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Test for trees and grass (obviously!). Trees are Evermotion, grass is from file elsewhere in this forum (thanks, btw). Card is GFX 580, environment is HDRI. This render took an hour, but honestly there was little visual improvement over the one that took 10 minutes. The downside is the set is quite large, creeping in at just under 1Gb. That being said, this was insanely fast to set up - I am so looking forward to that Max plugin... And instances... And....!

Nice render. The texture on the tree looks a bit mirrored but the poly grass is really nice.

It does seem to be mirrored; I'm not certain Evermotion intended the trees to be imaged this close up, but if you can..! Grass is actually that billboard technique using a single image scattered - it's far more flexible than I'd have given it credit for. Here's the question though; given the size of these tree objects (at a rough estimate they seem to occupy around 300+Mb of card ram) is it ever likely that instances will be feasible within GPU ram? Or is the solution just to wait a while (probably not very long) until we get an order of magnitude scale up in memory? I wanted to add these to a city scene I was messing with (test renders below) but the file size there was already well above a gig. By the way, the camera response settings are simply gorgeous - is there any way of customising these? You'll put colourists all over the world out of a job..!

I believe instancing is the next big feature on the list of Refractive Software, but I am sure this will come with other elements like translation features wich probably have to be embedded to make instances work. [only a guess]

I think it will need more time to wait for big GPU Ram in "Gaming Cards". The main reason why Nvidia & Co don't produce cards with tons of ram is that they want to seperate the consumer gaming market from the highend professional market (science,...).

Got it - thanks! Silicon Graphics leant me an Onyx reality engine once upon a time - 3 years later the same chip set was in the Nintendo 64. My rule of thumb is that from graphics supercomputer to commodity hardware is 3 years - roll on 2014!

The city renderings look very nice. Is the environment HDR or Sun/Sky sys?

They're HDR. The sun and sky system is really great, but without cloud the end result is always very 'Mediterranean'. I'm just outside London, and HDR provides a somewhat more English feel - only rain could improve it

Actually, that's not strictly true; being able to mix sun or direct light with HDR would make a big difference - that would be very useful indeed.

Good job, indeed mixing sun/sky with HDR is a common wanted feature on the list.
HDRI is the prefered method of environments with Octane but I really enjoy the sun/sky and hope for bidirectional pathtracing and other improvements in the future.

It doesn't feel as though mixing the two would be a huge step for them - or at least, it seems as though it would be less problematic than instancing. Still, it's a great product; I hope they can keep their development momentum going, it's just a lot more fun than Vray. Being able to experiment interactively with lighting and camera angles is extraordinary!

Very nice grass and architecture render.