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Octane Render & Brecht on Belgian Television

30

Here's a pretty cool demonstration of the Octane Renderer by none other than Brecht! The item is in Belgian/Dutch with English captions.

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

30 Comments

  1. Lol, this wouldn't give a 3D professional any clue as to what Octane Render is at all. They mentioned that you can select your location in the world to get realistic shadows, but not the fact that it's GPU accelerated.

    But gratz Brecht!

  2. Octane is very good and very fast ! I use it as my main render engine for several months, with Blender, exporting Blender scenes in obj format. After having used other unbiaised render engine for a time, I couldn't switch back to them ! Setting up the materials is interactive and you see the result of your settings with no delay !

    As it is a GPU render, it requires good recent GPU to get the best of it, but also works with older Nvidia graphic cards since 8800 GTS if you want to render simple scenes or just test it. However, you need two graphic cards to use it with a fluent interface : one card for display on the screens and one card to render.

    With cards like GTX 480, you can navigate in real time in the render window, seeing your materials with their final look ! You can render photorealistic full HD images in few minutes !

    Some features are still missing as it is a very young render engine, but it is already very usable and amazing and it is growing very quickly, with an excellent support !

  3. Any exposure is good exposure, don't get me wrong, I can imagine the mild frustration of how simplified the explanations were made for the interview.

    ~Sadly there's nothing new in someone saying it's faster than before in the cg biz lads.~

    It's impressive to me because we know the tech behind it, and indeed Luxrender is a nice open source parallel version for non-octane users such as myself.

    Good luck with octane tho, I know a couple of guys who've bought it and love the instant feedback aspect! So much so they're boosting their cuda cores to crazy levels!

  4. It's good to know that it is not a new thing, Pixar is using tis kind of techno since Cars.
    It's called Lpics.

    But of course, nice to see Brecht - and belgians (:p) - under the spot (in a positive way ).

  5. Well I would love to try octane render on Ubuntu 10.04 (64 bit)
    But it is hard to get Cuda working. Yes I have a cuda gpu grpahic card geforce 9500GT
    and installed Nvidia drivers and the Cuda toolkit 3.2.9.
    But still get the message no cuda capable devices found.

  6. I got regular crashes importing .obj - files, octane ist fast on simple scenes and geometry, on complex scenes it aint. No bashing, but the interface is a mess. I hope Brecht will contribute to this project and make something out of it, right now I dont see why to believe the hype.

  7. @JoBS : My current scene is very complex and has more than 2 000 000 triangles and renders in few seconds on my system, in 2560x1440. But obviously, I have invested a lot in the proper hardware (around 2500 Euros) to use octane at the best. I had to spend so much because my workstation is old and couldn't support Big graphic cards internally, but someone with a recent motherboard and a powerfull Power supply can get very much power for the price of one GTX 480 (around 500 Euros).

    One can't say for example that Blender doesn't work if he has only a Pentium II.

    As Octane is a GPU render, it requires the best GPU for the best result. It is normal. I run it on a Cubix Xpander pro 2 with two GTX 480, and I can navigate fluently in very high resolution.

    With a CPU render engine, even with a Dual CPU computer with 6 cores each (around 10 000 Euros), you can't render as fast as you can render with Octane with a simple GTX 480.

    So, it is not hype. Octane is very powerful, you just need the minimum hardware required to run it.

    For the interface, most users like it... it is a matter of taste, I suppose, like Blender interface.

    For the crashe when importing obj files from Blender, it is almost sure that you don't use the right settings in the exporter. Some features of the script musn't be enabled for Octane, that's probably your trouble. Just ask on the forum to get some support !o) you will be welcome.

    I have to say that I have nothing to do with the refractive team, I'm only a happy user !

  8. Is there a working octane plugin for Blender 2.5X? At the octane website I can only find one for 2.49. I need it for animation...

  9. For what I know, the exporter for 2.5x is in study. Also, if I'm not wrong, there is currently no built-in obj export in Blender 2.5x. It should come in a close future as well as the specific obj Octane exporter.

  10. I have an octane license and it rocks !
    Too bad Radiance fell ill a couple of times, we all think works too hard =)
    (stay healthy buddy, we love you)

    Sidenote, is that emacs there on the background ?
    (I don't like emacs, i Love it!)

    wzzl

  11. Smart thinking to have the machine work as much as possible, do stuff when the user wants to use and do more stuff when the user takes a sip of coffee.

    Maybe the next thing is an intuitive way to create the scenes, or import, or... you know. I couldn't get it to work, remember that artists ( well me ) are not as smart as progr.a.. as Brecht.

  12. @ROUBAL: Tested with an intel q9550, gforce gtx460, 8gb ram, scene with ~200.000 polys, mostly glass and reflection materials. The scene renders clear with blender internal 1920x1080, full raytracing in bout 45min. I used the octane demo, so I couldnt go for the same resolution, but with 1024x512 after 20 min there still was so much grain that I switched it off.

    You say, you dont work for them, whatever, I said, I didnt want to bash octane, but I cant see the advantages right now.

    If you tell me I just exported wrong... yeah, again, whatever. All 3D-suites my collegues and I work with dont have any trouble importing those .obj (blender, lightwave, modo, deepex)

    After all it´s just a beta and yeah, it´s an impressive piece of software that guy made (almost alone in a short amount of time I read), but right now there´s too much "beta" in it for me.

    Furthermore I dont see the point in buying 3000$ new hardware and then going for the gpu-way, there are many limitations to gpu-rendering ATM, so I´d rather buy a XEON station (yeah, you get the smaller ones for less than 10.000)

    Like I said, I hope Brecht will bring this to a point where it actually works as you expect it seeing the demo vids, perhaps making good exporter scripts that work out of the 3D-app. This is a pain too, right now, export your mesh, import to octane, adjust material, lighting etc., see a problem in the mesh, go back to your 3D-app and do it all over again.

  13. And I would buy octane instantly, if it worked as expected. The price is great, and why shouldnt I want a fast instant raytracer thats 10x cheaper than V-ray?

  14. Its quite a very good software and the pioneer of its kind. You could almost say the others are copying. It includes a lot of features that are helpful for many task. The price is great too... though it is still beta. A very amazing software.

  15. Wow. I think I'll be very interested in trying that renderer! What nice features I can see already. I mean, I'm all about seeing the GPU stuff come from Lux too. Raise that bar, Brecht! RAISE IT!

  16. I would like to inform Blender and Octane Render users about Octane Power Tools http://www.OctanePowerTools.com and facebook page at http://www.Facebook.com/OctanePowerTools .
    Octane Power Tools let you use the power of Octane Render in your animation projects, without loosing time in the transfer process.
    This means that animation render that takes days, takes hours and minutes with Octane Power Tools.
    Blender is supported up to 2.5+ .
    Also we have a limited time 25% off offer until the next release ;)
    Using both Octane Render and Octane Power Tools together, gives the power needed to achieve demanding animation projects in short time and easily.

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