octane render
Sorel
Posts: 1,395
Does anyone here use it? What are you thoughts on it? I've been debating buying it for a while. There isn't a demo for studio yet so I haven't been able test it myself before buying.
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There is, or at least was, a demo of the standalone to which you can export/import your DAZ scene in.obj format (you'll have a bit of 'fun' setting the camera up in Octane though)
The OcDS plug-in is, whilst still a beta, pretty good. It has just undergone a fairly major overhaul so whilst there is a swathe of new features there are, naturally, a few new gremlins. It is, also, quite expensive as you need to not just get the plug-in but also a standalone Octane licence (the plug-in comes bundled with an in-built version of Octane). If you get the plug-in whilst still in beta that part of the price is, I think, halved.
I'd recommend trying the demo of the standalone, mainly to ensure your graphics card is compatible (needs to be CUDA compliant, which pretty much mean an nVidia card).
It tends to be a faster un-biased renderer than LuxRender but that is down to it being wholly processed/held in graphics card, so a decent amount of VRAM is very handy. LuxRender makes use of system RAM and thus is not so limited in that area. Octane uses not only the gfx card VRAM but also it's GPUs which is what makes it so fast. LuxRender can make use of GPUs but that area is still a trifle 'flakey' and in development.
Positives:
Very fast by all accounts.
Can give incredibly realistic results.
Has some great procedural surfaces which can make up for textures in many cases.
Uses no system RAM, so you can run many other applications without concern.
Negatives:
Needs a beefy graphics card.
Very expensive.
Heavy restrictions on texture size and quantity.
Uses only graphics memory, so not recommended for very large scenes.
I did fiddle with the stand alone demo a few months back and liked the speed. I rendered most of the basic scenes in a minute or a more so I feel larger resolutions would render fairly quickly as well. I have a gtx 670 at the moment, would like to upgrade to a 780 eventually. I guess I could try exporting a scene into the standalone and see how I fair. And thanks for the replies by the way.
The plug-in as/when/if you get it WILL make use of DS Camera/PoV so you won't have to mess about with such stuff which makes it a whole lot easier! I'd be inclined to say if you like the results with the demo and are happy with the constraints placed upon things by the limits of your gfx card (numbers and sizes of maps, etc.) then it's probably worth the spend!
- scrapped because of redundancy -
1+ on what SimonJM said.
I've got the DS plugin for Octane and I really like it. I haven't installed the new version yet, so I can't say anything about it. It is still in beta, so you will have things that aren't quite polished or not working fully or properly yet, but that hasn't kept me from using the plugin at all.
As SimonJM mentioned, if you buy the plugin while it's still in beta, you get it for about half the price of the full release version, and you get the upgrade to the full release version at no cost. If your happy with the performance of the demo, and don't mind working within the constraints of your video card, then you should enjoy Octane and the DS plugin as well.
Compared to the cost of DS (or Poser), Octane is expensive. But, compared to many applications aimed at the "professional" 3D/GFX/CGI market, it's really very reasonable. It made using DS a lot more enjoyable because of the nearly instant feedback when changes are made in lighting, shaders, etc. Everyone has there own priorities and preferences, but for me, it was well worth the investment, and I have no regrets with my purchase at all.
For reference, the attached image took about 3.5Gb of system RAM in DS, and 1.7Gb of VRAM while rendering in Octane..
I will lay no claims to any greatness in doing CG art, but what I have done with Octane is here some of which is NSFW! Some of the image may give you an idea of some of the features available without having to go into a graphics package for postwork (such as flare from lights).
Thanks again for the feedback guys. I fiddled a bit with the demo again last night and some of the demo scenes. I also exported a simple das scene with m6 to import into octane. I think I need to fiddle with settings more still. My m6 looked really flat lol. Also need to see how I can set up other lighting other than the daylight one. Is it easier to set that stuff up in the studio plugin?
Lighting is as simple to do in the plug-in as it is to apply UberArea light to a surface in Daz Studio. Your choices, in the plug-in are to use a 'no lighting' environment, one based on sunlight, accurate to location and date/time, and using an HDRI. To all three of those (especially the first!!!!) you can add extra lighting in the form of 'mesh lights' (geometry whose surface emits lights - much like the UberArea light shader).
$300 bucks? Yeesh. Might do it later but that seems like a lot out of pocket.
Do you guys think it is worth it?
My tax return money is going towards it lol.
Standalong Renderman is priced at $2000, Maxwell render single node locked is priced at $775. Is $300 that much for the render under rapid developement? It's up to you. Octane still lacks a bunch of professional features required by its advanced users, but for hobbyist and middle skill freelancer it is far more than adequate. Anyway, Octane was already used for serious commercial works.
DS has a good tool to combine multiple textures into single one. This may help with textures number. The overall size matters, too. But analize your scene - do you need a hundred MB color map for a distant building that takes 10 by 10 pixels on the final image? And to the image use optimisation, as far as I figured out, procedurals take very little amount of video ram.
Octane seems to have a good competitor that may utilize GPU power. It is Thea render that runs in CPU, GPU and hybrid mode. But like Octane it is in early commercial state and has a long way to go. The main disadvantage I found is that Thea takes a longer material setup procedure then Octane as Thea seems not to read image maps of an exported from DS obj on the fly. (But it is also possible I was inattentive I simply missed some Thea import feature.)
Standalong Renderman is priced at $2000, Maxwell render single node locked is priced at $775. Is $300 that much for the render under rapid developement? It's up to you. Octane still lacks a bunch of professional features required by its advanced users, but for hobbyist and middle skill freelancer it is far more than adequate. Anyway, Octane was already used for serious commercial works.
Not quite true...the free version of the stand alone 3Delight is now 4 cores capable, so for the 'hobbyist' that is quite adequate. And since DS uses 3Delight and not a Pixar product, the stand alone 3DL makes more sense. And $0 compared to $300 is a pretty darn big difference, especially since you won't have to plop down at least another $300 for a video card to go with it.
But it isn't really about price...it's about what each one can do.
Every renderer has its strong points and things it does better than others. It's more about fitting the tool to the job at hand.
Does Octane use system RAM or does everything out of Video RAM? If so would it have limitations to large projects that incorporate hundreds of textures or would it limit texture use size or both?
It uses vRAM...and yes, it has texture limits. But it does make very good use of resizing them...
I grabbed the octane render demo when it was available but could never get it to work. I followed many guides, but every time I loaded a scene into the program it would crash out. I eventually gave up, but if they ever offer a plugin demo I will be trying again.
Love Octane + plugin. A LuxRender which would have taken 30+days to complete took 7 hours in Octane - same quality - better if you factor in parameter changes available. A+++ Would pay again.
This is the biggest selling point for men renders that would finish in hours can be completed in a much smaller amount of time.
for men??
not sure about why that is... my project is a vocal animation that would have taken years otherwise to be done in days - not possible to achieve otherwise.
LOL I wrote that on my phone, it should have just said "me" XD
Let's just say that I'm very happy with my purchase, and if I new everything I know now about Octane and the DS plugin before buying, I would definitely buy again (and sooner). I'm enjoying DS a lot more with Octane and the plugin. I think that my renders have also improved using Octane, probably due to the speed and interactive nature of using Octane (i.e. you see in near real time the effect of lighting and shader changes), easy to setup lighting, and how easy it is to work with the materials/shaders..
Whether or not it is worth the investment to you, or anyone else, really depends on what you want to do, how you currently use DS, and how "big" your scenes typically are. For someone who primarily likes to load, pose, render without a lot of tweaking to materials or lighting, and is happy with the results they get, then Octane would probably not be worth the investment. For someone who tweaks things a lot, and runs their renders in 3Delight at maximum, or near maximum quality settings, then Octane could be well worth the investment. If you would like to use and unbiased render engine, and want faster render times than Lux CPU or Hybrid, and don't want to got through the work/learning needed to render via Lux GPU, then Octane would be a great choice.
Anyone interested should definitely download the demo to make sure it works with your video card, and that you will be happy with the performance.
Somehow you cut off the freelancers I mentioned, too. I always thought that time is money for that sort of people. To make my home 6-core cpu work at full load with 3delight I'd need to buy additional quadcore license that goes... $650 (not sure how 3delight handle threads let's hope it utilizes physical cores). And unlimited multicore license (to use dual six- or eightcore xeon renderstation like one used for visualisation works at my job) costs... $1250. Isn't it a bit more expensive than Octane that may use as much supported NVidia videocards as you could plug into your motherboard without any restrictions.
Luxrender is also free, DS plug-in is relatively inexpensive, but how much people did go back to Lux after using Octane saying "Oh, that's OK, I have all the time in the world, I can watch the grass growing while Lux finishes a job"?
We've been using the Daz Octane plugin pretty much since the day it was released, and it has made rendering and animation in Daz much easier. The lighting quality of an unbiased renderer gives you some immediate gains in quality, and the speed means that you can make a lot of tweaks very quickly to get the image you want.
The latest version has a texture resizer that allows you to optimize a scene to make best use of VRAM, and it also supports instancing and Octane 1.2. It has a few new bugs, but nothing too major that I've found.
Is it worth it? Absolutely.
Here's a still from an animation we did back in August of last year. It took about 2 minutes per frame at 720p.
So I have finally purchased it! The only thing I seem to be having problems with is setting it up to where it doesn't make all my studio actions laggy when setting up a scene with the live view port. I have the screen I'm working on hooked up to my onboard graphics and the screen with the live viewport is hooked up to my high end card. I know on the daz plugin thing it says "It is also highly recommended that you have your Windows display adapter set to a non-Octane rendering graphics card (ie. your on-board graphics card, or a second graphics card)."
I must be doing something wrong ._.
I'm no wiz with multiple displays, but if you have a monitor connected to your main GPU are you sure your system isn't using it?
I have a titan gpu with no displays connected just to do octane renders. I also had to adjust the BIOS to get the system to use my GTX670 graphics card as system GPU.
Edit: if the slowdown occurs only when octane is rendering, then your system is probably still using it...
My suggestion is to click "Pause" in the Octane viewport while you're doing your updates, and then click "Continue" once you're done your adjustment. Check the render and pause it again if you need to do more updates in your scene. Repeat as necessary. I run both displays through my GTX680 and find I can get things to work very quickly this way.
Awesome I seem to have it set up correctly now. There's a lot of things to experiment with I'm not sure what all I should do lol. I noticed when setting up materials for M6 his maps are different (obviously). Do I always have to re add things like normal and spec maps? Also I was messing around with the transmission setting (supposed to be sss?) I'm not sure if it's doing anything lol. Are there any good tutorials when it comes to setting up skin?
This is something I was messing around with. The hdr lighting is pretty cool.
I have two Nvidia cards in my system. The lower end card I've designated for Windows use in the computer's bios. In the OctaneRender>System tab, it's not checked so it's not used by OctaneRender. That eliminated the OS response lagging issue for me.