Hey guys,
Considering Rhino3D plugin probably won’t be part of the free tier,
Does it mean there will be 3 options:
I’m considering to start using Octane for my personal projects - do Rhino users enjoy new Octane updates at similar pace as others?
Thank you,
Jonas
P.S. Sorry for pushing you, it’s just the fiscal year is about to end soon.
Hi Jonish,
Personally, I love Octane. The developer of the Rhino Plugin, Paul, is terrific. He’s extremely responsive to users request and any bug reports. As for Octane development speed of the Core Engine itself, I’d say its on par with the development speed of most other major options.
As for the pricing option, I’ve been using Octane for a long time, so I paid for the standalone and plugin quite some time ago and haven’t looked at the new pricing structure for new users, so maybe someone else can chime in there.
From a business standpoint, Octane is worth many times what it costs to my business. Most of my work is done in Octane, both stills and animations.
Ryan
that’s very true, however I think the problem is that Otoy is not putting enough attention to develop good good integrations with host 3D packages. We love the render quality and speed of Octane, but using it inside Rhino is painful. The fact that we can’t see materials appearance in the material editor and/or in the GL viewport is unacceptable IMO. also the sliders/fields in Rhino are all glitchy.
We recently bought Vray and are staring to use that more instead. The integration with Rhino is not great, but soooo much better than Octane. Also having Vray components in Grasshopper so you can see your iterations and slider moves in final render appearance without baking is very useful.
Octane is a awesome but also a very very niche tool, and that is not going to change unless they change their approach of how much care, time, effort and developers they allocate to proper integrations.
I just upgraded to Rhino 6 a week or so ago and Octane doesn’t work as well in V6 as it did in V5. I was hoping this will get ironed out before too long, but . . . it might not…
I know Micha on this forum speaks very highly of Vray – I used Vray quite some time ago, (version 1) but haven’t had the time to devote to a proper revisit. I keep meaning to and keep getting pulled away on jobs. Please let me know how it goes with you and Vray now that you’ve started to integrate it more.
A big thing for me is animations (although mine are relatively simple) and Octane works very well with Bongo. Have you tried Vray and Bongo together by any chance?
For the animation side of my work I’ve also been looking into UE4 . . . and Lumion just released a LiveSync for Rhino too, just FYI. Again more for animations, Vray, Octane, etc. is still needed for good stills and customization.
Ryan
I’m pretty much with Ryan on the Octane thing. I haven’t loaded it into Rhino6 yet so that may change. I have loaded Thea into Rhino6 but haven’t really delved into that either. I love Octane for what I have done in the past and have hopes that Paul and his connection between Rhino and Octane will continue to be productive. I sort of get lost when I go into Octane Standalone and the integration for any render engine into Rhino directly is of utmost importance to me. Not sure the Octane 4 will ever really apply on that level.
My current situation is:
Vray2 (an old beta version based VfR2 UI and 3.2 cernel, the best of two worlds) for high quality interiors and for anything, where other engines fails. It’s so rock solid and I love to control anything per clear UI without to go through endless nice looking hidden sub menus of VfR3. VfR2 is my daily work horse, it save my render life.
I don’t use VfR 3.6.x since it is not stable enough for my need, controls are canceled and the UI is to much scattered and it’s difficult to keep an overview. Also the license manager was not working and killed my VfR2 install. I will wait some months more to test it again. I found VfR3 isn’t made for me, I should skip it.
Enscape is great for extreme fast interior renderings and fly-troughs, but some basic materials are not working - mirrors, semi-transparent milk glass, metallic car paint, solid glass, textured transparency. It works very well within the tight limits. The Rhino plugin is very basic only, very limited. My impression is the developer team is to small and so, some basic issues needs endless to be solved. There seems to be no separation in core and plugin development. New features are faster added than old issues fixed.
Enscape is very promising and could have a bright future. Maybe it needs one year more for a better integration and to solve the material problems. If the current limits are no problem, than I use it for commercial projects. It’s impressive to get dozen of high res images and a 2 minute fly through animation within an one or two day project. Impossible per any other render engine.
Octane 3 - my favorite for object animations per Bongo, most if a lot of reflections are needed (metal, glass).
I tested Octane 4 and it was very promising, also for interiors. The denoiser is a turbo. I jumped back to v3, since I need to get an old v3 setup for an animation running, and v4 shows me a different output. Maybe I found some time to check, what the difference caused. If the endless nice weather will stop and the rainy autumn will start here in Germany, than I will spend more time to discover it. 
Thank you, guys, as always you’re being extremely helpful, that’s why I love this community so much!
@micha, I believe you’re being too harsh. I use VfR 3.6 in my day job and I’m mostly okay with that but the biggest pain is that GPU rendering is missing features but they haven’t properly mapped that so you can always spend hours tuning your scene only to find that one crucial thing is not supported using GPU.
@gustojunk, can you compare octane rendering speed with vRay gpu?
I have tried octane demo but both the standalone ui and rhino plugin seem extremely unclear and difficult for orientation. It kinda scares me off.
Cheers
Jonas
Hi Jonish,
I can’t speak for the Octane Standalone, as I only use it to run animation frames for large scenes to avoid re-loading the scene for each frame, however if you have any questions regarding the Rhino Plugin feel free to ask me and I’ll do what I can to help you.
Hi Micha,
Since you mentioned Enscape, you might be interested in this: https://discourse.mcneel.com/t/lumion-9-livesync-for-rhino/74441
Hi @Ryan4 , thank you for your offer! How did you learn Octane? Do you know some good sources for a beginner? I’ve only found the official documentation so far, which lacks image examples and is closer to a simple list of functions: https://docs.otoy.com/RhinoH/RhinoPluginManual.htm
Hi Jonish,
Honestly, I’m just self taught. Before using Octane, I was coming from Vray 1.x and Thea Render. Vray 1.x had a million controls and a huge learning curve, but I got the hang of it and was using it for daily work, and Thea had very little controls and little learning curve but at the time was not well integrated into Rhino. What drew me to Octane was that I could get the quality that I was getting in Vray will much less effort and at the time, Octane was better integrated into Rhino than Thea Render was. I think Thea is better integrated now, but it didn’t used to be. In any case, I wish I could send you a video link for Octane Tutorials, but all the rhino ones I know of are outdated.
What version of Octane are you using and are you in Rhino 6? I could make you a file and send it to you if you’re on the same version as me. That way you could see the materials and settings and then ask questions that you have.
Hi @Ryan4, today I tested Octane4 and my impression was, the plugin seems to be in beta state, it’s a little bit fragile, but the denoiser works great.
In the past I used Octane for exterior and product shots only, since interiors need to much time and there was some noise and fireflies. My impression was, a lot of time was spend and nothing changed at the screen. So, I’m not so much a friend of unbiased rendering. The denoiser seems to change the game. It’s like biased interpolation calculation that bring the speed.
Did you render some high res interiors per v4? If yes, I would be very curious to hear what you think about it. My typical VfR renderings are in the range of 5000x3000 and rendertime 20…30min. Could this be possible per Octane 4 and for example 2x1080ti?
Hi Micha,
No, I have not test V4 yet because it’s still in BETA and I’ve got to many paying projects going on right now to risk V4 messing them up. I generally wait until the Octane versions are out of Beta before diving in. I’m hopeful about it, but we’ll see. V4 is supposed to greatly reduce load times as well, which will be great. I have not had time yet to dive into Vray3.6 but maybe will get a break in work to do so when the holidays get near.
The issue with clients that I’m facing now, is that most are asking more and more for simple animations and less call for still shots. So . . . speed is becoming more and more import for my work. Which is why I’m reading about Lumion and UE4. Hopefully I can test some of these programs out in the coming couple of months.
Hi Ryan,
thank you for the answer. My impression is, that the load time of the current Octane 4 Rhino plugin is quite slow compared to other plugins like Enscape. It tested it and I found for example Enscape18s vs. Octane 4 30s. I will ask at the Octane forum for this.
EDIT: I found that Rhino 5 and VfR2 needs 60s for this scene. So, maybe something is wrong with my scene.
-Micha
V4 is finally out.
From my understanding, the pricing options are:
There are also some all-access licences not limited to a single 3D application.
The Octane 2019.1 release of the plugin will include the “Pertetual plugin” build (which is called “Regular”). So there will be “Studio”, “Enterprise”, “Regular” and “Demo” versions of the plugin in Octane 2019.1.
Paul