OTOY Forums

Hi all,
Not sure if I’m posting in the correct section of the forum, but I couldn’t find anything closer to my issues. Please move it if it is needed.

We are a small studio running Blender/C4D/Houdini, and Thinkbox Deadline. For the last two months, we have been trying to add OctaneRender Prime to Blender.

The problem: OctaneServer crashes frequently. On all any machine, no matter the GPU or the spec. We try different GPU drivers, try different versions of Octane. Tried rendering locally or through Deadline. The same story. It will render a couple of frames, then crash. We try to put some tools in place to monitor it, but any request will crash the server instantly.

• Anything to make the Octane server more stable?
• Any tools that can monitor the server so we can find out why it is crashing so often?

The machines run Windows 11 and 10, with 128 GB of RAM and a single GPU. We have a wide selection of Nvidia GPUs: 2080 Ti, 3080, 3080 Ti, 4080, 4080 Super, 4090 Ti, 5080.
All machines are with Blender 4.5.2, OctaneBlender Edition 2025.3/30.7.0
We are using Nvidia drivers 522.30, 572.83, 576.28, 577.00 and 581.57

Any help will be appreciated.

Hi All,

It has been two weeks. We couldn't find anyone to help us, and Otoy has been quiet as well. After countless hours of testing, we discovered that the OctaneServer needs to be restarted before beginning to render the new frame. Since we can't get any data back from the OctaneServer, I can only guess that the restart clears all the cache. So, we have found a solution.  
With the help of ChatGPT, we wrote a Python script that does the following:-

• Checks if there is a running instance of OctaneServer and terminates it

• Starts a new instance of OctaneServer

• Waits for OctaneServer to load, opens it  from the Windows tray icons, and activates it

Load the script into Deadline as a Pre-Task Script. Before starting any frame, the Deadline worker will restart and authorise OctaneServer. No issues so far.

Finally, we can render with Octane under Deadline without crashes.  

The bad news is that we are generating thousands of authorisation requests to Otoy every day. I hope they don't ban us, thinking we're attempting to hack them. 

Octane is a fantastic render engine; we want to use it more. Let's make Octane even better. If anyone finds a better (more clever) solution, please share it. I would love to hear about it. 

Best

Hi All,

I have no interaction on my post, I feel like talking to myself . But want to keep it in the record, you never know when someone else hits the wall as we did, so the solution is here.

Ok, something new we've found for Octane Server. If you run out of memory, cannot load the Ocio, or something else goes wrong, Octane stops loading resources and will corrupt the credential file stored in …..user\AppData\Roaming\OctaneRender (see log file below). The render is starting to look weird, with some elements appearing black or without ACES applied, etc. The way to fix it is to log out of Octane Server, close it, restart it, and log in again, or replace the credential file with one you saved earlier in your “squirrel stash folder”, which also works.



This is definitely a bug, and Otoy needs to fix it.

To bypass the issue, we had to add a Python script to run first, kill the Octane Server, copy the new credentials, restart it, then the PowerShell script kicks in and performs the login. And all this has been controlled by Deadline before each frame. This way, there are no black frames, weird colour spaces, or any of the hundreds of things that can go wrong.

Again, we love Octane, so let's make it better.

Best.