Octane v. Lux

Xfitz

I know several artists use Octane for their renders while others use Lux. I use Daz3d 4.5 Pro and am ready to upgrade my render capacity and I am hoping visitors to this site can give me their opinions on which way to go. Thanks.

BTLProd

Xfitz said:

I know several artists use Octane for their renders while others use Lux. I use Daz3d 4.5 Pro and am ready to upgrade my render capacity and I am hoping visitors to this site can give me their opinions on which way to go. Thanks.

Octane's DAZ Studio plug-in has not been released yet.

Both Lux and Octane are unbiased render engines. They both work, approximately the same way with similar algorithms.

The big differences are speed, and that speed in Octane is highly dependent on your hardware, and cost. Lux Render is free, Octane is 99 Euros.

The Paper Tiger

BTLProductions said:

Xfitz said:

I know several artists use Octane for their renders while others use Lux. I use Daz3d 4.5 Pro and am ready to upgrade my render capacity and I am hoping visitors to this site can give me their opinions on which way to go. Thanks.

Octane's DAZ Studio plug-in has not been released yet.

Both Lux and Octane are unbiased render engines. They both work, approximately the same way with similar algorithms.

The big differences are speed, and that speed in Octane is highly dependent on your hardware, and cost. Lux Render is free, Octane is 99 Euros.

Octane Render is no longer in beta. The 99 Euro price was only a promotion that was available before Octane Render standalone version 1.0 was released.

An Octane Render Standalone Edition v1.0 license is 199 Euros. When the Octane Render for Daz Studio Plugin is released it will be 99 Euros for a licesne (and it requires the Standalone Edition license). A combo that includes the Daz Studio Plugin and the Octane Render Standalone Edition licenses will available at a discounted rate of 279 Euros.

You can use the Standalone Edition without a Daz Studio Plugin by exporting your scenes in the .obj format for rendering in Octane Render. Octane Render requires a NVIDIA graphics card as it uses NVIDIA's CUDA platform. If you have a recent NVIDIA GPU you can take advantage of Octane Render's speed.

Octane Render has a limit for the amount of textures that can be used in a scene and scenes cannot be larger than what will fit into your GPUs RAM. LuxRender is only limited by your systems total RAM. Here are the texture limitations that currently exist for Octane Render.

The current limitation on pre-Kepler GPUs (500 series or earlier NVIDIA GPUs) is:
- 64 LDR RGBA textures
- 32 LDR greyscale textures
- 4 HDR RGBA textures
- 4 HDR greyscale textures

The current limitation on Kepler GPUs (600 series NVIDIA GPUs) is:
- 144 LDR RGBA textures
- 68 LDR greyscale textures
- 10 HDR RGBA textures
- 10 HDR greyscale textures

Octane Render is much faster than LuxRender if you have at minimum a 500 series NVIDIA GPU. LuxRender and Octane Render are capable of producing very similar results and I personally use both to render my work. If you can live with the current limitations of Octane Render which include, texture number limitations (listed above), GPU RAM limitations (geometry and textures must fit into the GPUs RAM), have a 500/600 series NVIDIA GPU and are willing learning to use the Octane Render standalone's UI you can get great results in a short amount of time.

If you would like a more automated approach to rendering your scenes using an exporter for Daz Sudio such as Reality to export your scenes to LuxRender, would be a better option. You'll get great results using this option although it will take more time for rendering images.

Mattymanx

The Paper Tiger has explained Octain.

Lux was at first a CPU only render engine. In recent years they have been developing the Hybrid rendering so that Lux can take advantage of your OpenCL video card, ATI or Nvidia.

You can read about Lux here - http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/Main_Page

Currently, Lux Render is the least expensive option.

BTLProd

ThePaperTiger said:

Octane Render is no longer in beta. The 99 Euro price was only a promotion that was available before Octane Render standalone version 1.0 was released.

An Octane Render Standalone Edition v1.0 license is 199 Euros. When the Octane Render for Daz Studio Plugin is released it will be 99 Euros for a licesne (and it requires the Standalone Edition license). A combo that includes the Daz Studio Plugin and the Octane Render Standalone Edition licenses will available at a discounted rate of 279 Euros.My Mistake. I snagged it early and didn't pay attention to the price increase.

You can use the Standalone Edition without a Daz Studio Plugin by exporting your scenes in the .obj format for rendering in Octane Render. Octane Render requires a NVIDIA graphics card as it uses NVIDIA's CUDA platform. If you have a recent NVIDIA GPU you can take advantage of Octane Render's speed.

Octane Render has a limit for the amount of textures that can be used in a scene and scenes cannot be larger than what will fit into your GPUs RAM. LuxRender is only limited by your systems total RAM. Here are the texture limitations that currently exist for Octane Render.

The current limitation on pre-Kepler GPUs (500 series or earlier NVIDIA GPUs) is:
- 64 LDR RGBA textures
- 32 LDR greyscale textures
- 4 HDR RGBA textures
- 4 HDR greyscale textures

The current limitation on Kepler GPUs (600 series NVIDIA GPUs) is:
- 144 LDR RGBA textures
- 68 LDR greyscale textures
- 10 HDR RGBA textures
- 10 HDR greyscale textures

Octane Render is much faster than LuxRender if you have at minimum a 500 series NVIDIA GPU. LuxRender and Octane Render are capable of producing very similar results and I personally use both to render my work. If you can live with the current limitations of Octane Render which include, texture number limitations (listed above), GPU RAM limitations (geometry and textures must fit into the GPUs RAM), have a 500/600 series NVIDIA GPU and are willing learning to use the Octane Render standalone's UI you can get great results in a short amount of time.

If you would like a more automated approach to rendering your scenes using an exporter for Daz Sudio such as Reality to export your scenes to LuxRender, would be a better option. You'll get great results using this option although it will take more time for rendering images.

You can use Texture Atlas to drastically reduce the number of texture maps used for Octane.

Definitely more information than I had. :) Thanks.

Xfitz

Thanks for the responses. I think I will start out with Lux simply because of the price. Now I have an another question. i notice that the Daz store is offering a product called LUXUS which is suppose to "translate" Daz scenes into the Lux Renderer. Is this option instead of the REALITY Exporter? I am unclear about what function REALITY and/or LUXUS provide.

The Paper Tiger

Xfitz said:

Thanks for the responses. I think I will start out with Lux simply because of the price. Now I have an another question. i notice that the Daz store is offering a product called LUXUS which is suppose to "translate" Daz scenes into the Lux Renderer. Is this option instead of the REALITY Exporter? I am unclear about what function REALITY and/or LUXUS provide.

Luxus and Reality are both plug-ins for Daz Studio and they accomplish the same thing, each exports a scene you setup in Daz Studio to LuxRender. The difference between the two plug-ins is how they accomplish this task.

The Luxus plug-in is integrated into the Daz Studio interface and the Reality plug-in is not. Reality does not expose a lot of the more advanced features of LuxRender, instead keeping things simple for a more automated approach that will deliver great results in the hands of a novice without much need for adjustment. Luxus allows for greater control over the exporting options and LuxRender materials and settings. With the added control that Luxus offers it will more than likely need more adjustment of materials/lights to get great results, Luxus is very new so its limitations and abilities are unknown at this time.

cridgit

Redacted

The Paper Tiger

cridgit said:

Octane was a available for free at some stage (not the beta) as I was under the impression they'd stopped development. I downloaded the free version but I haven't used it as I'm quite happy with Reality and Lux.

Octane Render was never available as a free version. There have been demo versions available, perhaps that is what you have. Development of Octane Render is currently underway and Octane Render Standalone version 1.0 is now live (the Octane Render software is no longer in beta).

mjc1016

The demo version is very limited...

If you bought the beta for 99€, you got the 'gold' release, but if you didn't then you've got to pay full price which is much higher (199 €/$250)

And it seems that all the plugins add another 80€ to that cost.

cridgit

Redacted

Xfitz

cridgit said:

Octane was a available for free at some stage (not the beta) as I was under the impression they'd stopped development. I downloaded the free version but I haven't used it as I'm quite happy with Reality and Lux.

Maybe i'm just missing something but when I type in REALITY 2.0 for DAZ at the Daz Store I get all sorts of products but NOT REALIT 2.0. Do you know where I can (1) get information to read about Reality 2.0 and (2) where can I purchase it? (I assume Reality 2.0 is the latest version? Also, I use a Mac at home but a PC at my photography studio. I heard somewhere that Reality only has a 32 bit version for Macs. Is this still the case?)

Chohole

Reality is not sold at the DAZ 3D store.

I believe you have to go to the creators own website now to buy it. Or it may still be on sale at either Rend or RDNA.

BTLProd

Xfitz said:

cridgit said:

Octane was a available for free at some stage (not the beta) as I was under the impression they'd stopped development. I downloaded the free version but I haven't used it as I'm quite happy with Reality and Lux.

Maybe i'm just missing something but when I type in REALITY 2.0 for DAZ at the Daz Store I get all sorts of products but NOT REALIT 2.0. Do you know where I can (1) get information to read about Reality 2.0 and (2) where can I purchase it? (I assume Reality 2.0 is the latest version? Also, I use a Mac at home but a PC at my photography studio. I heard somewhere that Reality only has a 32 bit version for Macs. Is this still the case?)You might want to give Luxus a shot. Same render engine and the interface is right in DAZ Studio. It will save you some money and gets you to the current version of the Lux Render engine.

Xfitz

Ok, that sounds like a plan. What do you mean though when you say acquiring Luxus will get me the current version of the Lux Render engine? I know Luxus is on sale for about $14. Should I purchase Luxus prior to downloading the Lux Renderer? Sorry for my lack of knowledge here but I am quite in the dark when it comes to these render options.

mjc1016

Xfitz said:

Ok, that sounds like a plan. What do you mean though when you say acquiring Luxus will get me the current version of the Lux Render engine? I know Luxus is on sale for about $14. Should I purchase Luxus prior to downloading the Lux Renderer? Sorry for my lack of knowledge here but I am quite in the dark when it comes to these render options.

Go to http://www.luxrender.net/en_GB/download to grab the version of Lux for your OS/bit count. (the Linux version should have some example scenes the other version may not...)

Miss B

chohole said:

Reality is not sold at the DAZ 3D store.

I believe you have to go to the creators own website now to buy it. Or it may still be on sale at either Rend or RDNA.

I think I saw it recently at Renderosity.

spaceray2005_e908957707

Xfitz said:

Ok, that sounds like a plan. What do you mean though when you say acquiring Luxus will get me the current version of the Lux Render engine? I know Luxus is on sale for about $14. Should I purchase Luxus prior to downloading the Lux Renderer? Sorry for my lack of knowledge here but I am quite in the dark when it comes to these render options.

I also do not have much knowledge about it, but when you buy Luxus (at 9,97$ if you buy two things from March Madness) you will get a "bridge" from Daz Studio to the Lux Render engine software that you can download the standalone version for free.

It does not matter if you buy Luxus prior to downloading Lux Render, they are two separate things, so the things is that to be able to join and use in a easy way you need to buy Luxus to be able to convert and use Lux Render with Daz Studio

spaceray2005_e908957707

Thanks very much PaperTiger for all this whole explanation and details.

ThePaperTiger said:

Octane Render has a limit for the amount of textures that can be used in a scene and scenes cannot be larger than what will fit into your GPUs RAM. LuxRender is only limited by your systems total RAM. Here are the texture limitations that currently exist for Octane Render.

.

So if it cannot be larger than what will fit into your GPUs RAM, it depends of course of the amount of RAM installed inside the GPU card, and recently have appeared newer cards that have 2, 3 or even 4 GB RAM installed on one card, so if you buy a 4 GB RAM GPU card you would have much more textures and much less limit than having a 1 or 2 GB RAM GPU, or am I wrong and there is also a limit in the software and not only in the RAM?

ThePaperTiger said:

The current limitation on pre-Kepler GPUs (500 series or earlier NVIDIA GPUs) is:
- 64 LDR RGBA textures
- 32 LDR greyscale textures
- 4 HDR RGBA textures
- 4 HDR greyscale textures

The current limitation on Kepler GPUs (600 series NVIDIA GPUs) is:
- 144 LDR RGBA textures
- 68 LDR greyscale textures
- 10 HDR RGBA textures
- 10 HDR greyscale textures

.

I mean if you have a 2GB or 4 GB RAM GPU card would these limits you have shown be the same and not be higher if you have a higher RAM GPU Card?

ThePaperTiger said:

An Octane Render Standalone Edition v1.0 license is 199 Euros. When the Octane Render for Daz Studio Plugin is released it will be 99 Euros for a licesne (and it requires the Standalone Edition license). A combo that includes the Daz Studio Plugin and the Octane Render Standalone Edition licenses will available at a discounted rate of 279 Euros.

Of course that this is the main and important difference, and that while Lux Render is Free, Octane is much more expensive at 279 Euros when it will be available and also that you new a good newer GPU card to make it work right. BUT then the main reason is that Octane is much faster to work than Lux Render

so how much? , would it be justified the price of the Octane Licence + plugin + newer GPU card ?

Of course that this is completely depends on how big and large is what you want to render and how complex it may be, and even if you want to make animation or just still 2D images, but would be good to have some kind of benchmark or measure to know how much time would take in Lux Vs Octane.

I know several artists use Octane for their renders while others use Lux. I use Daz3d 4.5 Pro and am ready to upgrade my render capacity and I am hoping visitors to this site can give me their opinions on which way to go. Thanks.

Octane's DAZ Studio plug-in has not been released yet.

Both Lux and Octane are unbiased render engines. They both work, approximately the same way with similar algorithms.

The big differences are speed, and that speed in Octane is highly dependent on your hardware, and cost. Lux Render is free, Octane is 99 Euros.

Octane Render is no longer in beta. The 99 Euro price was only a promotion that was available before Octane Render standalone version 1.0 was released.

An Octane Render Standalone Edition v1.0 license is 199 Euros. When the Octane Render for Daz Studio Plugin is released it will be 99 Euros for a licesne (and it requires the Standalone Edition license). A combo that includes the Daz Studio Plugin and the Octane Render Standalone Edition licenses will available at a discounted rate of 279 Euros.

You can use the Standalone Edition without a Daz Studio Plugin by exporting your scenes in the .obj format for rendering in Octane Render. Octane Render requires a NVIDIA graphics card as it uses NVIDIA's CUDA platform. If you have a recent NVIDIA GPU you can take advantage of Octane Render's speed.

Octane Render has a limit for the amount of textures that can be used in a scene and scenes cannot be larger than what will fit into your GPUs RAM. LuxRender is only limited by your systems total RAM. Here are the texture limitations that currently exist for Octane Render.

The current limitation on pre-Kepler GPUs (500 series or earlier NVIDIA GPUs) is:
- 64 LDR RGBA textures
- 32 LDR greyscale textures
- 4 HDR RGBA textures
- 4 HDR greyscale textures

The current limitation on Kepler GPUs (600 series NVIDIA GPUs) is:
- 144 LDR RGBA textures
- 68 LDR greyscale textures
- 10 HDR RGBA textures
- 10 HDR greyscale textures

Octane Render is much faster than LuxRender if you have at minimum a 500 series NVIDIA GPU. LuxRender and Octane Render are capable of producing very similar results and I personally use both to render my work. If you can live with the current limitations of Octane Render which include, texture number limitations (listed above), GPU RAM limitations (geometry and textures must fit into the GPUs RAM), have a 500/600 series NVIDIA GPU and are willing learning to use the Octane Render standalone's UI you can get great results in a short amount of time.

If you would like a more automated approach to rendering your scenes using an exporter for Daz Sudio such as Reality to export your scenes to LuxRender, would be a better option. You'll get great results using this option although it will take more time for rendering images.

The Paper Tiger

SpaceRay said:

Thanks very much PaperTiger for all this whole explanation and details.

So if it cannot be larger than what will fit into your GPUs RAM, it depends of course of the amount of RAM installed inside the GPU card, and recently have appeared newer cards that have 2, 3 or even 4 GB RAM installed on one card, so if you buy a 4 GB RAM GPU card you would have much more textures and much less limit than having a 1 or 2 GB RAM GPU, or am I wrong and there is also a limit in the software and not only in the RAM?

I mean if you have a 2GB or 4 GB RAM GPU card would these limits you have shown be the same and not be higher if you have a higher RAM GPU Card?

Of course that this is the main and important difference, and that while Lux Render is Free, Octane is much more expensive at 279 Euros when it will be available and also that you new a good newer GPU card to make it work right. BUT then the main reason is that Octane is much faster to work than Lux Render

so how much? , would it be justified the price of the Octane Licence + plugin + newer GPU card ?

Of course that this is completely depends on how big and large is what you want to render and how complex it may be, and even if you want to make animation or just still 2D images, but would be good to have some kind of benchmark or measure to know how much time would take in Lux Vs Octane.

The amount of RAM present on your NVIDIA GPU does not change the texture number limitations, it is a limit based not upon the Octane Render software but rather a limit imposed by NVIDIA. The limitation may be lifted for kepler (600 series) based cards in the future as they have the capability to go beyond the current texture limitations. I use a 2GB NVIDIA 660ti and I have not run into any issues with texture limitations or RAM yet, although I must admit I have not composed any extremely large scenes populated with multiple figures.

Octane is more suited for a professional environment, its speed and price (also plug-ins for programs such as Maya and 3DS Max) reflect this. From a business standpoint 'time is money' and Octane Render would be much more appropriate as it can render stills and animation faster than LuxRender while still maintaining the realistic quality of an unbiased rendering engine. A hobbyist who is not concerned with renders taking more time should consider using LuxRender as it is free and delivers great results.

Xfitz

Ok, since the other day when I began this post, i purchased Luxus and installed the Lux Render Engine. After lots and lots of fussing around with both I am more than a little lost, altho from what I can tell, both are working properly. Rather than go into specific questions at this stage, what I am hoping is for somebody to refer me to some good entry level blogs or threads or best of all tutorials on how to use Lux Renderer. Thanks for all the help so far. I am making progress, I think.

linvanchene

Update / Edit:

Corrected "additional" to "all".
Thank you "mjc1016" for pointing that out.

Guess the intended long version would be this:
One of the main advantages of Lux seems to be that after buying the "Luxus" plugin in the DAZ store one does not need to spend any more money to use "LuxRender" because all the "LuxRender" licenses are free.

- - -

Currently also in the process of trying out LuxRender because of the new "Luxus" plugin.

One of the main advantages of Lux seems to be that all licenses are free.
Cridgit suggested that it is possible to set up a render farm for Lux with the Amazon Web Services.

http://aws.amazon.com/

Does anyone have a backup of that tutorial anywhere that is still online?

If you are interested how render farms are set up at AWS this link may also help:

http://www.judpratt.com/tutorials/ec2-renderfarm/

It covers how to set up a Backburner renderfarm for Autodesk’s 3DS Max and Maya software but may give an idea about the basic principles.

- - -

On the other hand as I am interested in doing animations in a reasonable time - quality relationship I am at the moment somewhat confused by the endless render process of lux.

How are animations done with Luxrender anway?

How does one determin at which point one frame is rendered enough to move on to the next frame? Has anyone seen any impressive animations done with LuxRender?

- - -

Over in the official Ocane forums

http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=23663

this video linked below was posted.

OctaneRender for DAZ Studio Aniblocks test

http://vimeo.com/39469759#at=0

It is supposed to have rendered over night.
It features the kind of speed and quality that might be acceptable.

Can anyone share a similar video done with Luxrender?
Can anyone share a link to a tutorial how to render animations with the Luxus plugin?

mjc1016

linvanchene said:

Currently also in the process of trying out LuxRender because of the new "Luxus" plugin.

One of the main advantages of Lux seems to be that additional licenses are free.

Luxrender is an Open Source, GPL'd renderer...all licenses are free.

Xfitz

cridgit said:

Octane was a available for free at some stage (not the beta) as I was under the impression they'd stopped development. I downloaded the free version but I haven't used it as I'm quite happy with Reality and Lux.

Do you mind telling me how you learned to use Lux Render? So far my renders with Lux take hours and still they seem very pixilated compared to 3D Delight which takes a fraction of that time to render a scene. There are lots of Lux Controls to experiment with but since it takes so long to render each trial I am thinking there must be some manual or how to guide out there somewhere that can make the learning process a lot quicker. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

mjc1016

Xfitz said:

cridgit said:

Octane was a available for free at some stage (not the beta) as I was under the impression they'd stopped development. I downloaded the free version but I haven't used it as I'm quite happy with Reality and Lux.

Do you mind telling me how you learned to use Lux Render? So far my renders with Lux take hours and still they seem very pixilated compared to 3D Delight which takes a fraction of that time to render a scene. There are lots of Lux Controls to experiment with but since it takes so long to render each trial I am thinking there must be some manual or how to guide out there somewhere that can make the learning process a lot quicker. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

First place to go...

http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/Main_Page

Vast, almost overwhelming amount of info/tips...

larsmidnatt

Xfitz said:

cridgit said:

Octane was a available for free at some stage (not the beta) as I was under the impression they'd stopped development. I downloaded the free version but I haven't used it as I'm quite happy with Reality and Lux.

Do you mind telling me how you learned to use Lux Render? So far my renders with Lux take hours and still they seem very pixilated compared to 3D Delight which takes a fraction of that time to render a scene. There are lots of Lux Controls to experiment with but since it takes so long to render each trial I am thinking there must be some manual or how to guide out there somewhere that can make the learning process a lot quicker. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Use less lights to speed up the render. Don't over use glossy materials, they take longer to calculate.

If you are rendering interiors put the scene in a matte black box. This will help contain the light and speed things up.

Hide anything that is not rendered in the frame. Even teeth and tongues inside people. Lux still takes these volumes into consideration when rendering, so turn off anything that can't be seen.

Test render at lower resolutions.

Even then Lux may take hours to finish an image, it depends on your hardware, scene and resolution. But I doubt you can get your Lux renders to be as fast as an optimized 3DL render.

icprncss

Unbiased render engines will keep cycling until you decide to stop it.

Have you read the documentation that come with Luxus and that is available from the Lux Render website?