Octane Testing

I’ve been enjoying learning Octane and took an old project previously done in Arion to give it a go. I’m liking it but am going to miss Arion as it doesn’t work in Rhino 6.

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Look forward to your Octane efforts Paul. You have a look that is very distinctive. Are you using Octane4 yet?

Thanks. Yes, am using Octane 4 but am not that familiar with it yet to understand what I have gained in the 4th version.

Are you using V4 and if so what actual benefits are there?

I’m using Thea v 2.0, so cool.
Render time 9 m . 4000×2000

I mentioned Arion4Rhino is no longer being developed but a week ago found out the Arion Standalone certainly is. It’s now rebranded as Maverick and probably will be all the render I ever need. I’ve been playing with it and am extremely impressed!!

The AI denoiser works very well, but of course it’s not magic. You still need to let a lot of passes render to get a good result, otherwise will be very splotchy. But we are seeing speed increases up to 30-50% in some cases to achieve same quality as before. Metal shaders also look better and have more control. Scene cashing seems faster, still a pain for animation though (Bongo) since it cashes every frame, and the cashing takes longer that the render pass for each frame if you have a heavy scene.

Unfortunately all the render quality and speed comes at a price of very poor usability. The fact that the GL viewport, the material libraries and the material editor don’t even show you the correct diffuse color of materials is like rendering blind. Especially when setting up scenes. We are starting to use more Vray for this reason. It takes more work to match Octane’s quality in Vray, and it’s slower, but at least they have built their own shading/material editor UI (it does not work at all with Rhino’s material editor), and we can see some previews in GL rendered viewport if we make a shading mode with different lighting. Vray lighting tends to be pitch black in Rhino’s GL.

In both cases there’s a serious lack of integration with Rhino. But at least renderings look good.

Short note from the VfR side - I’m hard testing VfR4 beta and after I skipped VfR3, I think, this could be my future tool. The GPU engine is quite feature complete now and fast, two denoiser can be choosen to clean up some last noise and the plugin is full of little useful features. Also I like that I can use simple lights and not like at Octane, where I need to setup emitters for all cases.

At the moment I use a GTX1080ti+GTX780 and the speed is great - I think not less than Octane, maybe faster. I think, my next step in a few months will be to buy two GTX2080ti. I hope, some RTX turbo features will be added in the next months so that we can see a further hugh speed improvement. But this is speculation. Facts is, VfR4 will be a great all rounder at high pro level.

But I’m still curious to hear and see more from Maverick. :wink:

That’s great to hear Micha. We always liked Vray but it didn’t make so much sense because the speed wasn’t there. I agree about the emitters in Octane can be a pain, hard to make tiny changes in light sometimes.

I’m really excited about the RTX features. Especially if this also transfers over from Vray materials in Rhino to Unreal. I hope they provide a good PBR materials pipeline.

Octane has been working great of the laptops with P5000 cards and it flies on the 4x1080ti renderbox. I’d like to possibly upgrade that box to 4 RTXs and reuse the 1080tis on people’s desktop machines.

How’s the regular GL viewport looking like when you use Vray lights? The other day I was showing Pascal that when I had a couple go area lights in Vray all the Vray materials looked pitch black. It wasn’t the case, if you looked closely you could see a hit of color on the blacks, so we realized that the scene is was just extremely dart in Vray and making a different rendered viewmode with default lighting brought the materials’ diffuse color back. Hopefully the Vray team can tweak that better this time around. Who’s in charge of the beta these days? My only contacts there were Corey and Fernando and they are both gone. I need new Vray friends.

Best,

G

Hi Gustavo,

I didn’t test the GL-look yet, but I should test it too. My impression is, Konstantin is the person to contact for beta question.

Are you using the 4x1080ti in one workstation or a special external box?

Best -
Micha

Sort of both. It’s next to my desk, setup as my main desktop when I’m at my desk and no one else needs it.
I have my monitors/keyboard with dual input to this machine and to my Precision laptop (that’s my steady). So I can switch on the fly and let others run it via Remote Desktop. It also has 36 Xeos so it can do tricks. And it’s on a cart so we can wheel it to a different desk, meeting room or to my car if I have to bring it to a local client. We use it as a virtual photo studio with clients. It’s very nice.

I’m curious to try the CPU+GPU if that becomes available in VfR.

Don’t expect to much from the CPU anymore, at some scenes the speed increase from GPU(1080ti+780) to GPU+CPU(Dual Xeon 32x3.2GHz) was approx. 5%, at others I maybe 20…30%. It looks like the CPU will lost on importance. I love it - so I don’t need to build a new machine every few years anymore, now I can simple change the GPU.

And I’m happy that we can use NVlink - two GTX2080ti and you will get 22GB. That’s a great deal.

Yeah that is very welcome we did hit the ceiling of 11GB in a couple of cases doing automotive renderings. Had to render things in chunks and compose.

It looks like NVlink can also do 4-way and 8-way, not just 2? https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/nvlink/

Someone now needs to make a modern motherboard with more room between each PCI-E connectors to these things can breathe and have rooom for NVlink cables. We have the current 4-GPU setup stacked right next to each other (almost touching) and only thing saving them is the hybrid cooling with fanned radiators on hoses going out of the case. Future is not here just yet.

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Micha, have they changed the menu system for v4? Having everything buried in endless menus that you have to click through each time you want something has killed VfR for me.

Sorry, not yet. I have the impression they hear me, but I’m not sure, they will solve this UI issue. Could you ask this question at the Chaosgroup forum please? It would help that it doesn’t look like it’s my personal problem only. :wink:

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Ha! Ok, will do.