OTOY Forums

Hello everyone,

This is my first post here. Here is a little bit of context before i pose my question. I love sculpting in apps like zbrush/sculptris. However the rendering has always been a bit of a pain for me. Even with a powerful workstation its a time consuming task, especially if you want to experiment with camera angles, lights, environments etc.

Octane render seems like a great solution for this. It is wickedly fast and the price is right!

However the demo has some features lacking which for me make it impossible to test properly. Since i like sculpture the renderings i prefer to make would be more like studio setups. This means various artificial light sources. From what i can see Octane render does not bring any light types of its own instead relying on mesh lights which are not available in the demo.

How am i supposed to test studio like setups with the demo? Render out HDR environments from my other 3d package and import them back in octane perhaps?

Then the second issue. From testing and reading it seems you cannot use seperate 3d objects in the same scene. It all has to be one object. This lead me to the obvious finding that there is almost no tweaking to your scene in octane. You can move and tweak the camera, change materials and thats it! This seems like an awful, awful waste for an "interactive" renderer like Octane?

What if i want to position some whitecards to bring just the right reflection to the object im rendering? What if i move my camera to an interesting angle (camera position is interactive after all!) and find out I need to adjust the position of my rimlight? (or any light for that matter?)

This brings me to the third issue which is closely tied into the previous one. What I am really hoping (almost expecting in fact) is that the plugins will create a live connection to octane. I.e. move an object in your 3d package that you have the plugin installed for and see octane update in realtime. This would mean the full potential of octane gets used. However, not only does it seem from the movies I've found online that the plugins are "just" exporters but they are not included in the demo for testing either!

I am certain you guys have good reasons for doing it this way but look at it from the perspective of a potential customer. I think this is what I need but there is no way to find out. Since its a GPU based renderer the one thing I want to do is test. Hell, even a 10 day trial with the same limits as the current demo but brought up to date with the commercial beta's would be better then what it is now.

From what I read on the forums it seems a new demo is up and coming but I could not find any -official- announcement on it. Could someone enlighten me. Im on the verge of buying this but put simply, I need to test it first.

Also, a real important feature for me would be SSS. There are lots of materials that use this (including marble). Ive read the feature page and found:

Absorption and transmittance **

If I translate that to 3d artist language does that mean that SSS will be a feature of V1.x of the Octane renderer?

Kind regards,

JW

JWvD wrote: However the demo has some features lacking which for me make it impossible to test properly.

A new demo is supposed to be released within the next few days. They are currently finalizing the latest version and will then create the new demo.

JWvD wrote: Since i like sculpture the renderings i prefer to make would be more like studio setups. This means various artificial light sources. From what i can see Octane render does not bring any light types of its own instead relying on mesh lights which are not available in the demo.

The new demo will include mesh lights and IES lighting.

JWvD wrote: Then the second issue. From testing and reading it seems you cannot use seperate 3d objects in the same scene. It all has to be one object. This lead me to the obvious finding that there is almost no tweaking to your scene in octane. You can move and tweak the camera, change materials and thats it! This seems like an awful, awful waste for an "interactive" renderer like Octane?

At this point, your scene needs to contain all of the elements. Octane does not allow you to pull objects from separate files (at least not at this point). If I remember correctly, they plan on changing that, but I don't know when that will happen. I agree that this would be a great addition.

JWvD wrote: What if i want to position some whitecards to bring just the right reflection to the object im rendering? What if i move my camera to an interesting angle (camera position is interactive after all!) and find out I need to adjust the position of my rimlight? (or any light for that matter?)

You would need to make the changes in your modeling app and then export / import them into Octane again. Octane has a relinking feature that helps with this process. It's not as bad as it sounds, once you get used to the workflow.

JWvD wrote: This brings me to the third issue which is closely tied into the previous one. What I am really hoping (almost expecting in fact) is that the plugins will create a live connection to octane. I.e. move an object in your 3d package that you have the plugin installed for and see octane update in realtime. This would mean the full potential of octane gets used. However, not only does it seem from the movies I've found online that the plugins are "just" exporters but they are not included in the demo for testing either!

Refractive Software has stated that they are not interested (and don't have the personnel) to create special linkages between each 3D app and Octane. But they have also stated that they might reconsider this in the future.

JWvD wrote: Also, a real important feature for me would be SSS. There are lots of materials that use this (including marble). Ive read the feature page and found:

SSS is slated for version 2.0 (which won't be for a while, since 1.0 isn't even out yet).

Of course, a live integration between octane and the app would be ideal, but without hiring a team for each 3d app I don't see how refractive software can handle that much dev work. I'd prefer 100 times they keep going the way they are to get the engine working even better as is before trying to take on that task...

As for the workflow of moving things around like lights, I had some of the same concerns and mentality for a while, but then I realized how easy it is to go back and forth between octane and (for me) Max. Not sure of the other apps, but I imagine it's similar.

For example, I was trying to make a floor texture from LiveDB in Octane rotate 90 degreess so the grain would match the direction I wanted it to go. I spend 4 or 5 mins trying to switch all the x y z scale values for the nodes making up the material, and it still wasn't looking right. So I quit without saving, Max was still running anyway so I opened the UVW modifier, rotated gizmo 90, hit export to octane. 2 seconds of obj export, 1 second to open up octane, 3 seconds for octane scene setup and my texture was all moving the right direction.

After that, I realized it's quite easy to just hit the re-export button. I had previously tried to make a clear division (at least mentally) in my work flow between modeling and octane, but after that it dawned on me that I don't have to. I can treat octane like a test-render in the normal renderer like vray or mentalray. I even bound the export to octane to Shift-Q.

If you have some extremely complicated geometry going on (grass, carpet, trees, etc) that take a long time to export and/or voxelize in octane, simply hide it if you aren't working on it specifically, or isolate if you are, just as you would use a render region preview in the "normal" way of doing things.

And by comparison, vrayGPU has a significant setup time when you hit activeshade and the gpu server starts up. Sometimes like 30-45 seconds long. And I've often found that I have to close the window and reopen it because something stopped working while I was moving things around.

GeoPappas and thefailsafe,

Thankyou both very much for the indepth replies. You both seem to have answered all my questions.

That said I am dissapointed to hear there are no plans for creating live connections from other 3d apps. You both seem to share the same opinion that this sounds worse then it actually is. From what you tell me a new demo will be out soon so i can experience the workflow for myself. I hope you guys are right.

The fact that SSS is scheduled for V2 (upgrade that needs to be payed for) is a big con though. I have no idea what the upgrade will cost or when it will be ready. Paying a hundred bucks for a beta with the guarantee of a set of features on the release of V1 is quite acceptable to me. A discount for pre investing into software with the promise of getting the full version at release. However having no idea what you have to shell out to get SSS implemented (which is a pretty basic feature for renderers today) is a little harder to justify. Especially since i could really use it.

Is there any info on the date of release for V1, V2 and the cost of an upgrade?

Thanks again for all the info and i hope to be testing the new demo soon. Ill post some pictures up here once i do.

Kind regards,

JW

JWvD wrote: Is there any info on the date of release for V1, V2 and the cost of an upgrade?

In a word, no.

Release dates are nebulous in the software development world. This is especially true when you are on the bleeding edge (which Octane is). Octane is dependent on NVIDIA CUDA technology which is a moving target. Whenever a new CUDA release comes out it could mean a large rewrite. There are also a bunch of features that need to be implemented for V1 (instancing, custom MLT-like rendering engine, animation support (via RIB and/or XML), etc). But if I were to give a guesstimate (which could be totally wrong since I have no inside information), I would say that V1 will be released in Q4 2011.

Hi,

We have just released the new demo version (1.0 beta 2.46) to our downloads page.

Radiance

Thankyou very much! I have the whole evening for myself so I am going to enjoy this!

I havent looked thoroughly yet but am I correct in finding no plugins/exporter scripts with the demo?

JW

radiance wrote:Hi,

We have just released the new demo version (1.0 beta 2.46) to our downloads page.

Radiance

Not trying to jack this thread just wanted to make note that the demo on the downloads page is still listed as 1.0 22

BLincs wrote:

radiance wrote:Hi,

We have just released the new demo version (1.0 beta 2.46) to our downloads page.

Radiance

Not trying to jack this thread just wanted to make note that the demo on the downloads page is still listed as 1.0 22

I just checked (here: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/downloads.html) and it states "1.0 beta2.46b Demo"

Where are you looking?

GeoPappas wrote:

BLincs wrote:

radiance wrote:Hi,

We have just released the new demo version (1.0 beta 2.46) to our downloads page.

Radiance

Not trying to jack this thread just wanted to make note that the demo on the downloads page is still listed as 1.0 22

I just checked (here: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/downloads.html) and it states "1.0 beta2.46b Demo"

Where are you looking?

See the attachment.