Siggraph 2010 hub interview with havensole/Octane Render

[radiance]

Hi all,

Here's the video we've all been waiting for,
an interview with havensole about octane on Siggraph 2010 which has just past.

Thanks again for your efforts, havensole

http://www.productionhub.com/video/view.aspx?item=6133

Yours,
Radiance

[photonf]

was that path tracing ?? !!!!

[foxid]

heavensole is the best one!)

[kubo]

Nice one James, btw, that scene moved in real time was amazing, if people is still not conviced they should be roped to a horse and dragg thru the middle of the street!

[havensole]

Thanks for the kind words guys. I was pretty scatter brained by the time they showed up. The scene they showed was actually direct lighting. It is one of Enrico's scenes and even with direct lighting it looks amazing and people were really surprised it wasn't full pathtracing.

[[gk]]

Thats the beauty of ambient occlusion.
With the right feel for treatment its the only thing you could use and still have clients standing in line to buy your visuals be that moving contents or not.

[jbeau3d]

Did he say 6x GTX 480's? 5 running, 1 for display? wow

[havensole]

Yup. We had 6 gtx480's hooked to a Cubix blade server using 3 Cubix xpanders. We had 5 rendering in Octane at the point the interview was done and left one reserved specifically to play back some of the animations from the June contest on the 6th. The first day we did use all 6 at the same time. They cut out the part where I said it was rendering at full 4k cinema resolution. Render times were seriously ridiculous. Navigation was also really smooth.

[jbeau3d]

I see 17.89 megasamples per/sec on that scene at frame 1:27 in that video. I thought it would be much higher with 5x480's GPU's. Would like to see some benchmarks with 3,4,5,6 cards. Does it scale linearly?

[havensole]

The gtx4xx series scale almost linearly. I meant to run the benchmark scene while we were there, but just didn't have a chance to do it. A lot also depends on the scene. There was a lot of glass, especially in that shot, which dramatically lowers one's megasamples.

BTW I just looked at how many views that video has recieved so far and it is the highest of the Siggraph vids at just under 1000 views. Animation Mentor is the closest behind it with around 950 views.