Octane Render (i.e. HOLY CRAP THIS IS AWESOME!)

[JeffreyMcGrew]

Always loved the 'physically biased' rendering engines, always hated the slowness and the price (except for Radiance, which I love, and is free, but very hard to make nice images with).

Just started playing around with Octane render from http://www.refractivesoftware.com/ and I just have to say HOLY CRAP IF YOU'VE GOT A CUDA-COMPATIBLE VID CARD YOU HAVE TO CHECK THIS OUT!

I'm feeding it scenes from Blender as a test and very happy with the results to far. It's almost-realtime on my system, no matter what the tweak you do, and you can actually pan / orbit the camera at about 1-2 FPS (I don't have that awesome of a video card).

It works with MAX too (best way to get Revit models into it) but it don't work with Revit (yet).

Very impressed! It offloads the rendering to the GPU and makes it so you can get decent sized photo-real images in minutes (sometimes seconds) not hours. It's got some limits and it's still beta, so YMMV, but so far I can see us using the heck out of this thing in the near future.

[truevis]

Yes, it's really awesome technology. Hard to get materials especially from Revit. There's probably some way for us to use it. Maybe RVT>FBX>Max>Octane.

Here's one I did with the free version of Octane. Notice, it's just one material.

[Chadwick17]

Am I understanding this correctly... if I am running an ATI graphics card, this will not work?

[JeffreyMcGrew]

Am I understanding this correctly... if I am running an ATI graphics card, this will not work?

That is correct. It only works with CUDA, which is a NVIDIA thing.

Since it's pretty cheap overall as rendering engines go, and you can get a decent NVIDIA card for pretty cheap too, I don't really mind. Octane is about $150 and a decent NVIDIA card is around $200, so for like 1/3 the cost of Maxwell you've got something that is physically-biased yet a whole lot faster.

The software is a beta, and being physically-biased probably not the best for animation work. Also it's got some serious memory limits, as the beta only uses the GPU's RAM. But it's going to be great for still shots of smaller scenes, which is a lot of what we do.

[Chadwick17]

Yeah, were mostly interested in still shots. Problem is, I've got an ATI GPU in my laptop and I don't think there is any easy way of replacing that - I don't even think it is possible actually. I guess I'll just stick with 3DS Max

[JeffreyMcGrew]

Yeah, were mostly interested in still shots. Problem is, I've got an ATI GPU in my laptop and I don't think there is any easy way of replacing that - I don't even think it is possible actually. I guess I'll just stick with 3DS Max

Honestly, due to the setup, hardware requirements, and licensing, you'd be better off using this on a big desktop. It's not really a solution for laptops. It would work, but you'd get a lot more bang for the buck with a tower + big graphics card IMHO.

[Chadwick17]

Maybe I can get work to drop a new card in my desktop at the office - it needs a new one anyway, currently running a 9400 GT :crazy:

[truevis]

That is correct. It only works with CUDA, which is a NVIDIA thing.

Since it's pretty cheap overall as rendering engines go, and you can get a decent NVIDIA card for pretty cheap too, I don't really mind. Octane is about $150 and a decent NVIDIA card is around $200,...

I got a GT 220 card last year -- they go for around $50. If you want to try Octane, it is unbelievably fast on that card's 48-core GPU.

[Gordon Price]

I got a GT 220 card last year -- they go for around $50. If you want to try Octane, it is unbelievably fast on that card's 48-core GPU.

That is the amazing thing, when a computational problem is a good match for the GPU, a $50 card will blow the doors off $1000 of CPU that the computation is not ideally suited to. And a higher end card, when clustered, approaches supercomputer performance.
And the fact is that rendering, daylighting studies and energy studies are exactly the kind of computation the GPU is good at. One would hope that Autodesk is at least looking at this. As more than a catchphrase to repeat endlessly at AU and then fail to deliver on. In the meantime, hopefully the API has matured such that a decent Octane Render export will be possible.

Gordon

[JeffreyMcGrew]

In the meantime, hopefully the API has matured such that a decent Octane Render export will be possible.

From what I know of the API to date it wouldn't be impossible.

It probably would be like the plugins for other systems (like Blender). It exports, launches the renderer with your scene & materials & camera in it, but isn't 'live' and interactive and running within the app like Mental Ray currently is.

One of the Octane guys did say that they are looking at possibly making an exporter for Revit at some point in the future.

Sadly, because Revit's FBX files are horribly broken, and Revit very limited in Export options, ArchiCAD is waaaaay ahead here. Sad.

If Revit could produce OBJ files then it would be enough. We've looked at the API enough to know that an OBJ exporter is possible, but we're busy with some other stuff before we'll be able to get to making one.