Noise Removal

[3dgeeks]

Octane has lost a lot of ground, with regard to render speed, due to noise issues. Corona, Vray, Fstorm all having inbuilt denoise solutions which are giving them similar or better render times. I find it strange that Otoy is not addressing this issue when i see the new roadmap.
http://www.cgchannel.com/2016/04/otoy-r ... of-octane/

3rd party compatibility like Altus is a partial step but fails to meet the offering that the other renderers are offering.

Sorry to harp on but what gives?

[mojave]

Adaptive sampling is in the roadmap for v3.1:

viewtopic.php?p=288814#p288814

That should help clearing up noise with lower samples without the aid of an external denoising tool.

[Goldorak]

Adaptive sampling is in the roadmap for v3.1:

viewtopic.php?p=288814#p288814

That should help clearing up noise with lower samples without the aid of an external denoising tool.

Yes. Denoising is still destructive (but supported through Altus). With 3.1 we plan to get noise-free rendering to happen much faster in difficult scenes through AS.

[FelipeCortes]

aprox release date for 3.1?

[Goldorak]

Once we finish OSL and it is stable, we will be better able to offer a release date. We have at least a month of work just on OSL itself before it can be pushed into an alpha release.

[Rik]

What is OSL and why is it more important than getting rid of noise

[fatrobotsneedlove]

What is OSL and why is it more important than getting rid of noise

OSL stands for Open Shading Language. Basically it's an open source shader language that allows you to share shaders between render engines. So you could author something in Vray and then send it to Octane and get the same result. Vray has a ton of awesome free presets available online. OSL will allow those presets (if authored in OSL) to work in any engine that supports OSL, not just Vray. Basically, what alembic is to geo, and OpenVDB is to volumes, OSL is to shaders.

In addition it allows users to solve unique problems. For example, Octane somehow still doesn't support an IOR texture input. That makes it very difficult to interface with PBR texture programs like Substance Painter (even though engines like Vray and Corona have had IOR textures for quite some time and therefore work well ). So someone could write an OSL shader that takes an IOR texture input and therefore fixes this vexing shortcoming of Octane.

That doesn't make it more important than getting rid of noise, it just solves a different problem.

Personally I'm frustrated that other engines are offering built in noise reduction while Octane points us to a 3rd party subscription service for noise removal. I guess version 4 is supposed to integrate Brigade which will be great, but who knows when that will show up. 3.1 has already taken quite a lot of time.

I mean damn, if you pay for the Altus denoiser monthly it's $300 a year. An Octane license is only $99 more. It's shitty to tell your users "Well we offer denoising through this 3rd party you have to pay" when other great engines offer their own denoisers for free integrated directly!

I still love Octane though. But

[voltaire585]

i struggle to see how adding a denoiser can be overly complex codewise. Im having an artist look at Altus now, but seriously it looks vastly harder than solutions provided by ALL other comparable render engines.