Octane X renderer

Has any one tried the new octane X pre release that was shipped today?

Does it have a rhino plugin?

What’s it like?

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It does not have a Rhino plugin yet, but there is one in the plans! :pray:t3::pray:t3::pray:t3:

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It doesn’t sound so certain.

Awaiting to hear how best to register interest but it sounds very much like we will need to express interest in it for them to develop the plugin.

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@robinp Thanks for sharing!

Yes I totally agree - let´s do that. I already texted them per mail and they said that Octane X will be supported for Rhino Mac as well, but that the developer is currently dealing with some issues.
Would be cool if everyone who is interested would take 5 mins to express their interest to them, so we can have the Rhino Mac version sooner than later. :martial_arts_uniform:

Here is also a nice response by Jules Urbach from the Facebook group:

Rhino Mac seems to be a different deal than the other PlugIns since there was no version before to build on…

All the best,
Rudi

btw: haven’t tried OctaneX yet, but will do so after my current project is finished.

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Does not sound so good

That’s a shame. I really get a feeling that mcneel really aren’t that into providing support for 3rd party render plugins. It’s been so many years now and still developers are saying it’s not feasible.

@nathanletwory @dan @curtisw,

in the above mentioned link from one of Otoy´s developers mentioned the following:

“Yes - I have done quite a lot of work investigating a macOS version of the plugin for Rhino. Unfortunately the macOS UI that Rhino uses offers far fewer controls than the Windows version, and I don’t think it’s possible to replicate the tree structure that the plugin uses in Windows. So I think it would require a complete re-write of the plugin in order for it to work on macOS, and I don’t think that would be possible in the near future.”

Since plans for Rhino 8 are being forged now - is there anything that could be implemented to improve the 3rd party rendering situation? Or maybe we should get some clarity about what exactly would be needed?

Thanks a lot and best wishes,

Rudi

The tree control the developer mentions is built on Winforms, which is Windows specific.

To be cross-platform the best option for the dev is to re-implement their GUI part using Eto.Forms, which is what we use in Rhino to bring the same GUI in a cross-platform manner.

In v8 much of the GUI (on Windows) will be moved to Eto.Forms - at least everything RDK related. Much of it is already Eto.Forms on the Mac.

This makes it easier for any plug-in developer to create (RhinoCommon) plug-ins that will work on both Mac and Windows.

Thanks a lot for the explanation - makes sense. Lets´s see what the future brings…

Cheers