Introduction to Octane and Complex Materials in Octane
Frederik Steinmetz has added Octane to the tutorial series that I reported on earlier.
Gottfried Hofmann writes:After comparing Blender Internal, Cycles and Luxrender in tutorial form, Frederik Steinmetz added Octane to the series.
First he introduces the Blender to Octane exporter and shows you where problems might arise and how to avoid them.
Then he uses the Mantis-example to create a complex material using octane nodes and several maps. He also shows how to achieve fake SSS in Octane.
Octane is a $100 commercial render engine with GPU support similar to Cycles but more mature.
Links
Nice, I come from Maya, and it’s great to have tutorial like that to go to blender
Thx for the Plug, Bart! Matthieu: I hope Brecht’s improvements on the render API will get more commercial render engines tightly integrated with Blender.
“Octane is a $100 commercial render engine with GPU support similar to Cycles but more mature.”
Haha, yeah for sure. And developed by a guy who has made himself quite a few enemies in the CG community…
I’ll mever use Octane, and you should not do either. Refractive Software is a bad virus!
NEVER attack persons without stating what you disagree with.
Put a link or explain. I don’t know what you’re talking about and i’m not the only one.
Maybe he works for a concurrent render engine software.. it would explain why he dislike Octane..
think about ;-)
I think a long time ago that Octane was free and blenderheads used it, gave feedback, and embraced it. then after the community found all the bugs and thoroughly tested it the developer went commercial and no longer had a free version.
I think People were upset and felt used since it wasn’t stated that he had any intention of charging for the software. It was on Blender nation when it happened. that’s where I read about it. That’s the only “bad blood” moment I can think of.
and really other than using people as free beta testers I don’t see a problem with taking you software commercial. Blender is becoming great 3D software and people are starting to see it and make plugins and external renderers and I see no issue with charging for them.
but… I do have a problem with conning the community into being unpaid beta testers…
On the subject of external commercial renderers. I REALLY want to give Thea a try! it is both biased AND unbiased in the same renderer.
http://www.thearender.com/cms/
are you sure you’re talking about Octane?
because I think you mean Indigo. Octane was commercial from the beginning, it had a few selected beta testers from the blender community but everyone knew it was going to be commercial.
Also I don’t know what some people have against the developers? I know one of them was backstabbed by the Indigo. I don’t want to dwell too much into this drama but I don’t see why you’d dislike them.
my bad. Then I don’t know why antioctane thinks they have a bad rap. I’m sorry for mistaking Octane with indigo.
And I personally don’t dislike them I was trying to understand why someone else would.
petty little child
Note: On the 13th of january Refractive Software published a new version of Octane that supports SSS out-of-the-box…
Nice tutorial.
I myself made 23+ 15-10 min 1080HD tutorials on octane to, using blender has my modeling package (of course).
With seven tutorials covering the texturing and materials in octane render.
Its at youtube on the channel “Mtimtam”
I am a Blender user since 2004, and Octane render ins one of the best things that happened in my Blending life ! Octane render pushed my images at a much better level. The two important things currently missing in Octane for a Blender user are Instances (for a better use of VRAM) and a better export format for animations because the current one requires much more time to export/load frames than for rendering. The most wanter 2.6 version of Octane is supposed to bring us these improvements, and we are numerous to wait for them since the birth of Octane. Unfortunately, there is a lack of people able to code a good plugin for Blender, and users of other packages will be served first, I fear.
I tried Cycles, but currently it doesn’t make use of my two powerful external GPUs and only uses the weakest, shared with my two screens, making the render to slow for more than a simple trial.
I also have an Indigo and a Thea license. I have not used Indigo since I tried Octane. The interactive setup of materials and the high quality and speed of the render are really amazing. About Thea, I can’t say much, because I bought it for the Instances,but discovered that they couldn’t be used from inside Blender at the time ofmy purchase. I have seen few days ago that the new exporter for Blender now allows the use of objects duplicated with Alt+D as instances, so I will give Thea a second chance !
Cycles supports instances and with 2.62 it will suport mulit-GPU.
Upcoming support of multi GPU is very good news ! I think that rendering animations with Cycles from inside Blender will also avoid the huge export/load time currently lost with Octane.
@ Mtimtam: I watched already your tutorials. They are really helpful. Thank you very much for your efforts.