eyeing up octane for our studio.

[opentarget]

Hi everyone, i have been reading and looking at all things octane and am very interested in the product.

I work for a small animation studio, we are a startup company who after years of working for various other big boys decided to go it alone and give it a shot.
For the most part our work comes from 2d and flash jobs, but we have seen a increase in 3d jobs lately, we are fully capable softimage studio and have no problems handling the work...that is untill we get to render time lol.
we need a new rendering solution and fast! we cant afford/ arnt big enough to get 3delight or not special enough to request arnold render, so its time to think outside the box.

Now i haven't got a chance to download the demo of octane yet(ill mess with it this weekend, will my poor old laptops nvidia 330m be even able to run it?) but i am very impressed with what i have seen so far.

so i have a few questions to help me decide if its what we need, and i am only the influencer not the decider i need to be sure sure sure!

what kind of limitations can i expect with octane in comparison to mental ray(the engine we use at present)
ie passes/hair and fur/particles/volumetric and just about anything else you can think of.

Can Octane work in conjunction with mental ray to overcome the lack of passes, eg can i render my id and motion passes in mental ray and they should play nicely with octanes render in after effects or nuke?

What kind of rendering can/cant octane do, is it only photoreal style renderings or can we get stylised looks as well, what i mean is if a job comes in that needs a specific look i have enough experience with mental ray that i can lash together a really nice material/shader to do that job, dose the octane render have that kind of flexibility in its 3 material types, and can we expect more soon?

Lights in softimage are very nice to work with, in future realises of O.R can we expect more traditional lights for 3d, not that Area lights dont cover most basis.

And lets talk render farm for octane, is there any company out there building specific systems for octane and what kind of cost can we expect in comparison to a traditional cpu render farm? our budget is very low...so this is a serious factor to consider.

thats a lot of questions to start me off.

I hope yous can answer some of the questions.

Kev

[Jaberwocky]

I am one of the users.I can answer some of your questions.

Use a GPU-X box with GTX460/470/480's.That would take care of the render farm scenario.

I think Octane is fast now.far faster than using top range Intel CPU's.However be aware that they are in Beta at the moment and are adding features all the time.Also the beast will speed up even further once they start using Cuda 3.2.

Additional lights will i believe be coming at some point.Currenlty you can use blackbody emitters for local lights,HDRI files and the daylight system.Regarding stylised output.Try the Demo version and render out using some of the different film colour profiles available EG Kodachrome or Agfa film profiles along with settings for the depth of field.If you are talking about Toon shaders,then no it does not do those.It is also a stand alone renderer and does not work in conjuntion with Mental Ray.You export the mesh and standard materials that you apply in max to the OBJ file format either in max or through the Max Plug in which is available to registered users.You can also create and add materials within Octane.

The resultant export along with the materials that you apply are then imported into Octane.Be aware that we are talking about creating Standard materials and maps in Max.Not the Mental ray Materials and maps.

Hope that helps.I will let Radiance or one of the more experienced Octane users take it up from here.If in doubt just play around with the Demo and see if it's capabilities are what you are after.

[matej]

Regarding shaders; you can do a lot of materials with those 3 shader types. Material creation is node based, which is very powerful and easy to use. New nodes & possibilities are added every new update. And now in pre2.3v5 a mix node is coming, which will allow to mix materials, thus expanding possible combinations even further.

The only drawback (in your case) is the lack of SSS, which will probably come only in Octane 2.0

[jipe]

At the moment, using Octane is a bit like drag racing. It's very fun to use and extremely fast at what it does (unbiased pathtracing for photorealistic renders) but it lacks the flexibility and broad feature set of more mature renderers such as mental ray. The developers at Refractive are very dedicated and they work quickly, but Octane is a young piece of software. If you need something with all the bells and whistles (hair, fur, SSS, volumetrics, etc.) and if you're rendering animations, and if you need a renderer that will just work right now (as is often the case in production), I'm not sure if Octane is the best choice in its current state. In the future that will undoubtedly change as Octane matures.

What kinds of things are frustrating you about mental ray in Softimage? I suppose that's the real question -- what does mental ray lack at the moment that you think Octane could provide?

[Daniel]

Regarding shaders; you can do a lot of materials with those 3 shader types. Material creation is node based, which is very powerful and easy to use. New nodes & possibilities are added every new update. And now in pre2.3v5 a mix node is coming, which will allow to mix materials, thus expanding possible combinations even further.

The only drawback (in your case) is the lack of SSS, which will probably come only in Octane 2.0

When was it said it would come in 2.0? The extra cost is not my problem, I'm happy to pay for every upgrade of Octane, but I was hoping SSS would come sooner rather than later.

Edit: Never mind. Just did a quick search and found it.

[opentarget]

Thanks a million for all the replys, very informitive.

Use a GPU-X box with GTX460/470/480's.That would take care of the render farm scenario.

can you send me a link to where i might be able to read up on this kind of rig? what kind of cost are we looking at here?

The only drawback (in your case) is the lack of SSS, which will probably come only in Octane 2.0

This is a big issue for us...this will be a large deciding factor.
its great that octane is node based, coming from softimage i have a great understanding of building shaders in its node based render tree.

What kinds of things are frustrating you about mental ray in Softimage? I suppose that's the real question -- what does mental ray lack at the moment that you think Octane could provide?

At the moment, speed. its such a slow engine. that being said its great to be able to optimize the settings and shaders and so on to enhance the speed, but then again that takes time and is very much a workflow killer.
the main problem is that at the moment we just dont have the power to render high quality animations as we lack a render farm, im looking at octane because i believe that we may be able to get more bang for our buck as far as getting a render farm together.
I may very well be wrong in this.
I have to say i have been using mental ray for a long time and i love it, but having worked in much larger studios with access to large render farms i am now feeling the pressure of not having that power behind softimage.

[Daniel]

Find out about the GPU-X by looking at the top of this page in the middle, and there is a link called "GPU-X". It's in bold.

[opentarget]

Find out about the GPU-X by looking at the top of this page in the middle, and there is a link called "GPU-X". It's in bold.

god damn! dont i feel like a fool now. lol
thanks.

[philippecoenen]

Hello guys,

I'm also considering very seriously about Octane.
In order to jump, I don't worry that much about sss. (It has to be there of course) I do need it a lot.

But there was nothing said about hair and particles. (If I'm not wrong)
Is there any possibility to simply use maya's hair system. Is the plugin take care about such kind of things?...

It can be time consuming to install everything then to try, that I would first be sure there is a way to do it. My characters are using hair system.

I also uses blender 2.5 so the same kind of problem will be found there.

Can someone provide this info?...

Thank,

Phil

[kubo]

I've seen hair done in some soft and then imported into octane as geometry, althou I'm no sure where, but just to be sure, do a quick test with the things you want to check in the modeling soft you fancy and follow this thread for exporting options http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum ... f=21&t=362 then open octane demo and import your mesh. Basically anything your host app's internal obj exporter can convert, octane can render it.
I don't use either of those softs so I can't guide you, but I'm sure someone else will.