I am considering Octane

Riggswolfe · May 2014

I have Reality and Luxus but often use the standard 3Delight renders because I find I get a good combination of time vs quality with them. Luxrender looks awesome but often takes a long time and lately time has become a factor as I am having to do 5-6 renders a day for projects I am selling.

So here are my Octane questions:

1) How fast is it?
2) Does it work with Daz shaders? I often "redress" sets using shaders I've bought to, for example, change a wall to look like brick instead of stucco. I have bought many shaders sets to let me redo walls and flooring. I also make use of Backdrops made easy for some simple scenes..
3) I've read that it is primarily lit by HDR or mesh lights? Does this mean, that like reality, I need to give up on the idea of using things like spot lights and point lights? I make extensive use of AoA's lights because they're so useful. How does it do for interior scenes which I do a lot of?

StratDragon · May 2014

Riggswolfe said:
I have Reality and Luxus but often use the standard 3Delight renders because I find I get a good combination of time vs quality with them. Luxrender looks awesome but often takes a long time and lately time has become a factor as I am having to do 5-6 renders a day for projects I am selling.
So here are my Octane questions:

1) How fast is it?
2) Does it work with Daz shaders? I often "redress" sets using shaders I've bought to, for example, change a wall to look like brick instead of stucco. I have bought many shaders sets to let me redo walls and flooring. I also make use of Backdrops made easy for some simple scenes..
3) I've read that it is primarily lit by HDR or mesh lights? Does this mean, that like reality, I need to give up on the idea of using things like spot lights and point lights? I make extensive use of AoA's lights because they're so useful. How does it do for interior scenes which I do a lot of?

I can't stpeak for 2 and 3 but for #1 the question is How fast is your video card?

starionwolf · May 2014

Hi, I can only answer your first question because I only have the demo of the stand-alone version. The speed is fast if you are rendering simple scenes. I can render small scenes with one Genesis figure in 20 minutes or less. The quality is decent. I am using an Nvidia Geforce 630 with 1 GB of memory. Most people buy video cards that have more memory.

I would setup an indoor scene but I haven't learned how to setup the spotlights in the stand-alone program. The Octane plugin for Daz Studio may converted the Studio lights to Octane lights but I am not sure. The stand-alone does not load studio shaders. I don't know if the Octane Plugin for Daz Studio will convert Daz Studio shaders or the Age of Armour lights to Octane format. Sorry I couldn't help out more.

Riggswolfe · May 2014

My video card is a GTX 580 with 4 GB of VRAM

starionwolf · May 2014

StratDragon said:
I can't stpeak for 2 and 3 but for #1 the question is How fast is your video card?

I recommend nothing slower than my Nvidia Geforce 630: 800 MHz with 96 CUDA cores, 1.62 GHz shader clock, 1 GB of VRAM. You definitely need at least 2 GB for larger scenes.

edit: forgot to mention that I use Octane Demo on my 7 year old computer. Octane runs faster than Luxrender with similar lights in similar scenes.

starionwolf · May 2014

Riggswolfe said:
My video card is a GTX 580 with 4 GB of VRAM

That card has 512 CUDA cores. You should be fine. Glad we could help you.

SimonJM · May 2014

You'll need to licence both Octane and the plug-in (the plug-in is delivered with an in-built version of the Octane render engine, usually a few levels below current standalone). You could just use the standalone version but you'd lose a lot of handy features. When I gave Octane a trial run I found it very hard to get camera framing done and that is an area where the plug-in scores in!
It IS fast as it is all done in the GPU(s) of your CUDA-compliant graphics card(s) - and by all, that is not only all processing, but all data and textures too - so a lot of VRAM may be useful! As an indication I have a 4GB nVidia card which happily coped with a dozen (unclothed) Genesis figures, each with own skin texture, but Anderson Hall blows limits ... so do be careful!
In texture collection it is very much akin to Reality in that 'the usual suspect' shaders are handled alright, but custom, shader mixer, shaders are not well understood.
There are three main modes of lighting: sun, HDRI and none. To an of these you can add any number of mesh lights, by converting a surface to be a light emitter. So far as I know it Octane has no understanding of spot or point lights, so you have to do them yourself. The different render kernels (there are three main ones) are progressively more accurate in how they handle light, but also get slower.

All in all, I am impressed with Octane and I have done (what I like to think of as) some nice stuff with it. The plug-in is still in beta (meaning that it is still, I think, around half price) with development taking a little while - it seems come in fits and spurts with a fairly major re-write having been done to get the current version out.

Szark · May 2014

and Octane doesn't do Displacement yet but I believe it will do soon.

Elele · May 2014

There is a free demo available and also free sample scenes (in a seperate download i think). The demo is only for the standalone i think, but it will show what speeds you can expect on your system

I'm happy with it, real happy :D
So happy that i bought an extra graphics card specially for octane, and now i can render without the rendering having ANY impact on my computer performance. It's like nothing is going on, so awesome! :D

Midnight_stories · May 2014

This is a tutorial series getting the marsh monster from DAZ Studio to Octane Render, exporting and rendering.
https://www.youtube.com/user/MsMidnightStories/playlists
It's through the eyes of a newbie so I'm no expert, but it might help !

Coon Ra · May 2014

Riggswolfe said:
My video card is a GTX 580 with 4 GB of VRAM

There never existed GTX 580 with 4 Gb of VRAM, only 1,5 and 3 Gb.
1 cuda core of 580 is somewhere equal to 2-3 cuda cores of 680 and higher video cards. But on 5xx cards Octane is limited to 64 total textures.
Do not hurry up, wait till Octane 2.0, Otoy promised to make it independent from VRAM capacity and add some postponed features like displacement.
Cannot tell for sure about DS shaders but its live Octane plugin is in beta stage and as reported under the rapid development, so, probably the shaders translation is implemented. Better read the native forum.

Ghosty12 · May 2014

Coon Ra said:
Riggswolfe said:
My video card is a GTX 580 with 4 GB of VRAM

There never existed GTX 580 with 4 Gb of VRAM, only 1,5 and 3 Gb.
1 cuda core of 580 is somewhere equal to 2-3 cuda cores of 680 and higher video cards. But on 5xx cards Octane is limited to 64 total textures.
Do not hurry up, wait till Octane 2.0, Otoy promised to make it independent from VRAM capacity and add some postponed features like displacement.
Cannot tell for sure about DS shaders but its live Octane plugin is in beta stage and as reported under the rapid development, so, probably the shaders translation is implemented. Better read the native forum.

That sounds very good if that happens as I find it rather silly that such an expensive program like Octane is so limited by the amount of VRam you have.. Where as Luxrender even though rather slow by comparison and it being completely free is only limited by the amount of system ram you have

hzr · May 2014

Just remember that Octane will slow down considerably on interior shots and when using subsurface scattering. Otherwise its really good.

DustRider · May 2014

Riggswolfe said:

1) How fast is it?
Like any render engine, the speed depends on what you have in the scene, and the final render size. Compare to CPU only rendering in Lux, it's extremely fast. Campared to 3Delight with lots of transmaps and high quality settings, it's very fast. With your video card (Fermi based), it would render quite fast, your main limitation would be the number of texture maps in a given scene. Fermi based card limits are 64 RGBA textures, 32 grayscale textures, 4 HDR RGBA textures and 4 HDR grayscale textures. Newer Kepler based card limits are 144 RGBA textures, 68 grayscale textures, 10 HDR RGBA textures, and 10 HDR grayscale (but Kepler based cards require about 2x the cuda cores to get approximately the same speed/performance as the Fermi based cards)
With SSS rendering will slow down, but that is true with just about any renderer. Indoor scenes can often be slower to render as well due to more complex lighting setups - but still much faster than GPU Lux or DS with transmaps. I'm very happy with the speed of Octane, and my card is a couple of steps down from yours (on a laptop).

While the render speed of Octane is truly impressive, what I find that really speeds things up for me is that I get almost instant feedback for every change I make in the scene from lighting to shaders to object placement and poses. This was what really sold me on Octane, and what I still love about it. I don't spend endless hours doing test/spot renders. I have had some renders run for several hours (10-12?), but they were quite complex both in terms of lighting and materials (a lot of SSS), and about 3800x3600 pixel renders. Typical render times for me on images in the 1500-1800 pixel range are 10-60 minutes, depending on size, complexity, and shaders used.

For a transmap example, this image (warning mild nudity - http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2489672) I rendered in Octane via the DS plugin. It took about 40 min. at 2500x3000, sorry for the nudity, but I really liked the way the lace turned out on the top. Unfortunately it’s a bit difficult to see, even in the “full size” view. so I attached a higher resolution sample below. Transmap lace like this always brings DS/3Delight renders to an extreme crawl, and would take hours to render at the same resolution. No post-work on the image other than re-sizing and adding the sig.

The second image below took just under 2Gb of VRAM (just having fun, was done for a contest here) I would guess it has at least 150-200 materials. most are using shaders without unique texture maps. It used 44 color textures, and 8 gray scale (bump), so I still had room for another fully clothed human figure, or other stuff with 20 color slots and 8 gray scale left. It took about 30 min to render, and it has a ton of reflective surfaces, and the large window is architectural glass.

2) Does it work with Daz shaders? I often "redress" sets using shaders I've bought to, for example, change a wall to look like brick instead of stucco. I have bought many shaders sets to let me redo walls and flooring. I also make use of Backdrops made easy for some simple scenes..

It really depends on the "shader". Fully procedural shaders typically will not translate at all, but mats/shaders that use images usually do quite well, but you typically need to do a bit of tweaking in Octane. At first, this will take a bit of time, but after you learn Octane a bit better, it gets much faster.

Octane also has a feature called the Live DB, which is a fairly comprehensive set of Octane shaders (by Otoy and user submitted). These are very helpfull, I've used them a lot, often replacing texture based shaders with Octane procedural shaders to save on texture slot and VRAM usage (plus they often look better).

3) I've read that it is primarily lit by HDR or mesh lights? Does this mean, that like reality, I need to give up on the idea of using things like spot lights and point lights? I make extensive use of AoA's lights because they're so useful. How does it do for interior scenes which I do a lot of?

Yes and no. Lighting is very similar to Reality/Lux. You can use the daylight lighting model, which is very fast, and easy to use (primarily for outdoor scenes). HDR works very well too, but like the daylight model, is best used in outdoor or open stage scenes. For all other types of lighting you use mesh lights similar to Reality/Lux. You can simulate spot lights in Octane by using an open ended cone mesh light, just make sure the normals are facing inward. For point lights you can use a sphere mesh light. Like in Lux, larger meshes will make softer shadows, smaller meshes make harder shadows. If you need a light placed in view of the camera, but don't want the mesh to show up in the render, you can make the light transparent and it will add illumination, but won't show in the render.

Hope all this helps a bit.

Ghosty12 · May 2014

The one thing you have to factor in is the cost, it may all be well and good but $382 USD or in my case $408 AUD this is for the Daz Studio Version, you will really want to have a use for it, and if you have a cruddy video card you have to factor that in as well..

And well $380 to $400 for a program that relies heavily on how good your video card is in terms of how complex the scene you are creating can be, is nothing to be sneezed at..

Kendall Sears · May 2014

I bit of warning. MAKE SURE that your video card has sufficient cooling and ventilation. THIS IS CRITICAL!

Most cards come with what looks like decent cooling but actually is just cool looking. Gaming uses rarely pushes the GPU's very hard for extended periods and many cards are built with that in mind. Using Octane will push the card to heat levels you wouldn't believe. "Overclocked" cards are the worst to use for Octane, as they are already beyond the specs and pushing them will cause damage.

You must have your machine's ventilation set up to remove the excess heat as well. Unless you've installed supplemental, or specialized, cooling on your GFX card, excess heat *will* escape into your case. Added with the CPU's heat, this can be a recipe for disaster.

I use Octane with Quadro's that have specialized cooling and they STILL get hot enough that the air exhausted will burn your hand if it is placed at the vents. I've also installed liquid cooling units onto the CPU's to help remove the excess heat.

Just some words to help users plan for correct system setup.

EDIT: PSU! Make sure that your Power Supply has *more* than enough juice to run the extra draw the card will want. All of the cores cooking at once will increase the hunger of the card. A marginal PSU won't be long in use.

Kendall

Riggswolfe · May 2014

Coon Ra said:
Riggswolfe said:
My video card is a GTX 580 with 4 GB of VRAM

There never existed GTX 580 with 4 Gb of VRAM, only 1,5 and 3 Gb.

I see what happened. I looked in DXDiag and it showed 4gb. But when I looked elsewhere it showed 1.5 and 2.5 of shared system memory. So, 1.5 gb VRAM. From that alone I suspect I should hold off for a bit.

Sorel · May 2014

Riggswolfe said:
Coon Ra said:
Riggswolfe said:
My video card is a GTX 580 with 4 GB of VRAM

There never existed GTX 580 with 4 Gb of VRAM, only 1,5 and 3 Gb.

I see what happened. I looked in DXDiag and it showed 4gb. But when I looked elsewhere it showed 1.5 and 2.5 of shared system memory. So, 1.5 gb VRAM. From that alone I suspect I should hold off for a bit.

I currently use a GTX 670 for my octane renders, and that only has 2 gigs of vram. But I do mostly portrait work so I guess it wouldn't have much of an impact to me when it comes to texture sizes and such. But octane can also downsize textures, so if you have a lot of distant objects or plan on using DoF you could reduce the texture sizes of such object and save vram. I am very happy with octane. Most of my recent gallery images are made in octane. I dont think I'll ever render with 3Delight again lol. Here are just a few things.