Early test with Octane Render

[El Burritoh]

I hopped on the Octane bandwagon today and decided to put it through it's paces with some refraction.

http://timcrowson.smugmug.com/photos/897783086_9dktA-L.jpg


The geometry was kicked out of modo and imported as an OBJ into Octane. Got the HDRI from the sIBL collection. For those of you who are familiar with Octane, here are the specs for this render: 1200px wide, 5000 samples, DirectLighting, on a GTS 250. Render time was 1h30m, which is acceptable considering I'm on a GTS 250, but still pretty long for something 1200 pixels wide.

Anyone else here using Octane?

[ZippZopp]

i bought it a couple weeks ago but haven't had the time to really dig into it. I've played with it a little bit and it was quite easy to get into and seems quite powerful, even at this early stage.

the great thing is i recently upgraded to an nvidia gtx 480 and it works extremely well with octane

[El Burritoh]

Refractions seem to give it a hard time. Non-refractive surfaces render very quickly, even on my 250. But make something out of glass or liquid and it slows down a lot. Still, the results are good.

No displacement or SSS yet, sadly...

[El Burritoh]

Sorry to double-post but here's a new image. Maybe I should throw all these in my sketchbook thread instead of posting them here.

http://timcrowson.smugmug.com/photos/898791916_vmmd4-XL.jpg

[Vimmy]

Very nice those images:)

[PascalR]

yeah I love these renders! I will wait for dsp and sss to be implemented though :D

[El Burritoh]

I wish I could post a render I did of a creature we're working on. A coworker modeled it and I brought it into Octane. Looked awesome.

This whole GPU-based, phyiscally-accurate rendering is very interesting. It has advantages and disadvantages, but the science behind it is fascinating.

As for Octane itself, yes Pascal, it will be a good day when things like SSS and Displacement are supported. In its current form it doesn't even support Subdivision surfaces, nor does it subdivide meshes at render time. So your imported meshes have to be frozen.


Oh, and apparently the two guys who make Octane are adding a 3rd developer soon. That should help. Still an impressive tool for only two people working on it in their spare time.

[El Burritoh]

Last week I was using Windows 7 and a GTS 250. Since then I've upgraded to a GTX 470 and installed Kubuntu 10.04 as an alternate-boot.


Benchmark scene results, all on the same machine:

Windows 7 + GTS 250: 0.94 samples per second.
Windows 7 + GTX 470: 6.96 samples per second.
Kubuntu + GTX 470: 12.96 samples per second.


Hot damn! I'm never rendering with Octane in Windows again! This is awesome! My original render that took 8 hours would now take about 30min.