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I've been using Maxwell Render professionally for the past 4 or 5 years and have started to look at switching to Octane now that it will support displacement. I plan to test the demo when I have time to swap my my Nvidia card but I have a few questions before I waste my time.


Info
I do mostly liquor bottle renderings at fairly high resolution (usually between 6500-8000px). Most of the textures I use are 8,000px in size and there will be a handful of textures this size used on any given render. I have one 16 bit displacement map for condensation I use fairly often and is 16,000px. You can see samples of what I typically render here: www.justingoode.com

Question/s
Taking the info above into account, would either a 3gb or 6gb graphics card have enough vRam to handle these types of renders?

Are there any limitations to caustics in octane? does light only penetrate a certain amount before it quits being calculated? What about caustics combined with displacement? What about reflected and refracted caustics?

I think that's the main concerns I needed to find out regarding octane render before I look further into switching over. I hope you guys give me good answers because I'm antsy to get rid of my render farm and get a big speed boost with Octane!

6Gb card is a way to go.

For image like 8k square You need more than 2Gb of vRam only to be able to render..add main geometry, maybe some high res textures & You'll have easily jumped over 3Gb. So I would advise going for 6Gb cards. Seems 780 is coming with that amount for pretty reasonable price..so if You have no hurry - wait a bit =)

P.S. 16k square texture as a b&w float (if I'm not mistaken) would use ~0.5Gig of video RAM.. - Might be wise to use scattered geomtry instead - with the help of instancing You'll end und up eating less memory & the result might be better lookin' in the end =)

Great, thanks for the input. I remembered that I have a quadro 4000k laying around, which has 3gb of vram, so I'll be able to install that and get a feel for how my scenes would work before I spend any money on switching over and new graphics cards. That 780 6gb is the card you mentioned was the one I already had mind.

Yeah, I know using that giant texture for displacement isn't the most efficient method to render condensation. The problem I've run into trying to scatter actual geometry on the bottle surface is it's always a bit too random. Condensation on bottles has a sort of grouping pattern to it. Large drop, with a few medium drops around it and then a bunch of tiny drops filling in the rest of the blanks space. This may be something I need to figure out though in order to start using Octane.

Does the scatter in Octane give you this much specific control?

=Scatter functionality in Octane finishes with file input =) so You need to generate CSV in external program, like Phantom Scater by Guus Thissen there's a thread in this forum too.

or alternativelly, You can generated scatering in Particle Flow - try to replace them into instances or scatter with the help of ForestPro by itoo software & renderout inside 3ds Max with Octane plugin.

Neither solution is perfect..in Your case, but with a bit of creativity You can get these tools to be used to control output result =)

the best is simply to play around.