Luxrender vs Octane Render
Tsuzura
Posts: 119
I am currently using Reality with luxrender for my render program and I now see that Octane has a Daz plug-in and I was wondering if it would be worth it to use Octane over Reality luxrender.
Comments
Good question. If you already have a decent NVidia Geforce video card with 2 GB of memory, you can try the stand-alone demo. You'll need to export you Daz Studio Scene as an object and save the materials/textures to a folder (Write Surfaces, write Materials, collect maps).
On my single-core computer, Octane is faster than Luxrender - I see a decent scene within one minute in the Octane demo. In Luxrender, I need to wait 30 minutes or more to see the scene, textures and the effects of lighting.
Sorry I couldn't give you any more information or a better comparison.
My take, if you have the serious money for Octane and a new vid card if needed (Octane relies heavily on the GPU) then you will like Octane. i think it usually looks better then Luxrender, but is only slightly faster since both are unbiased renderers.
@Starionwolf How do I import them into Octane?
@FSMCDesigns My video cards is Nividia GT 650M is that good for it?
The 650 M is a mobile card and only has 384 cuda cores, which Octane runs off of. I'm not sure how fast your renders would be. If you have not, you should download the demo along with the demo scenes to see how fast they render on your current system.
My research has been similar to yours with one key difference. Most people say that the output of the two apps is equal, but that Octane renders many factors faster than LuxRender due to the whole GPU rendering paradigm. The same scene could take minutes in Octane that could take days in LuxRender. In fact, there really is no competition in the speed department. If you have the appropriate video cards, Octane wins hands down because as stated being unbiased the output quality is mathematically equivalent to LuxRender.
I have both Reality/Lux and Octane. I prefer using Octane because in most instances it blows the doors off of Lux. The workflow is also much more interactive than either Rality/Lux or 3Delitght. It's amazing to change lighting or shaders and get almost real time feed back.
I use Octane on a laptop with a Geforce 670m, and haven't even had a second of buyers remorse. But there are a couple of things to consider. Your laptop should have a special cooling mode, or at least a very good cooling system or you could overheat it (the GPU) using Octane. Mine has a turbo cool feature, which is loud (high speed fan), but while rendering with Octane the GPU only increases about 5-7 degrees over what it runs at just browsing the internet. The other thing to consider is that your card is Kepler based. The good news with that is you can use 144 RGBA textures, 68 grayscale textures, 10 HDR RGBA textures, and 10 HDR grayscale (this is about 2x what I can use with my Fermi based card). The bad news is that it wont perform as fast as mine, despite having a few more cuda cores (670M has 336 cuda cores, the 650M has 384 cuda cores) because with the Kepler architecture it takes two clock cycles to perform the same calculations that Fermi could do in a single clock cycle.
Now this doesn't mean your GPU won't provide great performance with Octane, because I think you will still see outstanding increases in the speed of your renders, especially compared to Lux. It just means that you won't see the insane speeds you see say on youtube. So you should definitely give the demo a good test run first. The VRAM available on your video card is also very important. I'd consider 2Gb to be the minimum. I have 3GB on mine and haven't run out of space yet (but I have run out of texture slots).
The first image below has a rather complex light set up, and some complex skin materials, it took about 40 minutes to render at 3400x3000 pixels and used about 1.2GB of VRAM. The second image took a little under 2Gb of VRAM, and took about 30 min, to render at 1800x1500 (a lot of reflective surfaces and glass in this one). The third image to a little over 2Gb of VRAM, but I let it cook for 12 hours at 3300x3300 pixels. It had fairly complex lighting, and a lot of geometry (the full StoneMason scene), and the shaders on the leaves were mildly reflective. This all meant that the Jade materials took a long time to resolve to my satisfaction (keep in mind that the Jade Dragon has about 800,000 polygons which means a lot of internal SSS light to calculate from several external sources). The first two images would have taken several hours (6-12 or more) with Lux, the last one would have taken probably at least 36 hours in Lux. Setup time would have been much greater with Reallity/Lux due to waiting on test renders.
Hopefully this gives you an idea what you might expect with Octane.
Some important things to consider when choosing which one of the two are best for yourself.
Octane is easily the faster of the two rendering solutions, but this speed comes at a steep asking price and not without some drawbacks of its own. Octane is entirely dependent on the strength of your GPU and reliant on having a decent amount of graphics memory to boot. When rendering in Daz Studio, you need to consider that graphics memory is already being used by the application so this may impact how well you are able to render.
Since it is so GPU dependent, the number and size of textures will be reduced considerably. Larger scenes can be done, but you will be replacing textures with procedural surfaces instead. You would need a beast of a graphics card to be able to render a typical Daz scene without any texture changes due to the high resolution most textures are these days.
Luxrender isn't very fast. On the contrary, it's one of the slower engines and may take a while to clear up some of the trash. That being said, it can do all of this without needing to concern itself about the texture sizes. Because it uses software rendering, or even a hybrid of GPU and software, it can use your system RAM instead of just your graphics memory, giving it much more room to maneuver. If your PC has 32Gb of RAM, for example, Luxrender can use that for storing detailed textures.
This also accounts for *why* Luxrender appears to be much slower than Octane. The issue isn't so much in the calculations, but simply because you're using much higher resolution textures on average in Luxrender than you would be using in an Octane render. That and, of course, the fact that Octane is entirely GPU rendering which is faster in general.
Luxrender does actually have a pure GPU render included which greatly reduces texture overheads to render it all on the graphics card. This works blindingly fast, easily on par with Octane, but again has similar texture restrictions as a result. Sadly, it's also the most under-developed part of the engine, with very little control compared to a standard render.
Now, that being said Luxrender isn't without its problems either. As it's very much still a work in progress there are plenty of well-known bugs, including issues with the hybrid mode crashing when using multiple light sources. More annoying issues involve null materials casting shadows on the edges of otherwise invisible objects when the engine should be ignoring nulls entirely.
Pick the engine which suits your needs best. They're both fantastic and I only really use Lux since I had that before Octane and can't justify owning both (especially with Octanes asking price!). Just be aware of what they can and cannot do, so you can at least make an educated decision.
I just tried the Octane demo and it is amazing :o
I didn't know most of the features yet I can tell it works alot better for me then luxrender :D
Glad to here your enjoying it. The manual gives good settings for exporting scenes from DS to obj that can be easily opened in Octane if you want to try rendering something from DS. I tried Octane via the Poser plugin demo and was hooked immediately. Couldn't put it down for almost 2 weeks. Then my wife told me to just get it, cause I hadn't had so much fun in years.
Development of Tugpsx's Daz2Octane exporter script was halted in favor of the integrated OctaneRender plugin for DAZ Studio. There still is a crippled demo version of the Daz2Octane script available that automates the DS scene export into Octane Render standalone if you wanted to give Octane Render a whirl as it works with the Octane Render Standalone demo. Be sure to read though the whole thread for helpful information. Also, if you don't set FOV to at least 50 on the Daz2Octane Camera tab (the default is 0), a value can be set in the Octane Render camera tab's FOV setting. Here are links to the files:
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=11712#p75471
SCRIPT FILE DOWNLOAD: Daz2OctaneDemoIIb.rar
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=11712&start=20#p76633
DOCS FILE DOWNLOAD: Daz2OctaneDoc.rar
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=11712&start=40#p80728
BLANK OCS FILE DOWNLOAD: Blank.rar
Note: Set path to the Blank.ocs in the Daz2Octane Preferences tab.
How do I download those? There is no download option.
I nearly fell out of my chair first time i saw how fast it was :D
I nearly fell out of my chair first time i saw how fast it was :D
Indeed. I just got the DS plugin combo after testing it with the Poser demo. Of course later on you realize that it defaults to the "direct lighting" kernel which is quite simplistic but unbelievably fast. Once you switch to the more sophisticated PMC or PathTracing kernels things slow down considerably in complex scenes with complex materials (absorption, scattering, reflections...). Mind you, it is still very fast, but now you are looking at many minutes to a couple of hours for a final render again rather than seconds to a few minutes.
The DS plugin is very nice. I can highly recommend it so far. Currently I am using it just with one GTX 670, but my box is set up for up to 3 cards. I will a dedicated render card soon.
Ciao
TD
Oh, and a quick test render (~ 40 min) I did while experimenting within skin.
How do I download those? There is no download option.
Each of the three messages has an attachment at the bottom of the message. Just click on it and the download will initiate to you. In the first link, here is what you click on to download Daz2OctaneDemoIIb.rar
Each of the three messages has an attachment at the bottom of the message. Just click on it and the download will initiate to you. In the first link, here is what you click on to download Daz2OctaneDemoIIb.rar
I can't click on that.
Does your cursor turn RED when you place it over the file attachment? I'm sure you don't need to be a registered user of the forum, as I was not logged in to their forums when I tested the ability to download the message attachments.
Has anyone else been able to download the attachments that's not a registered user of the OTOY forums? There is a GREY "Log-in" tab displayed when you're not logged in to the OTOY forums.
Edit: I'm using IE 10. Try placing the cursor over the attachment, right click and see if you have a "Save target as..." option.
For some reason, Octane won't render any model that has tattoos, their skin just turns pitch black.
Are the tatoos a part of the texture, or are they "put on a texture" using LIE? I don't think LIE (Layered Image Editor) is supported in Octane.
Are the tatoos a part of the texture, or are they "put on a texture" using LIE? I don't think LIE (Layered Image Editor) is supported in Octane.
It should be as the LIE created files are 'just' tif format. You may need to manually nudge OcDS into picking them up.
I also have a question for people who have the full version. what are some features you can do with Octane that you can't do in the demo?
From the Otoy site:
The demo version has the following limitations:
Render resolution output is locked to 1000x600 pixels
Project and render output cannot be saved
Online LiveDB material database functionality is not included
Render output contains water marks (Octane logo and stripes)
do you use Octane with Daz or Poser?
In the octane vs luxrender debate, might I suggest a third option? Blender's Cycles has subsurface scattering, displacement, and (admittedly still slow) volumetrics. It is also very cheap to try out since both it and its exporter are free. While I understand a lot of people don't like the blender interface, exporting from DAZ you don't have to use it much at all, just the main screen and node editor (which is like DAZStudio's shader mixer, but with more options) to set up materials.
I think this is both a matter of personal preference and render limitations.
My absolute preference in term of rendering speed and quality goes to Octane. Yet as soon as the scenes become to heavy for my graphic card, which is often the case I would switch to Luxrender.
I did not use Cycles for DAZ scenes just because... I have to reconnect all the nodes, and this can be long! Yet if someone provided a blender exporter "auto-connecting" more or less the nodes, I would immediately switch to cycles which also presents (if I remember well) a choice between CPU and GPU rendering, as well as tons of free tutos on the subject!
Apart from the enormous cost of Octane you also have to consider the cost of a new video card and or complete system if your video card or system is not up to scratch.. For me I would love to have Octane but cannot justify the $400+ it would cost me to buy it and the cost of a new video card / system since I am running a 1.2GB 570GTX on a 1st Gen I7 920 X58 based system..
And the other thing is do you have the need for it to justify the cost of it..
You are totally right on this point.
The use of Octane must be limited to small scenes. Octane will be really great if one day it can mix GPU + CPU to raise the texture limitations.
Octane is not as limiting as it sounds once you learn how to set things up (For example, the DS plugin allows you to reduce texture sizes with a click, this helps tremendously). This scene has Stonemason's complete Forrest scene and one G2F with clothing and I still had space for another figure or two (Just a quick test without any material adjustment). This is just with my current GTX 670 2Gb card which also drives my displays and has typically ~1.5-1.6 Gb for rendering. Once I get the second card installed (most likely a GTX 780 3Gb) it should be possible to get quite significant scenes done. For true monsters of complexity I still have Vue.
Ciao
TD
I have produced TONS of renders (in the hundreds) using Lux here is one using the same king of BG looks the same to me..
Indeed, so have I. Lux and Octane are both physically based, non-biased render engines (or at least they can be depending on the kernel you use). There is no significant difference in the QUALITY you can achieve. There is a significant difference in the SPEED you can achieve (especially when comparing Octane with CPU based Lux (The purely GPU based version of Lux is still very limited at this time). Render like the test I posted can be done in a few minutes in Octane. How long did the Lux render cook?
So, there is no question that quality is not an issue when deciding between Lux and Octane. however, if you frequently render scenes that require looooong Lux render times (refractions, lots of reflections, scattering, ...), the Octane will give you a huge boost in productivity. If you do mostly simple scenes that can be done in Lux in an hour or so, you won't gain as much.
Ciao
TD
Alot of scenes sepcially outdoors look good withing 1/2 hour, but I still let them run a few since I for the most part queue render and then refine renders using the brush that are not quite right at the point. I think experience and setting up materials play a big part. I also enjoy the control one has over lighting. I built a custom 32G tower with an ATI Firepro last year with a good heat sync