Any opinions on Octane Render?

[kosso_olli]

Hi,
I was quite impressed by the presentation they held at Siggraph. Has anyone ever tried Octane? If so, how does it compare to Vray RT GPU and the like? Is it production-ready, especially for high res print work?

Regards

Oliver

[instinct]

That's an odd place for that kind of question...

[vlado]

I was quite impressed by the presentation they held at Siggraph. Has anyone ever tried Octane? If so, how does it compare to Vray RT GPU and the like? Is it production-ready, especially for high res print work?

Path tracing speed (the amount of noise in a certain amount of time with full GI) at least based on the available demo versions, is comparable to that of V-Ray RT GPU. For other things, it would probably be best to test them both.

Best regards,
Vlado

[theedge]

If you're used to take advantage of vrayRT distributed rendering, beware that octane cannot do that. You can run backburner jobs of course, but you cannot render a a single still image leveraging all the gpu power in your network nodes. That was by far my biggest disappointment after I bought the license + the 3ds max plugin license. And that brings me to another important point to consider : value for money. At first octane may seem cheap at 199 EUR. But you'll have to buy a license for each additional machine in your network. You'll also probably want to buy a 3ds max plugin license : the plugin doesn't come with octane (but they do offer a bundle with a small discount).
So the most economical option is to run octane on a single machine in which you'll fit as many high-end gpus as you can. That's precisely what most octane users do, take a look at the otoy forums : you will see incredible monster machines packed with titans built by some octane users.
That said, concerning quality, I find the renders produced by octane excellent. You can easily and quickly obtain very nice-looking, pleasing renders without fighting endlessly with material setup and redner settings.

[wxyz]

It's very fast with highly reflective materials.

[Pixelcon]

Something that I do like is the film responses that comes packaged with it...