We are excited to bring you the first stable release of OctaneRender 2026.1. Thanks again to all those who sent us feedback and continuously help us improve Octane.
2026.1 Feature Highlights
- Support for Gaussian splats with full path traced GPU rendering.
- New high quality texture displacement for better displacement details and with support for all texture types.
- Full support for trace sets to include/exclude other objects or scene data from within any shader or object node graph .
- New neural radiance cache (NRC) system, an adaptive neural network trained at runtime which significantly reduces noise on first pixel.
- Native support for MaterialX and OpenPBR material standards.
- Support for typed textures, both inputs and outputs.
- New meshlets system for streaming massive scene geometry assets adaptively from disk, like Unreal Engine Nanite, but for path tracing.
- New virtual textures system for adaptively streaming massive Gigapixel-scale textures directly from disk.
- Support for more vertex attributes.
- The minimum NVIDIA driver version required has been raised to R535 (R572 for GeForce RTX50 series).
- The minimum version of macOS required is 14.5.
Gaussian SplattingWe are also happy to share with you a preview of our roadmap for Octane 2027 and beyond featuring some of the key features we are currently working on.
Gaussian splats can capture complex lighting effects such as reflections and refraction that change depending on the viewing angle. Gaussian splats in Octane support relighting, casting and receiving shadows, clipping material, trace sets, DoF and more.
Octane supports loading
.PLY and .SPZ files that are industry standard and can be produced from a set of images in software such as NeRF Studio or Polycam.Below is a series of videos showing some of the features Octane supports when rendering Gaussian splats:
Camera effects such as depth of field native to Octane also natively work with Gaussian splats:
Global illumination using all types of Octane lights also work in almost real-time on Gaussian Splat objects:
Octane 2026 can also load generative splat scenes through a collaboration with WorldLabs' Marble 'world model':
Below are other examples of what can be currently achieved with Gaussian Splats in Octane:
Instancing of Gaussian splats showing refractions and reflections as well as casting shadows on themselves and other scene geometry:
An athletic shoe Gaussian splat with a directional light creating a rim light effect and points driven by an advected particle simulation.
Pineapple Gaussian splat with 4 different clipping objects cutting holes and slicing it apart
Some Gaussian splatting scenes assume black background so to make them look correctly you will need either of the following:
- Enable alpha channel in kernel settings. Add an output AOV layer with black color to serve as a background.
- Disable the environment lighting
Meshlets
This feature allows Octane to render very detailed geometry while not using a lot of device memory. It works similar to "Nanite" in Unreal Engine by adaptively choosing a not too fine and not too coarse level of detail for different parts of a mesh - depending on what is visible in the render.
The video below initially shows a scene where meshlets are not being used and then get enabled. The memory savings in device memory used by geometry data after the switch are quite significant (1 GB > 0.3 GB). You can also see how the geometry LODs change seamlessly while moving the camera around which makes this very useful for lookdev applications. Finally the video displays the various watertight meshlet patches using different colors and updating as required.
In its current form it needs to be enabled explicitly in the geometry preferences as it requires a fairly expensive preprocessing step. During the preprocessing, Octane clusters a mesh into "meshlets" and then reduces the amount of geometry iteratively into multiple levels of detail. The preprocessed data is stored in a cache file in the OctaneRender cache directory to avoid having to redo the preprocessing every time the mesh is used.
During rendering, Octane chooses a selection of "meshlets" that results in a watertight mesh while making sure that the triangles are not too small and not too large in image space and compared to the pixel size. This automatically limits the amount of data that is actually loaded into VRAM without showing a visible difference to the original high resolution geometry. Since Octane needs to render the scene to determine the meshlet selection, we introduced the concept of a "settling phase" where Octane determines a fitting meshlet and virtual texture selection by iteratively rendering the current scene, and only starts progressive rendering after meshlets and virtual textures (see below) have settled.
This feature is very well suited for 3D scans and similar high-resolution continuous polygon geometry. It doesn't work very well with technical/CAD geometry since the triangles in those models are very hard to reduce without introducing shading artifacts. Also vertex motion blur and displacement are currently not supported. We are planning to provide support for vertex motion blur and vertex displacement in the future.
The integration into network rendering didn't make it into this release but will be available in the next release. Until then, network rendering won't start if the scene contains meshlet meshes and a warning is shown in the status bar.
Under File -> Preferences... -> Directories and caching you can manage the meshlet cache.
If you want to nerd out and visualize the meshlets you can use the Octane OSL intrinsic
_meshletIdRgb() in an OSL texture, i.e. using this code:Code: Select all
#include <octane-oslintrin.h>
shader OslTexture(
output color c = 0)
{
c = _meshletIdRgb();
}
Virtual Streaming "Bufferless" Textures
This feature allows Octane to render very large image textures (many billions of pixels). Octane will create an on-disk tile cache, containing the texture at various levels of detail, and Octane will interactively stream the parts needed for the current camera view point into VRAM. This takes indirect effects like glossy reflections into account.
- We can render large textures while only using a few dozen megabytes of VRAM.
- For far away view points, or rough glossy or diffuse reflections, lower levels of detail will be used, this works as automatic texture filtering and reduces sampling noise.
- Although creating the tile cache takes a long time, once cached Octane can open the texture instantly regardless of size.
Under File -> Preferences... -> Directories and caching you can manage the virtual texture cache.
As with meshlets, support for using texture LODs with network rendering will be coming out in the next release. Until then, network rendering won't start if the scene contains meshlet meshes and a warning is shown in the status bar.
New High Quality Live Texture Displacement
Octane's texture displacement system has gained a new "high quality" mode. The quality of the displaced surface, especially with high frequency input data has been much improved. It is also now possible to use OSL textures directly in the high quality mode.
There are far less visual artefacts in this mode, and it requires less resolution (therefore less VRAM) for the same quality as old displacement. We keep both the old and the new displacement methods since if you don't need as much visible detail and have spare VRAM, then the old displacement will give you faster render speeds. The new method will give you close-up high quality, and you would usually require lower resolutions.
We have also increased the maximum displacement resolution to 16K, for the cases that super high detail is needed. Please note, a current limitation is that you must have mesh UVs; but we would still like to remove this limitation.
Below is a video showing the new texture displacement can also be edited at almost real time:
The new texture displacement currently only supports UV projections, but this limitation will be removed soon.
Trace Sets
Trace sets allow geometry to be made invisible to other geometry. For example, an object’s reflection can be hidden in another reflective object, or an object can be prevented from casting shadows on another object.
Trace sets are set up via object layer nodes and apply to the geometry that belongs to the object layer. Object layers can belong to zero or more trace sets (currently limited to 31) and different object layers can belong to the same trace set. Each object layer can use any number of trace set exclusion rules, which can apply to reflection, refraction, diffuse and shadow ray bounce types and can optionally apply to multiple bounces rather than just the next one. The combination of these two makes this feature quite powerful and versatile.
The red cube is excluded from reflections in the mirror while the rest of objects are still displayed.
To achieve a result like the one above you need to make use of object layers with this setup:
- Assign a trace set name to the object layer the red cube belongs to.
- Add a trace set visibility rule to the object layer the mirror belongs to to exclude such trace set name.
OpenPBR Surface Material
OpenPBR Surface is an open standard of an uber material for physically based rendering hosted by the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF). It is an evolution of Autodesk’s Standard Surface material and Adobe’s Standard Material and it has already gained wide adoption in many DCC applications and is designed to be portable. It is now supported in Octane as a new material node.
OpenPBR Shader Playground Copyright 2024 Adobe. Rendered in Octane.
Some new features this introduces include:
- A new Energy Preserving Oren Nayar diffuse model
- A new multi scattering sheen model called Fuzz for Cloth or Dirt (at high roughness)
- Tinted emission through the Coat layer
- Control over transmissiveness of Thin Walled mode
MaterialX Support
MaterialX is an open standard for representing materials in a portable way across applications and renderers. MaterialX workflows are now supported natively in Octane with native nodes and importing facilities.
Chess Set by Academy Software Foundation, CC BY 4.0. Rendered in Octane
MaterialX materials can be imported from already existing native MaterialX files or existing USD scenes and also authored in Octane using over 130 new Octane nodes which implement the main pattern nodes in MaterialX version 1.39.4 and that can be used in combination with any other existing texture nodes.
Octane's MaterialX node collection
Neural Radiance Cache
Neural radiance cache (NRC) is a technique that allows for faster noise resolution by using a neural network that is trained at render time. This is especially useful in scenes with indirect lighting where many rays might not reach the camera.
Here's a comparison of a low sample count render where early noise reduction can be seen when using NRC in these videos showing side-by-side comparison of early noise reduction with and without NRC in a scene where light contribution comes from indirect sources:
Here is another example set with NRC and live GPU denoising working concurrently:
Current limitations:
- Only supported on Windows and Linux on NVIDIA devices with compute capability 7.5 (Turing) or higher.
- The first few samples are expected to be not accurate due to the network's initial learning phase.
- If the GPU memory consumption shoots up when the feature is enabled, please try to lower the max tile sample count.
- NRC support for network rendering is coming in the next release.
Typed Textures
This version introduces a much improved workflow for authoring shader graphs using nodes since now node inputs and outputs have specific value types.
The OSL Texture node can now have texture pins that are typed to support OSL types including 2D/4D vectors/colors and matrices.
Additional texture value nodes have been added for providing 4D vector and color values and for matrix values.
Image texture nodes can now output RGBA colors with alpha channel (when applicable).
Binary math operation texture node can now operate on selected value types with adaptive UX.
More vertex attributes
This version also increases the maximum count of supported attributes per vertex.
Octane now supports 10 float vertex attributes (up from 4) and 10 color vertex attributes (up from 2).
Chinese language support
We introduce a separate build of Octane with support for internationalization which allows users to use Octane in simplified Chinese as their main language. A lot of work has been put into making all translations as accurate as possible. For now only Standalone is available but plugins will be coming next.
New Online Activation Model
This new version updates how Octane's online activation works, moving to a lease model, where licenses can be reused elsewhere after the lease period expires
This means no more licenses being locked after an application crash, so no need to unlock them when this happens. This new model also allows for future release of licenses in order to be used on other machines (dependent on upgrades to our user portal not yet available).
The new model enforces online mode during rendering which is needed to keep the license lease valid at all times.
This change does not involve any changes to our current licensing model. Other licensing modes such as offline dongles as well as SSO authentication are not affected by this change.
Downloads
Studio+ Downloads
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 Standalone for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 Standalone for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 Standalone for Linux
OctaneRender 2026.1 Standalone for macOS
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 Node for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 Node for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 Node for Linux
Demo Downloads
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 Standalone Demo for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 Standalone Demo for Windows (ZIP archive)
Studio+ Chinese Downloads
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 (Chinese) Standalone for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 (Chinese) Standalone for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 (Chinese) Standalone for Linux
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 (Chinese) Node for Windows (installer)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 (Chinese) Node for Windows (ZIP archive)
OctaneRender Studio+ 2026.1 (Chinese) Node for Linux
Happy rendering,
Your OTOY Team
