Trying to activate Octane Plugin on a New Computer
Jonstark
Posts: 2,738
I lucked into a new computer with a GTX 1070 (that's 8 gigs for GPU for rendering, which is a substantial increase from my laptop which has only 2 gigs).
I've installed both Octane and the Carrara Octane Plugin, but even though I've activated both by serial numbers/passwords, I can't seem to get any renders going.
I remember running into something similar the first time, but can't remember what I did to actually get it to render. I think it has something to do with the devices tab (in the settings popup window) but though I click on the 'active' checkbo to try to activate it to use the GTX 1070 the checkbox remains blank. Am I in the right place for this, or is there a different step to do this I'm just not remembering? And why doesn't the checkbox let me check it?
Any clues would be very helpful :) I'm sure it's something obvious, but my brain isn't working out the answer.
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Do you have Octane v3.03.02? Octane 2 does not support GTX 1070/80.
If you have Octane 3.03.02 try the Standalone version, check if it is running with your card.
Ah no I only have Octane v2
I wasn't sure it was worth upgrading as I liked the version I was running pretty well and I didn't care much about volumetrics, which was the only thing I perceived that v3 added (I'm sure there's more but I wasn't paying much attention).
Didn't know that v2 didn't work with 1070/1080, lol I was leaping for joy when I lucked into this computer thinking of all the extra power, but I can't use it without upgrading, ironic.
Guess I'll have to go upgrade then, but thanks for putting me on the right track Aspin
Dang, that upgrade is going to be $100 extra bucks, 50 for both the standalone and the Carrara plugin
I know I'm going to upgrade anyway, but I just thought I'd gripe a little, hopefully I'll gain more other new stuff in v3 that helps justify the extra cost I wasn't expecting.
Check if the promo is still active. It was $75 a few weeks ago.
In looking through the forums over at Otoy, I can see the problem has to do with the Pascal architecture (GTX 1070/1080 cards) running with a new CUDA version (8.x) for which the developer toolkit hadn't yet been released. Apparently standalone Octane 3.03 and higher can now support these cards (though it's not optimized yet, but even so it will still be a huge upgrade for me since my laptop was running a GTX 740M prior to this) and there was a note on one of the forums that as long as the plugin version is also 3.03 or above it should work/support this now. I see the latest test version of the Carrara plugin is 3.03, but didn't see anything in the notes about Pascal/CUDA 8.x being supported, just want to make sure it will actually work before I pay for the upgrade. Does anyone know offhand if this is correct?
Hey Jonstark!!
I can't give a difinitive answer on your question for Pascal support on the plugin, but the 3.03 stand alone, and the 3.03 sdk both support Pascal cards, so the Carrara plugin should, as both the stand alone and the SDK use the same dll(s), just with different interfaces to them. Also, I noted in the Lightwave forum that the 3.03 version of the lightwave plugin supports Pascal, so I would say you should be good to go.
I just wanted to note, there are a lot of additional features in 3.x that are really really worth the upgrade, including volumetrics.
Oh ... I forgot ..... Congrats on your new computer, that 1070 sounds sweeeeet!
Completely lucked into it by an unbelievable string of bad luck which turned out alright in the end.
Used the excuse that I wanted to play with the Oculus (even though I'm not usually a gamer) to upgrade my rig at the same time, and got an Oculus bundle with new computer that was supposed to have a 980
- But then the computer showed up DOA. Brought back to the store, who told me they'd ship me another in 2 days.
- 2 days later, nothing came. When I called, they had no idea what I was talking about. Had to go back into the store again, wait in the customer service line, then found out they charged me for the computer but never bothered ordering it. Finally a manager straightened it out, said that I'd get the computer 2 days later, after the weekend.
- Computer was finally delivered, but also DOA, exactly like the first one was. That was statistically incredibly unlikely, but when I called the manufacturer tech support I found out it was the exact same serial number - all the store had done was to box my original DOA computer back up and ship it out to me again.
- I was spitting fire at this point when I went back into the store (keep in mind I even had originally paid extra for 2 day shipping, it was now more than a week later, and they sent the exact same doa computer to me).
- Manager's manager was escalated to, searched their database and told me it would be quite some time before they could get a replacement as there was nowhere in the US that had this model available to ship to me. I told him I wanted to have some sort of replacement/loaner computer that I could use in the meantime while I waited for it to ship.
- He came back with this monster rig that was superior in every category (except that the ssd was slightly smaller, which I didn't care about), said it was the first of it's kind sent to his store for display purposes, but hadn't even been opened yet, as it had come in that day. I was concerned that by the specs it would be a much more expensive computer, but he applied special discounts because of my situation and how embarrassed the store was at their mistake, and it actually turned out to be nearly $400 less expensive than the original computer. I said the heck with sending me a replacement for the original order, I'll take this one, thank you very much
So I ended up happy, went home with it and played my first ever Virtual Reality game that same day (and whoa I have to admit, worth every penny, I was blown away). So a bad and very frustrating situation ended up turning out great for me, and now I can look back and laugh about it
I was going to upgrade to v3.x anyway, just to make sure of supporting Sighman, I just hadn't gotten arount to it yet.
BTW, what else is new in v3.x besides the ability to use volumetrics (essentially that I can use Carrara's clouds in Octane). I've been searching Otoy's site, but don't see a lot on what the new features might be, and especially how they might apply to us Carrarists.
The main thing holding me back on upgrading to 3 is having to deregister 2 and having the DS plugin to do too, will eventually but both work and I am happy with it.
I never rush into upgrades on stuff staying 2 years behind on Poser and using DS4.7
Carrara only thing I do tend to buy newest lattest prettiest and am actually a build behind on that too!!!
Cards not being supported would pretty much be a game changer though.
There used to be an easy to find list, now I don't seem to be finding it at all. One of the big improvements that could be very usefull in Carrara (thinking Howies scenes) is the increase in the polygon limit. It was 19 million tris, or 9 million quads in V2, now it's unlimited. Deep pixel rendering, and texture baking could also be useful.
3.1 will have some very useful features (https://home.otoy.com/octanerender-3-and-roadmap-update/). OSL and MDL support will open up a new world of texture resources (Iray uses MDL). I'm hoping MDL support will mean that we will be able to use/import DS Iray shaders in the Carrara plugin. The DS plugin already translates Iray mats quite well (see attached image - no edits to the skin mats). CPU and AMD support for rendering will be a plus for people without Nvidia cards.
At some time in the future Brigade will be integrated into Octane (Otoy's real time pathtraced game/VR renderer) which will be huge for animators. I've seen seen info that it will be included as an update to 3.x and that it will be in 4.0 (in 2017), so who know when it will arrive, but it won't be too long.
I forgot to mention that there is also a new automated activation system with 3.x that allows you to easily use Octane on multiple machines (not at the same time). You need to be connected to the internet, when you start octane (or a plugin), it is activated via Otoy's activation server, when you close it down, the activation is released. So if you want to use Octane on, for example, and laptop and a desktop. Install on one system, start it up and activate, then close it down. Now you can go to the second machine, install, activate, and use it there.
The important thing is that you don't have Octane running on one machine when you try to use on a second. Keeping the application open and putting the first machine to sleep or hibernate will not release the license, you need to actually stop the application using it. Also, if your system crashes, you will need to restart it open the application using Octane, then close it, or you can manually release the license on through your account on Otoy's website.
Stunning image, my dusty friend!
Agree, very striking image :) Thanks for the tip about how it will now be much easier to use Octane on 2 different computers (as long as I make sure the program is completely closed down on one before using the other).
I was also reading in the Octane forums that version 3.x now lets you render inside the Carrara render room instead of the Octane window pop up, is that right? And that because of that we can now render straight into AVI, whereas before we had to render a series of images and then use a video compositor to put them together into an animation?
While I couldn't find anything describing the promo, I am happy to report that it must still be in effect, as once I added both the Standalone and Carrara v3.x to my cart at the same time, it gave a bundled upgrade cost of only $75
So it must still be going on, which is a good thing, thanks for the heads up.
I just wanted to follow up for anyone else curious and report that I went ahead and bought the v3.x upgrade for both the Octane standalone and Carrara4Octane, and I can report that it installed (too) easy and works fine, so the Pascal architecture must be working fine, at least with the latest Octane4Carrara version.
(I say installation was 'too easy' because I didn't have to uninstall anything, or re-enter serial numbers, all I had to do was buy and install the latest downloads. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to activate and enter serial numbers/passwords before realizing that it was already done, and if I had just booted it up to see it was working already)
The Otoy site says this is just a temporary workaround to make Pascal architecture work with these newest cards runing CUDA 8.x, and that performance isn't as good as it should be, but it definitely works.
.... but I just have to report that even if this is the 'low performance' version, it's blowing me out of my seat. The difference between the old 2Gig 740M I was using on my laptop and this 8Gig 1070 monster is tremendous, wow
Hmm, the preferences look like they have changed in the new version, not sure where to find to switch to PMC rendering mode for example. Also while I'm at it, I've never known what a 'render target' is.
Now thats a gamechanger possibly
I was thinking of building a second inferior PC from my spare parts and being able to put Octane on it also gives me more incentive to do so, no need to run both at once so that's ok, is somewhat like the Poser system.
So far I think version3.x is really cool
I can indeed render straight to AVI in the native render room (no more worrying about naming the files, where to put them, where to find them, then putting them all together in the end). I did find the place where you can change from direct lighting to pmc and all of those types of settings (like reducing sample size) in the scene effects tab under the octane render target button/popup.
The manual on Otoy's site talks about loading VDB files into Carrara fire and fog volume primitives, the picture of the fire that's shown looks fantastic, but I have no idea what a VDB file is or where I would obtain them.
The render speed on this machine is off the charts, having a blast playing around
Some free VDB files here:
http://www.openvdb.org/download/
See 3DAge's post here in how to use them:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/45564/octane-render-for-carrara-or4c-public-beta-now-released/p24
HI Jon :)
With Octane for Carrara 3,. you can render volumetrics,. such as Carrara's clouds,. (and the Volumetric clouds) and a scene environment medium,.
Carrara's Fog and Fire can now use VDB files,. which can be an animated sequence of VDB files
Have a look at the Octane (user forums / Plugin development / Carrara) where you can get the latest beta versions and see the full updated list of features Sighman has added so far.
VDB Files can be created using Blender, Houdini, and couple of other 3D programs or plugins for generating volumetric effects.
With Octane for Carrara 3,. the settings have been moved / integrated into carrara,. If you go to the "Scene" / effects tab you'll see the Octane panels,. and at the bottom ,. you'll see the Octane Render Target (edit) button.
In the Octan renderer "viewport" there'are options to Save and Load render targets.
The render target is basically "all of your settings" for the type of render engine and film stock to samples per frame,.muiltipass, and post processing options.
Wendy,. you should be able to have Oct 2 and Oct 3 on the same system,. (I have) :)
as long as they're in different installs of carrara,.
you still own a licence for octane 2,. so you should still be able to use that,. whether you have a license for Octane 3 or not.
It said something about deactivating
anyway I have bigger priorities at the moment, leaking pipes in walls etc lots of expense my 3D hobby can wait.
Yes,. I remember that when Octane 3 was launched,. and I actually deactivated my octane 2 install,. installed 3,. then went back and activated 2 again,.
Good luck with the pipes,. I just went through leaking washing machine = new floor + new washing machine + labour
Wow! Congrats on ALL of this! Octane v3, new machine, and Oculus!!! How fun!!!
So... which Oculus did you get? That's one whole new experience I may just have to get into!
When I attended (via live stream) Star Wars Celebration this year, I was awed by what they're saying about how they're pushing the technology through ILM X-Lab:
(warning - 45 minute seminar)
I don't think this is the correct thread to ask this, but I couldn't find another Carrara/Octane thread. After seeing all the great images from Carra/Octane I thought I'd give it a try. I have a Mac (an iMac to be exact) and I heard that the graphics card in it doesn't have enough memory to work well with Octane, but I figered I'd try the demo and see for my self. I went to the Otoy site and downloaded Octane and the Carrara plugin. But I couldn't find a Mac version of the plugin. Is there one availble? Is it coming? Any response would be appreciated.
Octane requires an Nvidia graphics card and as I understand it, Mac's don't use those, hence no plugin.
New ones dont, but older ones do. Plus there's the ability to use an external card in a box.
My iMac has a Nvidia 680 card in it. There's an Octane version for the Mac, just not the Carrara plug in. I guess there aren't enough Mac users in Carrara to warrant plug in development. I have Luxus for Carrara, but haven't been able to produce anything decent yet. It doesn't translate the Carrara shaders very well.
Have you tried the lux core Sheric Labs has the thread on?
It translates the Carrara shaders.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/50130/luxuscore-carrara#latest
I think you're right, but sighman (the developer of the Carrara plugin) is very responsive and you might want to pop over to the Otoy carrara plugin forum to ask, maybe this is something that's in the pipeline (or maybe not, not sure). Also Lux core might be another very viable alternative, as chickenman mentions above.