OTOY Forums

I've not been on the Octane forum for a few months now. Have I missed anything?

I am now 100% cycles and really enjoying it. I've not used Octane since version 2 came out. I tell a lie, I did fire it up the other day and I'd completely forgotten how to use it

What are you liking about Cycles?

Is it as fast as octane?
are the results comparable?

what makes you want to use Cycles over Octane?

I am still using stand alone for day to day projects but we might start using the integrated plugin for bigger animation jobs.

last time I used Cycles for interiors, it was slow and noisy.
I do like the control you get with images ect though.

Well Octane used to be my software of choice but now that I've started using cycles more I find it a very easy system to use. The node system used in cycles is massively superior to Octane. As for noise / speed I am not sure about speed but I don't have any issues with noise.

Here's my latest cycles render. This is at 100 samples/pixel

Hi Steve,

The node system used in cycles is massively superior to Octane. As for noise / speed I am not sure about speed but I don't have any issues with noise.

How is the cycles node system massively superior to Octane's? Can you be more specific? I don't know anything about nodes, but want
to learn.

re: Noise...sorry, no offense, but the cycles image is pretty noisy. How about a comparison of a cycles render vs Octane at the same sample level....something simple, e.g. a window?

I've been out of touch with Octane, too, and am considering upgrading to v2, but don't know what major
features or improvements there have been in the last 12months.

Hi,
Here a test render done with Cycles and Octane,
Samples was 2000, time take by Cycles was 44:42 and Octane was 18.22.
One sun light use in Blender and Octane.
Octane hotpixel removal set to 1.0 for image name Octane_01
and set to 0.0 for image name Octane_02.
Still lot of noise for Octane.

I download the current Demo for Blender but it fail to work when I try it,
so I use my Poser Octane v2 to do this, I have resize the mesh for Poser.
Blender 2.72b was use on GPU.

Samples was 2000, time take by Cycles was 44:42 and Octane was 18.22.

Octane needs more samples as far as I'm aware. More samples doesn't mean it's less superior. Considering it only took it 18 minutes in comparison to Cycles 44 you can probably increase the samples to 3000 or 4000. The noise difference isn't that much, it only seems to be where the bounced light that hits the armpits get the noisiest. Also, there should be some settings that solve Caustics faster in Octane that you can use. I have been using Vray recently so I can't really remember any more. It should be somewhere in this forum and in the manual.

Also, just read the manual if you've forgotten how to use Octane. It gives most of the information you could want. It's not very wordy in my opinion as well. There is a tutorial on this part of the forum as well when it comes to using the plugin. It's slightly older and doesn't have displacement and what not but it will get you started.

As for quality and what not I still prefer Octane over Cycles. The node set ups are easier in Octane (Seriously, adding a texture in cycle requires far more nodes than in octane) and the render times are better. I still prefer it to Vray despite having to use Vray recently for the past 4 months. I can't comment on the speed between Vray and Octane though. All I have is a cruddy laptop and I can only use Vray on my schools super computers >.> - I still find Octane a lot more simpler to use than Vray and a lot less hassle to render GI in it than Vray as well. GI in Vray is a nightmare to render properly and quickly.

Having used both for both commercial and non-commercial work; I love Cycles, but is not comparable to Octane render in terms of speed or quality.

I look at a lot of Archviz and the best Cycles renders, by experienced users, have not come close to the best Octane renders in terms of photo-realism. Obviously there are a lot of factors in play and this conversation has happened many times!

Cliff notes - Cycles still has a long way to go.