Octane standalone runs quite well with blender and produces very nice images. There is a more integrated plugin in the works, though without a definite ETA. The integrated versions for Max etc. are quite impressive. Octane standalone is currently EUR199.
There is also a GPU accelerated Thea coming, again ETA not firmly specified. Thea is EUR295 for studio + 2 rendernode licenses. Thea charges separately for the application plugin EUR29.50 for Blender. The integrated plugin will probably be more. (Max integrated is EUR69.50)
Maxwell also seems to work quite well even though the blender plugin is not in any way officially supported. If you are using it only for personal projects you can get a non-commercial license of Maxwell for only $99.
I think people using commercial render engines with blender probably do more posting in their respective render engine forums than on BA, but they are out there.
Installed the Octane demo this morning and played with it a bit, and I liked it, solid texture implementation, and looks darn good!
Did a few tests with Mikes car, also did a bit of comparison with Cylces (yeah, I know).
Only Cuda card I could find was an old GTX 260, but it did the trick.
I tried to reproduce the scene as much as I could in the time I had in Octane, rendered the Cycles test with default bounces in Blender, so I guess I could have have been faster if I had tweaked it a bit, but hey!
Nothing fancy, just a quickie at 1000 samples each.
Octane took the same time? I had the feeling it is much faster than Cycles?
I have a license for it as well, but I just fall in love so much with Cycles and the material node system that I cannot see myself using something different.
The kicker for me is the group sharing of nodes that could include shader materials or even basic color inputs that are shared across the scene and objects.
What I find outstanding with Octane is also the online material library, something like that for Blender would be terrific as a build in function!
The Octane comparison looks to me like it lacks a certain level of glossiness that is present in the Cycles render (all the reflections are sharp). Surely there was a sort of roughness factor available for its glossy material which you may have missed or chose not to use (a path-based render engine without blurry reflections would be pretty dumb otherwise).
Nothing fancy, just a quickie at 1000 samples each.
@PA3D, did you change the camera perspective or the lens etc. between this two renders? The are not congruent. Or is that because of the different render engines? Octane has more details at the hood whereas blender has better Reflections. Look at the lamps!
Yes, there is a roughness settings, and I did play with it, but I could not achieve the desired look, same with the chrome textures, which I could not make look right, but it is surely something I missed, as I am having trouble making good reflections, just used Octane for the first time this morning!
I left Blender Bounces untouched in that render, but in a test, I got 9:21 with bounces set at 0/32, with no visible difference in render quality, I also set the tiles at 256X260 for GPU render, which as usual make things alot faster!
I agree, this would be really useful and I agree, Cycles is really good as it is, now with SSS on the way, and hopefully volumetrics as well, We’ll have a very decent render engine.
This said, a more mature engine is always a good thing, and even though these renders are far from perfect, I must admit that Octane is really easy to setup even after a few minutes, as I spent maybe 2 hours on these, which I mostly spent waiting for render.
I really need to get a NVidia card, maybe one of those Titan!
Both are setup with 35mm lens, and this is an obj export from Blender to Octane, which I eyeballed the best I could, as I could not make the free plugin work with 2.66 and both use the same light emitter, but I had to crank Octane settings way up for any light to show!
The big problem of octane is that IMO is more important, they ignore the software… I bought a license two years ago and I only received one email with one update with little things.
I modified yoyoz’s script for 2.66, if you’d like to try it. I may do some more tweaks to it to get some things exporting correctly that seem to get neglected on export (blackbody settings, for example).
I think you should check Octane’s forum, for sure you will find a few updates, they don’t used to communicate via e-mail, they’ve been quite active lately but you have to check the forums man.
About the conversation about cycles vs octane I have to tell that we’re using both for a feature film and octane is far nicer in quality and faster than cycles, for a period of time I thought that cycles could allow us to break with Octane but lately I see a total lack of quality in the render in comparisson with Octane. I know it’s not the tools it´s the artists but for us we get faster and nicer results in Octane but not in cycles even if we spend more time with nodes and other stuff in cycles there’s a huge gap between quality/speed between these two engines. The only thing I like from cycles is the flexibility in the creation of the materials and the possibilities of the passes but for production… no way.
Can you provide some screenshots that show low Cycles quality? Any chance is related to complex light scenes with light sources covered by reflectors, etc ? Or it is overall feeling that it much better in every scene?
I took the liberty to replicate Mike’s BMW in Octane 1.1 as good as possible, I neglected a few materials though, didn’t want to put too much time into it.
Here we go, all render times based on my machine, .blend untouched, rendered in mint 2.66a:
All with 200 s/px
There’s not much to say or compare, both cycles and octane got strengths and weaknesses, and render times and visual appeal depends on the artists skill in the end and the knowledge of the kernels, materials and settings.
About the conversation about cycles vs octane I have to tell that we’re using both for a feature film and octane is far nicer in quality and faster than cycles
I don’t see a reason why a Cycles render should technically be inferior in quality. I also don’t see it being significantly faster. It’s probably the tone mapping or other post-processing that makes the visual difference here, but in Blender that’s the job of the compositor, not Cycles.
Storm_st , Is an overall feeling, sometimes we have scenes to render and I give a try in cycles and starting to create nodes, materials, light set ups, etc… I spend very much time and at the end the materials doesn’t looks half as good as in Octane, the metals for example are very bad in cycles, the robots from the tears of steel for example they look anything but metallic. Octane has a very nice metallic materials and it´s super easy and fast to have something nice while in cycles I used to spend hours and hours to have something decent but at the end never looks good enough in comparisson with Octane.
They probably don’t look like what you expect them to look like. The look they where going for is something more like this gear here, which I can assure you is made mostly out of metal. I think they did a pretty good job.
There’s no magic sauce in Octane that makes it technically superior. It does have a metal BSDF, but I doubt you could tell the difference over a glossy BSDF in a lineup. You seem to experience a workflow issue here that may be helped with a dedicated material library.
Hi Zalamander, it is a bit hard to explain but I understand what Sam meant.
It is more the whole package, a very good Sun system and easy to setup material system.
If i remember some node setups in cycles to get a good glass or wood, metal material it shudders me.
They have 5 or 6 experienced full time devs only for the render engine and brecht is alone more or less.
So Octane is only more matured, may 2 years in man power, thats all.
Cheers, mib.
EDIT: Forgot the good material database with hundreds of mats.
I’ve used Octane myself and apart from the missing features (like volume rendering) I’ve found Cycles Material system to be vastly superior. I can see that some things in Octane, like the tone mapping or the sun system make things easier, but I don’t see anything that makes it technically superior (or even all that different). There may or may not be a solvable problem here, but if you can’t get into specifics there isn’t anything to do about it.
