Refractive Software (Octane), purchased by Otoy.

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

Has anyone seen this yet. Apparently as of today, the makers of the Brigade real-time raytracing engine has purchased Refractive software and thus the Octane engine.

Since a number of people here use the Octane engine, what are your thoughts on it?

As for the question of whether this raises or lowers the chances of a proper plugin for Blender, the article suggests that Autodesk actually has an investment in Otoy, I’m personally not sure of the implications here for Octane users, but I guess we’ll see sooner or later.

#2

Well, disregarding the Octane rendering, I think Otoy’s gaming concept of having a server handle all the rendering for a game you’d buy is ludicrous. Thereby you’d essentially “rent” a game license, as you could never guarantee how long that company owned server would remain in existence. It would certainly be couched toward lower end computers/laptop owners without the GPU horsepower to handle the geometry crunching.

Me I like having the game in hand, as a stand alone product.     I'm not for subscription fees which this leans towards.   And I'm certainly not for having to network a game simply to display better graphics.
#3

The article is wrong. No one bought Refractive. Otoy just cut a deal with them to deliver a nicely integrated cloud rendering solution. Nothing to see here, business as usual.

#4

I think Otoy’s gaming concept of having a server handle all the rendering for a game you’d buy is ludicrous

But what is so ludicrous about it? I find the idea very compelling. OnLive already works with that model (no idea if it is profitable) but they don’t have any exclusive titles that leverage the power of the cloud. I know some people strongly prefer physical media, but digital distribution is already well-accepted and I believe that in the future games will simply “be there” on-demand like cable TV is today.

#5

OnLive is actually very usable, you need a good internet connection and there is not much lag.

Thus this idea can easily be applied towards online rendering, while you can get an instant feedback from the framebuffer.
The advantage is the hardware they have which you do not need to buy.

The downside is internet connection and what happens when it is cut off. But I lost for 2 days internet in 3 years so this fear is marginale.

Expensive hardware and GPUs also drain a lot of energy over a year so you need to calculate that into your investment as well.
Plus you probably will have access to really fast GPU rigs compared to your ordinary end user PC.

I love having a laptop and be mobile. For me such a solution would be awesome when I only need to pay for the time I use that platform.

Onlive also costs 9 dollars per month which means 108 a year. So we will see what the price structure for GPU based rendering would be - more of course but over a year less than a high end PC ?!

While I do not use Octane on my laptop (weak GPU) I am quite happy for them having cut this deal. This is a pretty interesting venture.

#6

The statement by radiance that otoy did not buy RF is very old:

http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=8041

Thus I’m sure the article is right. Too bad they didn’t get rid of “radiance” as well.

#7

Octane is an amazing render engine for the prize, I’d not be surprised if they finally get acquired by AutoDesk or Nvidia…not surprised at all, in fact - I sort of expect it.

We at our company bought a license because we saw some IMPRESSIVE renders at their site, especially with Furniture & realistic environment. Turns out that the 99 Euro (or whatever it was, it was low) we paid for it, was totally worth it. I simply failed creating a super-realistic Environment scene with The Internal Render engine, and Cycles too…even though…with cycles we where VERY close at the time, OCTANE…despite a lot of texturing compatibility issues, totally NAILED it.

Just in ONE day after purchasing Octane, we managed to raise the rendering levels to where the clients no longer could really tell the difference between real or fake, and that’s really tough if you’re doing interior designs for high-end clients that uses world-renown photographers to do their environments.

I’m guessing (and hoping) Cycles will reach Octane levels, if it does…WOW…just WOW…

Good luck to all parties involved, and thanks Octane, you more than earned your keep in our world.

#8

I am a blender user and an Octane user. I don’t really know what the news will mean for me. Perhaps I should be looking at cycles more because at the moment I have been concentrating on Octane and pretty much ignoring cycles.

#9

I switched from octane to cycles a couple months ago, because of integration, instances, faster development …
Results of renders are very similar. And now I see that it was a good choise.

#10

According to this arcticle, Autodesk is partnering with Otoy for a rendering cloud solution. In the article, Octane is described as an Otoy asset.

Maybe Otoy is becoming the nearly unique Refractive Software customer, step which in my work experience is preparatory to a formal acquisition.

#11

http://www.hergoods.info/avatar3.jpgWell, disregarding the Octane rendering, I think Otoy’s gaming concept of having a server handle all the rendering for a game you’d buy is ludicrous.

#12

Parrish,

and why is that so? So cloud computing is ludicrous?

#13

Parrish416 is a bot - all his posts are just random sentences from other peoples’ posts. Don’t expect to get any kind of intelligible answer, cekuhnen.

I do agree though - for games, at least. Since ping times are limited to the speed of light, there will always be lag when receiving data from a computer other than your own, which means you typically want to keep as much of the game computed on your own system.

#14

with cycles we where VERY close at the time

The only reason (unless you are using one of the special materials not available in cycles) that an image out of cycles would look significantly different than one out of Octane is the tonemapping . Octane has it integrated, with Cycles you have to do it yourself, eg. with the blender compositor. (Though there is no thing like the “camera response” curves yet)

#15

Before continuing this discussion, it would be good to know if the article in the first post is correct or not.

#16

The Octane forums are filled with user speculation but its complete radio silence from management. No beta releases in a long time and no communication from Radiance. Glad I gave up on Octane long ago…

#17

MeticulousMitch

I have an Onlive Account and not really a super fast internet and network playing is very enjoyable.

Another advantage is that you do not need to own good hardware to run 3d intensive games as all
you need is just a viewer application.

Video codecs are also maturing dramatically using the GPU for much faster encoding and decoding.
Of course when the internet is down you are in the dark - but thats true with all online games.

But when this works for online games I see no issue this for working as a 3D render engine doing the hard work
in the server farm and you get a framebuffer send to you instantly and you can move the mouse to move and rotate the 3D view
while rendering on the server GPU.

I really dont understand where some see problems here. Ever used a remote control software? It is the same principle.

#18

1.025 beta2.57 was released just a couple weeks ago as the current ‘official’ beta (although it was a Release Candidate for about a month before that) . . . I wouldn’t consider that a long time

#19

You are correct. Allow me to clarify: Lots of folks are complaining that the frequency of releases has dropped way off in the last months.

#20

I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this. They’re probably working on a big feature and put the current branch on basic maintenance.