OctaneRender™ Blender 4.0 plugin version 2023.1.2 - 28.13 [STABLE] released

Even thou Otoy does over do it in the marketing area. The RT core 8x speedups is related only to the ray tracing calculation portion of a render. A render has to do also material calculation, geometry processing, GI illumination, and other items.

The 3x still very impressive. In heavy scenes it will be less. I run the octane benchmark 2019 rtx and got over 3x improvements with my RTX 2070 cards.

That is awesome to hear that the 2070’s get that much speed improvement, I was expecting much less. I have a 2070 but until Nvidia pushes out the new driver for Linux I’m not able to test. :frowning: Even though Otoy does over do it on marketing, they do come through in the end, eventually.

According to this post by Golderak (Jules) the heavier the scene the more the RT cores will help, which is kinda counter-intuitive.

Q: What performance boost should I expect?
A: That depends heavily on the scene, we’ve experienced speedups of up to 5x for best case scenarios, this will be lower with scenes with heavier shading or smaller geometry sizes. For this specific benchmark scene which has 1.7M triangles we have seen figures ranging from 2.5x to 3.x.

Looks like they are getting close to a stable release the the 2018.1 version. :smiley:

Changes since OctaneRender 2018.1 RC5:

  • Fixed log message when using Cryptomatte with disconnected material pins.
  • Fixed material previews when viewing the universal material.

Changes since 2018.1 RC6:

  • Fixed undo after pasting a node into a node pin via the node inspector.
  • Fixed undo after camera rotate with alt+left mouse button drag.
  • Fixed noise in shadow pass when using uniform color environment.
  • Fixed there sometimes being dark pixels on the top left of the denoiser output.
  • Fixed inconsistent labelling of color vertex attribute node.
  • Fixed UV set 2 not working on displacement triangles.

What’s new in 2018

  • Cryptomatte
  • Deep render passes
  • Vectron (analytic geometry)
  • Vertex Attributes
  • Spectron (procedural volumetric light system)
  • Much less volume render noise
  • NV Link support on RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti (Enterprise only)
  • Direct Levelset surface rendering from VDB (can be fed into Vectron)
  • Scatter depth limiting (i.e. fast fog rendering)
  • Cached compressed textures

Hi, as a long term user since version 0.8 I am sad I cant spend 199$ for 1 Year access, or 399$ 2 Years, for the new 18.1 upgrade and stay at 4.02.
The new features are really good, I tested them during the 18.1 beta time.
It is not much money for Octane and the Blender for Octane Addon but to much for me as a hobbyist.
May I spend my money to E-Cycles and a new GTX card better and/or use Luxcore wich is improving amazing since a few month.

Cheers, mib

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I’m in the same position. :frowning: They do have the $20 per month rent plan, which is what I do for substance now anyway. Still considering and hoping for the free with 2 GPUs deal.

It was said, up to 2 GPU, it would be free.
It is not true?

I have licence Octane upgraded to V4,
but not using it it now, still waiting,
I am willing to pay upgrade licence, but never pay subscription for software.

great news

image

4 Likes

This is a TEST version, so be prepared to have some issues. Do not use it for production.

NEW FEATURES SINCE LAST RELEASE

New v4 XB4 features (please check at https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=68283).

  • Support universal material
  • support light linking
  • Global light exclusion: “Render-Octane Kernal-Light”
  • Light linking for object: “Data-Octane Properties-Light pass mask”
  • Support new AI light and settings
  • Support UDIM
  • “Node graph-Octane Texture-Octane Image Tile Tex”
  • Support new light passes in v4 XB4(direct/indirect(ambient light, sunlight, light pass 1-8))
  • New features and refactored systems(these are included in 16.1).
  • New Render Pass System(including all passes and optinos in v4 xb4 SA)
  • New Passes: refract filter, transmission filter, postprocess, all lighting passes(ambient light, sunlight, light pass 1~8), position, texture tangent, motion vector, light pass id, render layer id, render layer mask, wireframe, object layer color, Baking Group ID, all Material Passes (opacity, roughness, ior, diffuse filter, reflection filter, refraction filter, transmission filter)
  • New Options: include environment, uv coordinate selection

Fix bugs:

  • use rgba color for object id and material id passes
  • support scatter conversion with instance ids for duplication/array modifier/particle system
  • support node group.
  • now node group input value can be resolved independently in different materials.

FIXES SINCE LAST RELEASE

  • Add AI Light update and AI Light strength
  • Report warning when rendering denoise passes without enabling denoise
  • Add point type to draw bounds as points
  • Fix bug: Blend Angle option in the Triplanar Mapping node is not working

This has support for both Linux and OSX now. happy dance :smiley:

I did a quick test to compare stand alone and the plugin:

I did a render to 500 s/px and it took around 2.4 minutes. Then I rendered to 50 s/px with the denoiser turned on and it rendered in about 34 seconds. This is the image above. A bit slower than stand alone which rendered the image in about 19 seconds, but much, much better than the version 3 plugin, and a real speed boost from when the denoiser is not used.

Jason

I haven’t been updating this thread like I should. :frowning:

NEW FEATURES SINCE LAST RELEASE

  • Upgrade to 4.0 RC6
  • Support render layer ids from blender built-in layer system
  • Object with “Data”-“Octane properties”-“Layer number” as 0 will use layer id from blender built-in layer system
  • Add option “User Preference”-“Add-ons”-“OctaneRender Engine”-“Use Blender Built-in Render Layer” to choose use default layer system(octane or blender built-in)
  • It will not affect layer ids settings before. Just an optional choice
  • Support %i pattern for image tile texture
  • Support “texture type” and “sample per pixel” in baking texture node
  • Force to switch to solid mode when clicking “Stop Render and Empty GPU”
  • Rename float tex to grayscale tex to make it better understanding
  • Add button to reload image for all image texture nodes
  • Remove cudnn64_7.dll from setup packages

NEW FEATURES SINCE LAST RELEASE

  • Upgrade to v4 RC7
  • Support OctaneRender system for each blender built-in layer
  • Add option “Render Layers-Layer-Use Octane Render Layers”
  • Rename “Render Layers-Octane render layers” to “Render Layers-Octane render layers(Global)”. You can use it in preview mode or overwrite render layer settings
  • Add option to disable object layer properties when exporting(“Export Dialog-Export with object layers”)
  • Support show octane log

FIXES SINCE LAST RELEASE

  • Optimize performance
  • Do not upload nodes that are not used

NEW FEATURES SINCE LAST RELEASE

  • Add an option to control whether to enable node graph upload optimization(“User Preference-OctaneRender Engine-Node Graph Upload Optimization”)(disable as default)
  • Support drag and drop to create octane image texture

FIXES SINCE LAST RELEASE

  • Fix probabilistic render failure when using node graph upload optimization
  • Fix autofocus active state bug
  • Fix viewport border render update delay
  • Fix viewport border render update delay
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i read that blender & unity will have the free version of octane 4 up to 2 gpus, c4d wont have the free version, they are still thinking what other DCC will have the free version

That’s interesting. Will the free Octane version be fully featured / non-restricted, apart from the GPU maximum?

This appears to be the case, free except limited to two GPUs with no other restrictions. I think UE4 might be on that list as well, but not sure. This will not happen until Octane 4 is officially released, which could happen pretty soon now (couple of weeks?).

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Will the free version support RTX?

Yes, CUDA is supported by versions 3.08 and 4 for the RTX cards right now. The RT cores will be supported in the next version after 4, I think that version will be renamed to 2018.

I have a RTX 2070 and it’s working great, very fast compared to my GTX 980.

That’s good to hear. What are the speeds like compared to Cycles?

Yes, I’m also interested in knowing that.

In general I would say that Octane is faster than Cycles, but it’s going to be scene dependant. The two renderers have gotten more and more apart so it’s getting more difficult to compare them. If you guys would like to come up with a good test scene with simple material setups I would be very willing to convert it over to Octane’s material system and test. The materials should only be image based and using the uber shader, Octane has an uber shader as well so that might be a good test.

Using denoisers will also make a huge difference on render times so we could compare that as well. If we can keep the scene under 3 Gbytes in size I could also test with my GTX 980.

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