I am looking for a good renderer. I came to know about octane which uses GPU for rendering.
Has anyone been using it with blender?
How good is it?
Hi, work very well, the integration is like Cycles.
There is a demo version of Blender for Octane, test it.
http://render.otoy.com/downloads.php
Octane is better on hard light situations or if you need caustics, dispersion for diamonds and so forth.
It is not faster than Cycles on easy scenes.
Cheers, mib
Yes it is. When it starts up, it’s at least twice as fast cycles.
It however is not as easy to use as cycles.
If you understood what their nodes meant and how to use them then they might be easy as (if not more) than cycles, but going in with no prior explanation, I understood nothing about octane and plenty enough with cycles.
Probably my main beef with octane is that I could NOT figure out how to get a texture to load until I finally found out (through a lot of trial and error) that you need to have a saved image file for it to work because apparently it doesn’t use generated/internal images.
As for the speed, on a cube with a plane, they render about the same speed, but add in an internal shot like a box around the scene for a room (and maybe a hole in it for light), cycles ends up with a lot of grain and takes a longer time to render it.
Cycles:
1.68 @30 /6.28 @100 without light (black grain everywhere)
2.51 @30 /8.20 @100 with light
0.56 @30 /1.74 @100 (out of box/room)
Octane:
1.56 @100
0.77 (out of box/room)
Note: numbers are seconds to render @ total samples (more samples for higher quality)
GPU: GTX 770 OC 2GB
As a visual explanation, you’ll spend half of the time trying to mentally guess what the image looks like before the noise is cleared enough for you to get a clear enough picture. In Octane the picture is never noisy enough that you can’t tell what it is (inside or out), but there’s always some blue shading/shadow on everything (by default) that it’s probably never really what you wanted.
When it comes to rendering quality, Cycles does look better than Octane’s (in my opinion), but if you want the image rendered fast and in motion, Cycles can’t compete with Octane’s speed.