Just signed up for Octane.. you should to

[lancelotdulak]

So, i'm cheap. And i cant afford a 1080ti right now much less spending 5-700 on a render engine. Heck i dont want to be locked in to paying $20 a month for a render engine.. when.. there are so many out there.. and iray produces beautiful work! But... i want to be able to do video.. even small video.. and honestly most of my time is waiting for Iray to do its thing . So - Octane. It's 20 a month with the Daz plugin.

At first its confusing.. theres no render button etc.. the interface is very counterintuitive ie badly designed. And unlike most software..you REALLY need to check out the manual. For instance when you load a scene it wont try to autoload the textures. You have to go in and do it manually (which takes seconds once you know how). The quality is good and with the right settings im sure i can do better and ive seen amazing octane renders. Even iray textures transfer over well (not perfect but well)

But the SPEED. The speed is blowing my $#%% mind. I have a small beach scene. One girl on a beach environment. In Iray if i hit render it takes it a couple minutes to load everything up.. then say 10 minutes to render it to an acceptable but not perfect point. (this is with a 1700x 32gb ram rendering on a 1070 with a 1060 to run my monitors). I added anim blocks to it.. and i heavent even Considered rendering that animation in Iray because off the top of my head even rendering a small version would take 24 hours with my gpu heating the house by itself.


So.. right now in octane im on frame 131 in 23 minutes. Resolution is720p. It's taking about 15 seconds per frame. With pretty bad lighting. This is something that iray would take at least 8 hours to do i think. I think i could get to totally acceptable 1080p, final render quality with this scene by adjusting it til i hot 1 minute per frame.
As for quality - remember i basically know nothing abut Octane yet other than how to press buttons like a monkey - id say it's slightly lower than "big brother" or DMD quality. Very very close. Please note the obvious problems with this scene are because it is an old one that was tossed together to test animation and i loaded it into octane for that reason. The textures havent been tweaked for octane, it was never supposed to be a final render. I dont even remember what the lighting was.. so its biggest flaws are the artist.

If you can afford 20 a month i strongly suggest you sign up .. honestly...id suggest doing this before upgrading to a higher end card it's that good. Ill try to attach an image. Or maybe the animation if i can figure out how to turn the images into an anim before i go to work

Please note i keep editing this post because i keep thinking "Ya this cant be right this is just preview mode or .. or .." and well.. it seems to be as good as i think. In fact if i werent pretty sure Daz has a specific deal with NVIDIA (ie getting paid to do iray) i think daz should make a deal with octane...

 

[polywog]

There are a lot of good free render engines.
Iray is a joke, no Hollywood studios use it.

 

[lancelotdulak]

There are a lot of good free render engines.
Iray is a joke, no Hollywood studios use it.

Iray produces some ultra high quality renders. And the hollywood studios use CPU rendering and maya.. which tells you how out of touch they've become. There are good free render engines but ive tried them all and speedwise none of them compare to octane or redshift

 

[Nottravis]

So, i'm cheap. And i cant afford a 1080ti right now much less spending 5-700 on a render engine. Heck i dont want to be locked in to paying $20 a month for a render engine.. when.. there are so many out there.. and iray produces beautiful work! But... i want to be able to do video.. even small video.. and honestly most of my time is waiting for Iray to do its thing . So - Octane. It's 20 a month with the Daz plugin.

At first its confusing.. theres no render button etc.. the interface is very counterintuitive ie badly designed. And unlike most software..you REALLY need to check out the manual. For instance when you load a scene it wont try to autoload the textures. You have to go in and do it manually (which takes seconds once you know how). The quality is good and with the right settings im sure i can do better and ive seen amazing octane renders. Even iray textures transfer over well (not perfect but well)

But the SPEED. The speed is blowing my $#%% mind. I have a small beach scene. One girl on a beach environment. In Iray if i hit render it takes it a couple minutes to load everything up.. then say 10 minutes to render it to an acceptable but not perfect point. (this is with a 1700x 32gb ram rendering on a 1070 with a 1060 to run my monitors). I added anim blocks to it.. and i heavent even Considered rendering that animation in Iray because off the top of my head even rendering a small version would take 24 hours with my gpu heating the house by itself.


So.. right now in octane im on frame 131 in 23 minutes. Resolution is720p. It's taking about 15 seconds per frame. With pretty bad lighting. This is something that iray would take at least 8 hours to do i think. I think i could get to totally acceptable 1080p, final render quality with this scene by adjusting it til i hot 1 minute per frame.
As for quality - remember i basically know nothing abut Octane yet other than how to press buttons like a monkey - id say it's slightly lower than "big brother" or DMD quality. Very very close. Please note the obvious problems with this scene are because it is an old one that was tossed together to test animation and i loaded it into octane for that reason. The textures havent been tweaked for octane, it was never supposed to be a final render. I dont even remember what the lighting was.. so its biggest flaws are the artist.

If you can afford 20 a month i strongly suggest you sign up .. honestly...id suggest doing this before upgrading to a higher end card it's that good. Ill try to attach an image. Or maybe the animation if i can figure out how to turn the images into an anim before i go to work

Please note i keep editing this post because i keep thinking "Ya this cant be right this is just preview mode or .. or .." and well.. it seems to be as good as i think. In fact if i werent pretty sure Daz has a specific deal with NVIDIA (ie getting paid to do iray) i think daz should make a deal with octane...

Good Lord...

Thank you for sharing this. I'll check it out.

 

[mickydoo]

How many iterations per render, I can get a 720p render in 15 seconds per frame in iray on a 2070 if I keep the iterations down to something half acceptable.

 

[lancelotdulak]

How many iterations per render, I can get a 720p render in 15 seconds per frame in iray on a 2070 if I keep the iterations down to something half acceptable.

Octane doesnt work the same way. And.. im not sure but i literally never render in 720p. To do a fair comparison youd have to use the same scene on the same machine at the same res. On the other hand im starting to think its not worth it because the default iray quality is MUCH better. You have to convert then tweak all the textures (not manually), then change them so theyre close to what you wanted in the first place. IE basically we need a giant octane texture library which doesnt exist yet. And there is a problem w iray interior scenes having a lot of speckle no matter what you do (firefly too but you can remove that in ps easily). At this moment in time im thinking irays big advantage overall is a: if you want to do video.. if you spend ENOUGH time dialing in the scenes its ungodly fast.. but imho lower quality. And unlimited scene size. With iray youre straight up limited to the vram of your best gpu. With octane it just doesnt matter... it will use your ram.. and i think it will even use swap.. though i imagine each step in that gets much slower.

I adore the speed but.. im getting ready to finally assemble my game now that models etc are ready and im honestly thinking ill be better off just letting my gpu cook the videos while i sleep. Though i may keep octane to add in videos, do videos for promos etc

 

[xide]

I've been debating on a upgrade myself. I don't mind too much if my renders run all night because i do them in batches. My problem is some of my scenes require me to preview in iray or else they appear black and if it's a complex scene like one i'm currently working on with 8 girls and lots of lighting and reflections then my viewport lags super hard making it difficult to position my models. I'm running a i5 8400, gigabyte RTX 2060 Super, and 16GB of ram....so do you think octane would help me or should I upgrade my card, cpu, or ram?

 

[lancelotdulak]

I think octane will do it. I think using iray previews is yoru problem. use texture shaded. And add all the lights in one group and simply cut them off and use the headlamp to preview. Voila

Octane will RADICALLY speed things up especially on that super which im thinking is the equivalent of my 1070. Oh.. add more ram though. i have 32 now i just ordered another 16..
There are a couple downsides of octane . 1 is the materials/texturing. They need to hire some artists to put content in their livedb.. a lot of it. Irays renders are.. blah.. everything looks somehow powdery.. just blah. On some things it looks really good. Most things not and iray is 1000 times more vibrant.. its all textures not an engine flaw (mostly). I was about to abandon it despite the speed til i found th Redspec sss skin shader.. which pretty much EVERYONE uses apparently. If you spend t ime learning to build octane textures its awesome. And the other flaw is speckling.. it takes some work cleaning it up and getting lighting right. Your daz lighting flat out wont work. you need to use mesh emitters. Now having said that.. the speed is literally stunning on 95% of scenes. On others it can be as slow as or slower than iray

 

[cooperdk]

Octane has things Iray wish for. Like light settings based on geo location and time of day. Octane will also use the GPU and it's much more effective.

There is no discussion: Octane is much faster at delivering a good, production-quality render. MUCH faster, like, something like three times faster!

BTW, Octane is now available as a free plugin for DAZ.

 

[lancelotdulak]

Octane has things Iray wish for. Like light settings based on geo location and time of day. Octane will also use the GPU and it's much more effective.

There is no discussion: Octane is much faster at delivering a good, production-quality render. MUCH faster, like, something like three times faster!

BTW, Octane is now available as a free plugin for DAZ.

Um iray does everything you just claimed it doesnt and has for a long time. Also the plugin is free but it cant use Octane without a license

Sl you know octane is faster because of How it raytraces which is a complicated subject

 

[Kerr Avon]

Hi,

If you are still getting white specks on indoor scene renders try these two possible solutions

1) Use path tracing or PMC. Set Caustic blur to 1 and also set GI Clamp to 1. This works for me and is the first thing I set.

2) If the above didn't fix it then it's possible that the surface has high specularity, so it reflects light like glass. If you add bump to that you get all kinds of tiny light reflections. Unfortunately the automatic conversion of DAZ materials into Octane materials will often create a glossy material in Octane with no specular input ( or sometimes will link the specular input to the diffuse color) , neither of these is what you want most of the time. To fix it you can go into the Octane nodegraph editor for that material, and connect a RGB color node to the glossy material specular input. If you then set the color of the RGB color node to black, your material will not reflect like glass.