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I finally found a few hours of free time to give my fist shots at Octane.

Being pretty rusty after almost 3 years without touching 3DsMax, and wanting to test it on a simple scene involving few materials, sunlight and artificial lighting, I decided to model and render a simple building, this shop in Japan that I saw on Dezeen a few months back:

http://www.dezeen.com/2010/01/14/lad-mu ... al-design/

Also, trying to match the mood, materials, etc...was a good training. Here are a few renders:





Very far from perfect as I had only a couple of days to play around with Octane but I really loved the intuitive functions, learning was not only a breeze but also a lot of fun, I'm looking forward to having more time to dig it.

Congrats, really great work.
Cheers

Those are some great renders mate..good work !!

Hi Leiurus,
Your images are good but what bugs me in the first 2 is that the concrete wall texture has a very typical B&W photographic feel, which you sort of betray with the use of colour elsewhere in the image, like the door and artificial lighting. It works on the 3rd image though - I think because the sunlight brings out a different colour in the concrete. Also, the floor edge uplighters somehow looks more like a Unity rendering than Octane. Octane can do much better than that - play around with the location of lighting mesh and the strength & colour of the light.

Great composition on all. The shadows on the 3rd one is excellent!

Suggestions for first 2 images:
1. Give the concrete a slight tinge of warmth;
2. Tone down the warmth in the lighting colour temperatures;
2. Make full B&W images - I think they'll look great!

Seeker

Thanks for the feedback

@Seekfinder: Hell yeah, Octane can definitively do much better than that!

I agree on the concrete texture. Actually, if you look at the reference pictures, the concrete is warmer because some blocks have a cream tint while others are pure grey. I created the texture from Hi-Res shots of a wall from CG textures, and the overall color was quite warm, when rendered it was way too warm...To match it perfectly I should have done the same, creating a gradient from grey to cream by randomly changing the blocks colors. I had no time for that so I desaturated the texture altogether, hence the flat result.

Octane is almost "too good" at GI and to achieve the contrast of the photos (some areas are almost pitch black)I had to render a pass in Direct Light with no GI to post process the renders a bit.

IMO, to really perfectly match the photos, I should have:

- worked the concrete texture a bit more as suggested
- spent more time on the timber floor (it is awful in the renders )
- use a better HDRI for lighting (it turns out that my HDRI library is pretty poor, couldn't find a good hi-res one matching the cloudy day the photos were taken on)
- use IES with a narrower beam, I've been lazy flicking through the ERCO collection and grabbed the narrowest I could find from a short selection I generally use in interior renderings.

Actually, the purpose of these renderings was to see how heavy I could go with the texture resolution with my 3GB of VRAM. I was very worried by the RAM limitation, as used to go far beyond the 12GB mark when I was using Vray a few years back. The concrete texture is 10 000x 10 000, flooring is 6000x6000 and the galvanized metal / stainless steel materials are also mapped, all materials have at least diffuse, reflection and bump maps, so all in all it was a fair amount of pixels. Not only didn't I get above the 2GB mark (I remember using 1.7GB or something), but I was also able to render at 3000x2000px without any issue (even though it was too long to render at this resolution, so I downsized the final renders).

I'm trying to check how "production-ready" Octane is as I'm seriously thinking about switching from Vray to Octane in our 3D teams (I work for an Interior Design firm with a dozen of offices across the Asia-Pacific region).

My next scene will be a basic interior scene with a lot of details to pump up the polys count so that I can see how the engine react under such conditions. If it still as efficient as it has been so far I'll try to get the funds to upgrade our hardware and make the step.