The results in octane are better with less knowledge of the engine. But the integration of cycles in blender is perfect.
Those camera simulations are nice.
I must agree here with DcVertice. Octane is I think an easier tool to start with like Keyhot. But in the long run if you need more then a pure photo producer Blender with Cycles might be better.
Rendering in Cycles for me the way I set up materials and share nodes via groups is also part of my design process, and this would require a lot more work with other engines.
I think it’s a clash between freedom and ease, art and tech.
Cycles has absolutely awesome freedom, but can avalanche you, Octane is a bit more artistic but can feel constraining.
And I think this is mirrored in Blenders development in general. It’s more done by “the programmer” than “the artists”.
They keep it “true”, surface all parameters, maximum freedom, full control.
But Octane is more fast, IMO, because you can make a lot of things in the materials, like coats, light dispersion,… without difference in the render time. And the results in my benchs are better, few memory, few noise,… The problems in octane are the limitations of the studio version, the node system,…
Cycles is good, but the felling that I have is that we won’t have a full solution in a lot of time and it is a raw solution (you have a glossy material, a diffuse, the glass… do something). Is like the little details and petitions of the users would be ignored until the end, the dev time will be really long (I don’t want speak about Open Source) and the “never ending story” about nobody want make boring features ¿Who want make a real solution for the Sun-sky system? Nobody, ok… Other example is the new features, Hair and OSL, that only work in CPU…
The problem is that ¿could I wait two years more to have a solution for my problems? Or I will spent my time in other render engines, less raw but with all the things that I need.
Did you include/exclude the BVH build times for cycles / octane?
I tend to agree with DcVertice here, Cycles is darn cool, but it is still in early development and lack many tools and extensive GPU support, and its development is locked to one, even though dedicated developer at this time.
I find that Cycles can make extensive shaders if You put your mind to it, what is of interest to me in Octane is its full GPU support and the fact that it scales really well as You add GPUs, which is a solution We have been looking at here from the start, and the upcoming Blender plugin makes it even more interesting!
I think at the end it all comes down to what you need honestly. I like to work/explore with the 3D software, others only want to use/apply it. There is a reason why tools like Keyshot got so popular for a reason. Individual needs are all different.
When it comes to things like hair, I read on this forum before that Octane doesn’t even have hair primitive functionality yet because of the difficulty of getting it to work nice and fast on a GPU. As Octane is literally GPU-only, features that are rather difficult to make work on a GPU is currently more or less out of the question.
As for specialized things like a sun/sky system, I would rather see Brecht first spend time on implementing things that we genuinely can’t do very well with the existing nodes or functionality, and then after some optimizations, allow some time implementing some of the specialized functions like the one mentioned here. I say this because it’s already possible to use blend textures to create a sort of sky texture with a built in sun (which with the use of MIS will work quite well). There’s still the issue of atmosphere, but it looks to me like that might become possible if the volumetrics implementation also allows their use in the world shader so as to be able to do such things without meshes.
There’s already a somewhat specialized node in the form of the ubershader slated for 2.67, but I would much prefer it if Brecht didn’t spend too much on high-level shaders like in Luxrender or Yafaray so we can ensure that we have the nuts and bolts needed to literally create anything we want in terms of shading effects and materials.
Good point!
I simply neglected to mention it, as building the BVH for cycles takes ~1 sec on my machine.
Compiling the mesh in Octane takes ~12 sec, which has quite an impact if you render animations, for which I consider Octane unfit as compiling for complex scenes can take quite a while.
i know that you defend every ththing that somebody critic to blender in this forums. This no change something if the solution is not full. The reason of the problems don’t remove the problems.
Somebody in another trend mentioned a double standard regarding commercial vs. OSS, and I’m beginning to see it.
I’ve used Octane from the very beginning and for most of its time, development was slow, even though it eventually added several developers to the team. When it wasn’t really ready for production work, it was already sold to people, with a lot of promises attached. Eventually it was bought out, yielding the original developer a nice financial outcome…
Cycles is good, but the felling that I have is that we won’t have a full solution in a lot of time and it is a raw solution […] Is like the little details and petitions of the users would be ignored until the end, the dev time will be really long
With Cycles on the other hand, people had the privilige of trying it out for free, earlier than Brecht would’ve preferred, but he began getting paid by the BF, so it was made public. It’s exactly as he mentions in the Blender Podcast: Over time, every missing feature becomes something that “should have been there already”. Maybe if Cycles was kept under wraps, we’d be spared of all your entitled little opinions…
¿Who want make a real solution for the Sun-sky system? Nobody, ok… Other example is the new features, Hair and OSL, that only work in CPU…
The problem is that ¿could I wait two years more to have a solution for my problems? Or I will spent my time in other render engines, less raw but with all the things that I need.
This really has to be a joke, considering all the features that are missing from Octane. Is there any solution right now that has what you need? Well then you’re in luck, go use that!
Hair, OSL, CPU fallback, those don’t exist in Octane, so obviously if you can use Octane, you don’t need them. Right now, development focus is SSS, which people have been kicking and screaming for.
I had forgotten the other guy that only spend his live defending blender… Nobody can tell nothing in this forum againt blender without them here ¬¬U
Octane is a great product, we use to use it for still images, but we switched to cycles mainly because of the importing / exporting from blender… it was horrible having to go to obj, then importing it into octane again, not to mention back then there were no instances with octane.
When the plugin finally gets released, i will have a look whether its viable to switch back to octane… and you never know, it may be worth our while to switch back… The only other feature that we kinda need is the tile sizes (some of our scenes are quite complex, causing windows to crash from the gpu becoming unresponsive… as a result we lower the tile sizes so it updates more frequently… i dont think thats part of octane yet?)
Use whatever you need to get the job done, I’d say. So many choices out there in regards to render engines, so take your pick.
Look, everyone has their own wants and needs for software - you should see some of the comments made by users in the Autodesk forums. I myself waited for years for certain simple workflow enhancers in C4D, and they never came. So, you have a choice to invest in other solutions to do what you want to do right now. It is a veritable miracle Blender has grown into what it is now: Blender is powerful, but has caveats - like all the other tools out there.
I work with an older version of C4d, and Lightwave and Blender, and with a host of other apps to achieve what I need for my work. If something is missing in your current lineup of software, find a different solution, or modify your expectations a bit, and/or come up with a workaround.
Perhaps it is because I have worked in this industry for so long that I am extremely pragmatic about software (started on the Amiga with Deluxe Paint and Sculpt 3d).
Ohhh, Can I do the things with other software?? really? thanks… Who could have imagined such a thing?
DcVertice: if I came across as patronizing, I do apologize - I meant to be constructive - you misread my intent.
Btw, I do have an Octane license (which, unfortunately, I cannot use currently: ATI card).
I had forgotten the other guy that only spend his live defending blender… Nobody can tell nothing in this forum againt blender without them here ¬¬U
I am not defending Blender, I am criticizing you. Of course you are unable to address any of my points, probably because deep down you know I am right. Your little petty complaints are not any more important than those of others. Nor are they the same as others.
I’m also trying to paint a picture here what it’s like to be an open source developer vs. having a commercial product. If you’re a commercial developer, you get a lot of people complaining, but these are also the kind of people who financially support you - and with a little bit of luck, some venture capital may just come along, maybe delivering you from the hassle of ever having to deal with customers again.
If you’re an open-source developer, since you are giving out your software to practically anyone, you get even more complaints. If you get paid at all, it will be a meagre salary, maybe some donations (likely for things they want you to do, not for things you have already done). But mostly, what you get is some warm thanks or cheers.
From this point of view, you’d have to be a fool to do open source development. There must be other reasons to do it, right? Indeed there are. One of the major benefits is that you are entitled to ignore user complaints and feature requests. No user of free software is entitled to complain about his requests being ignored. People will bitch and moan all day what software should or shouldn’t focus on, sometimes being in complete contradiction with each other. It’s even worse with broadly-scoped software like Blender. If you don’t ignore these things, you will go insane.
Also, people will always complain from their own egocentric world view. People are frustrated with some thing, so they write up rants as if their own experience somehow embodies the entire user base, as if unless their demands are met, Blender/Cyles will always stay an irrelevant tool for hobbyists. If then somebody jumps in to describe their own impression (which miraculously contradicts theirs), these people will write it off as defensive fanboyism. They will go on to complain that they aren’t allowed to “criticize” Blender. Everybody is allowed to criticize Blender, just as everybody is allowed to criticize that “critique”.
I won’t jump at valid critique. I will however jump at stupid rants that have no foundation in reality. If you believe Octane is somehow better for “the” job (that doesn’t exist) or is more reliable, because it is commercial software, you live in utter cognitive dissonance. Maybe the fact that you paid for it makes it feel better. We certainly have evidence that more expensive placebos work better.
Some feathers are being ruffled over something as trivial as rendering software, old story, old debates, but I agree that You need to use the tool that gets the job done, but, this said, We decided to go with Blender because We wanted to use an open source software, one that can get the job done, even though it may not be the absolute best software out there.
Same goes with Octane, or any other renderer, You need to balance your needs and what the software can do, and the truth about Octane, at least as far as I know, is that it seems to have all the tools We need to make a character animated movie and that it works on GPU, and it seems to make a good job of it!
This said, I have no doubt that Cycles will become the beast it is destined to be, and the price is hard to beat, but at this time, it cant hurt to look at other rendering options for production!
Started on Amiga as well, Animator Journeyman if I recall properly, and absolutely not missing it! 
I will agree that complaining that X/Y/Z feature doesn’t exist in Cycles and then using another software missing the same features as an example of what it should be is silly. Octane is a spectral, pure GPU, COMMERCIAL renderer not designed from the ground up for animation. If you really can’t see why saying “Octane is better than Cycles” is similar to saying “Apples are better than oranges” then you’re either not aware of the goals of either project, or just trying to start a fight. Cycles is the work of mainly one developer, who in the course of a little over two years has created a path tracer built for animation that also HAPPENS to have a pretty awesome GPU mode, and whose only real counterpart is Arnold, which is commercial and has been in development for well over a decade. If that can’t cause Cycles to stand on its own merits, then I don’t know what would impress you people.
This OBJ import export madness is pretty much for me as well the reason why I switched back to Cycles and love being there, even with the trade offs.
Considering I was rendering on a core to duo 3 GHZ chip before and now run Cycles via GTX 570 card, the speed improvement is ah dramatic.