Problems with scene from Octane 30.11 in 31.7

[dopelessdesign]

I finally updated to Octane 31.7, but opening scenes made in Octane 30.11 + Blender 4.5 in Octane 31.7 + Blender 5.1.1 completely breaks them.

A few issues:

Materials using height maps become invisible.
If using Vertex Displacement, I have to disconnect the node.
If using Texture Displacement, I have to switch from “High” to “Normal” mode (which strangely gets set automatically).

Area light visibility/reflections are broken.
I have Octane Area Lights set to be invisible in reflections on certain objects, but in 31.7 the lights are reflected anyway no matter what I do.

Biggest issue: lighting looks completely different.
HDRI seems mostly fine, but Area Lights are MUCH darker. In some places I need to increase power 10x to get something remotely similar.

I’m attaching a screenshot comparison:
top = Octane 30.11, bottom = Octane 31.7.
Nothing was changed — it’s literally the same file opened in different versions.

The object in the screenshot is lit by the HDRI plus a front Area Light.

So basically: what is happening here?
Are these known issues between 30 and 31?
How should I even approach troubleshooting this?

Right now this scene is basically unusable in 31.7, and I want to understand what changed before starting new projects there.

[linograndiotoy]

31.7 integrates Octane 2026.3, so scenes created with older Octane versions, such as 2025.5 / 30.11, may show different results or require some adjustments.

The way RGB Image Color Space and Gamma work have chnaged, for example.

In general, my advice is to keep the older version installed when working on important projects created with that specific version, especially if you may need to reopen or continue them later.

That said, it would be very helpful if you could share a scene that reproduces the issues you listed. This would allow us to take a closer look and check whether these are expected differences between versions or actual issues that need to be addressed.

Thanks!

[dopelessdesign]

Hi, thanks for the reply, and sorry for not answering sooner.

I always keep old Octane versions installed, so I just continued working on the project in the same version it was originally created in, and everything is fine there.
I mainly tried opening it in the latest version because I wanted to use a plugin that only works with Blender 5, but it turned out there were simply too many issues.

What surprised me is that I’ve upgraded older projects to newer Blender/Octane versions many times before, and usually everything worked perfectly fine.

The project is under NDA, so I’d rather not upload the scene, even without the product itself. And honestly, judging by the fact that I seem to be almost the only one having this problem, it probably isn’t important enough to take up the developers’ time.

Thanks again!