paper almost the same, but with use, there is different feelings, grains and picture-character, the octane one is impressive, cycles more computer generated ).
As lucky lightwave user i'm, i bought the ugrade fior LW11/11.5 with the poser bundle, and bought the poser integrated plugin: it is a real pleasure to work with octane integrated, and there's no common way with the exporter for adjusting lights, objects and so on... and i don't talk about animations...
The other problem, with Blender ( again, i respect it and use it a lot ) is the perpetual growing, with ever new bugs, sometimes regressive...
For professionnal production, it is a negative point.