Creating mirror reflections in v2

[Spectralis]

I wonder if anyone can explain or direct me to a thread that explains how to create recursive reflections with mirrored surfaces in OcDS v2. I'm using the OcDS mirror material. It's been quite awhile since I needed this effect but in v1, if I recall correctly, there was a setting on the render page in OcDS that had to be increased to create more reflections. That seems to have disappeared in v2 and the only way I could find to create recursive reflections was to set the render option to PCM. Is this the correct way to render reflections on mirrored surfaces? This doubles the render time for each frame so I'm also searching for the least resource intensive way of creating reflections.

[SiliconAya]

Do you have Specular depth and Diffuse depth above 1?

Every time you increase those, it'll give you another level of reflection for PT or PMC. They control light bounces, so they affect things like SSS, water and glass like materials and general lighting, my default is 6 (the octane standalone manual has more detail).

[Spectralis]

Do you have Specular depth and Diffuse depth above 1?

Every time you increase those, it'll give you another level of reflection for PT or PMC. They control light bounces, so they affect things like SSS, water and glass like materials and general lighting, my default is 6 (the octane standalone manual has more detail).

Thanks so much for your advice. I increased the specular and defuse depth to 6 and the reflections in PCM are perfect now. I changed the kernel back to direct lighting and each frame renders in a quarter of the time it takes with the PCM kernel but the number of reflections is limited in the DL kernel. Is there a way to increase the number of reflections in the DL kernel? In this kernel specular can be increased very high but diffuse only goes up to 8. If the direct light kernel can't handle a lot of reflections then I'll just have to use PCM but that increases the render time for each frame from 20s to 1m 45s.

[SiliconAya]

I can't really help with DL as I never use it (doesn't support SSS), 90% of the time I use PT and only when it can't handle the image (lots of fireflys, etc) I use PMC. PT is normally at least 2x as fast as PMC, sometimes as much as 4x from what I've seen. PT also has the 'Coherent Ratio' setting like DL, which helps speed both up.

The PT kernel is a good middle ground for me, supports everything and has good speed and generally looks better than DL.


---
If you're using v3 then:
For all kernels you'll want to play around with the "Parallel samples" to find what works best for your hardware setup, same with 'Max. tile samples' for DL& PT and 'Work Chuck size' for PMC, the Octane v3 feature thread has more in-depth detail on what they do/mean. The default settings should be a good starting point for most people, but if you have bellow or above average hardware you might get improvements.

[Spectralis]

I can't really help with DL as I never use it (doesn't support SSS), 90% of the time I use PT and only when it can't handle the image (lots of fireflys, etc) I use PMC. PT is normally at least 2x as fast as PMC, sometimes as much as 4x from what I've seen. PT also has the 'Coherent Ratio' setting like DL, which helps speed both up.

The PT kernel is a good middle ground for me, supports everything and has good speed and generally looks better than DL.


---
If you're using v3 then:
For all kernels you'll want to play around with the "Parallel samples" to find what works best for your hardware setup, same with 'Max. tile samples' for DL& PT and 'Work Chuck size' for PMC, the Octane v3 feature thread has more in-depth detail on what they do/mean. The default settings should be a good starting point for most people, but if you have bellow or above average hardware you might get improvements.

PT does seem to be the best compromise as you suggest. I also find that if I increase the image size and lower the resolution this works better than higher resolutions at lower image size in terms of render speed and image quality. I've yet to try v3 but once it's released I'll upgrade and try adjusting those parameters.