Has octane become over priced?
Angel
Posts: 1,204
With modern tech in iray and reality + Lux.. Octane dont seem to have its edge over other programs anymore. Do you guys think Octane is over charging, with whats out there now days, or do you think it's still well worth the 400.00? The reason I ask... I bought it thhe other day. I did so to learn. I've learned Firefly, 3DL, Reality 2.5, Reality 4. Iray and now I want to learn Octane. I'm always hunting for something to learn. Mainly thats why I bought it. I can care less for the render speeds. Its nice to have speed, but I'm so used to waiting hours for renders it aint no thing to me anymore. I just get bored of the same ol render engines.
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I still prefer it to iray when forced to use D|S
I use it a lot in Carrara
but admitedly is difficult when things have iray only mats converting it all.
So octane don't convert iray surfaces very well?
not in my experience
nothing does inc DzDefault for it or 3Delight loses most of the maps except diffuse
The lack of conversion is more a problem of the EXPORTER than it is the renderer. The geometry and surfaces are not going to be a problem...it's just the materials.
The folks to talk to about the materials problems are ones who wrote the exporter. They will be the ones who need to update the conversion scripts, that's not something that can be done on Studio's side of things.
We get Iray for free with DS, if you want to use it with anything else, it will cost you $300 per year - which makes Octane look a lot less "expensive" when you get a perpetual license for your investment with Octane. IMHO Octane is a great value for the price. There are many features available in Octane that aren't available in Iray (like out of core textures - so you aren't limited by your GPU memory, true volumetrics, GTX10xx/Pascal support, etc.). I have both the Carrara and the DS plugins (both have been upgraded to Octane V3). Of course I may be a bit biased, as I was on the Carrara plugin beta team, but I think Octane is a great product.
However, someone who only wants to load/pose/render will find Octane an unpleasant experience. You will need to edit your shaders to get the best images out of Octane. As with any external render engine, auto-conversion will usually only get you a close approximation, so shader editing typically will be needed. The integration of Iray into DS, and the extensive quantity of pre made content for DS with Iray shaders/mats makes using Iray much easier than Octane, and for many (most?) will make any benefits to using Octane less attractive.
I've actually had pretty good luck with with the translation of Iray skin shaders to Octane using the DS plugin. The image below was done using Saphire for G3F, the skin shaders are a direct translation from the Iray shaders, the hair had some minor modifications, the shoes are a combination of modified DS/Iray shaders and my own Octane shaders, for the blocks I used one of the shaders from the Octane LiveDB with slight modification. Rendered using the PMC kernel. As Wendy (ToeJam) noted, some shaders don't translate perfectly, but I've experienced very few problems with losing any of the texture maps (bump, opacity, etc.) with the DS plugin. On the plus side, there are a lot of great shaders available in the Octane LiveDB, shaders/mats that you would need to pay for with Iray.
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Yeah Octane is great but it is too expensive.
Octane is only expensive to those that are used to hobbyists software and the cheaper prices in this community. If you want to put things into perspective, look up the price of Vray, Maxwell or even Indigo 3.
Correction, it's still expensive to individuals that don't do graphic art for a living, or derive any income whatsoever from their endeavors, and it's still expensive to people who work minimum wage jobs. The concept of what is or isn't expensive is completely relative. It doesn't mean; however, that it's not affordable. Anybody with a job could purchase it after perhaps saving a bit from 2 or 3 paychecks if they truly wanted it, without taking food off the table, but the real question would still be how beneficial is it actually going to be to you which is the question most people ask when they are in the process of trying to make a hobby or a past time start to pay off and are wanting to take it to the next level.
Well besides wanting to take my rendering to the next level... I do plan on finding people who would be willing to hire me to do Comics for them. I can meet deadlines in a snaz with Octane. I mean, sure, for rendering its going to be fun but this is more/less a busniess investment for Comics, and/or Promo renders for things I plan to sell in the future. Thing is. I have Reality 4. Which is slightly more physically accurate then Octane. If I wanted true realism. Reality 4 is the thifty shoppers best option. But with what I want out of it. Animations, and Comics. I do want something with a bit more speed. I mean I said I don't care for the speed and that's not what I got it for. I'll correct myself and say... Not for my own personal art. I can care less for insta render. :P But from a busniess standpoint. I think it's a must have...
If anyone reads this and is interested in my busniess. Please don't be shy to shoot me a PM.
If that's the case the people to ask are the people in the position you wish to be in, and to pick their brains as to what they think as well as what they are using. If you're trying to make it to the big leagues, cost by itself is not going to be too much of a factor. If you need something, then you're going to have to get it. But it is wise to determine if you're getting the absolute value for your money, because regardless to how much something costs, it's a bad investment if the money could have been better spent.
glad you posted this Angel-Wings, had a comment over at rendo commenting on one of the renders I did on my new computer with my two 1080 cards I mentioned even though they weren'tready for iray yet so it was via cpu around two hours which is faster still than what been doing on my other machine and was suggested to me I try Octane, price for me bit much normaly I think and the inability or at least being difficult to use makes it not really something want and I like using iray content though will admit octane renders seen do look really nice probably perfect for non iray content like the daz big cats 2 they look bad in iray tried uber them and oh looked horrible
...the one advantage of Octane (as well as Reality/Lux) is that you don't need to keep the Daz programme a scenefile open once it is submitted to the render engine. This can take a huge load load off the CPU and memory resources. For example having Daz open with my railway station scene loaded while rendering in Iray chews up nearly 9 GB of memory just in idle mode which on my system (10.7 GB free memory out of 12) almost immediately sends the render process into swap mode.
Your're welcome. I dunno... I think stacking 1400.00 worth of Graphics and not having octane seems like a bit of a... Waste... I say if your going to put money into cards like that, [mainly people stack for extra speed]... Why not get a proper engine to complement your investment? You know? I mean in a hypothedical situation... a Nvidia 1070 and octane is going to outrender or match your (x2) 1080's in iray. As far as speed. And guess how much money I spent? About $600.00 less then you did. Not that it's a race or anything. But.... Having that much Graphic power and not having octane... Kinda silly... Having (1) 1080 alone, and Octane blows iray out of the water. And thats a 1.1k investment, over the 1400.00. You've already saved $300.00 and rendering twice as fast on a more advanced render engine then iray. If I were you. Before you go stacking another $700.00 graphics ard into your tower for extra speed. I would buy a $400.00 render engine that is famous for its speed. I say anyone with 2 cards worth more then 500.00 for extra speed in rendering, and does not own octane has bad investment skills.
+1 Agreed.
Same can be done with 3Delight with even less fuss than Octane or Luxrender...no need to convert materials before exporting.
...yes, but does the RIB handle UberEnvironment GI?
...and to use most new content you do have to convert from Iray to 3DL first as little is being released with 3DL shaders.
I still think 199.99 would be a lot more realistic. They would have a ton more customers if they would get off their pedestal. Their price tag has ran off probably 10,000 people...
Not to burst your bubble, but I was an Octane & Poser user. The workflow was MUCH slower, as many have said you have to edit the materials. The maps come over, but shader values don't. Maybe with comics this won't be too bad, as once you convert the materials over on a set most of the work is done.
Octane really isn't much faster with comparible quality settings, but it supports network rendering.
Long story short, faster will depend on your workflow and setup.
I don't think I have evet got one of those to work, so gave up. No idea what caused it and too lazy to chase down the causes of the error messages but it was, from memory, all stuff not being found.
If you don't own several hundred dollars worth of Nvida hardware (which in many cases is outperformed by similar priced AMD/ATI hardware) one could make the argument that maximizing performance ahead of Cuda is not all that cheap either. Otherwise the Cycles engine that Poser decided to go with is cross platform, LuxRender is cross platform and both are free and designed to work with what you have, not what you need to add.
I guess if you are the load and go type artist.. This is true. As for myself I'm used to adjusting every nook n cranny of the surfaces anyways. This wont be an issue with me as I've been toying with surfaces since 3DL. For myself, that is part of the fun of 3D is pushing the limits of the shaders and seeing what it's capable of. I only have maybe 20 renders that were totally stock shaders .
Also, *your bubble, but*
As one of those individuals who doesn't do this for a living or make a dime off my endeavours, Octane has always been just out of reach cost-wise despite how much I had the "I wants". I couldn't justify it after buying Poser Pro. I've purchased Vue in the past to go to that next level, as well as Reality. Reality was certainly the most cost-effective "next step" until my old computer couldn't keep up with the improvements.
At this point with Studio being free and including Iray, I've lost all interest in getting Octane (or upgrading Poser or Vue). I still debate getting a Studio version of Reality now that I have a new computer, but eh. Save myself the cash for now, since this hobby is nothing but a money pit for me.
Yes.
+1
Octane is designed for the professional market, and in that market, the price is quite reasonable. It is a bit pricey for the amateur/hobby market, but that is not Otoy's market base. But there seem to be a number of people here who spend $100-$200 (or more) a month on content for DS, and $600- $1,000++++ on graphics cards for Iray. For those people Octane could be easily affordable. Octane is designed for a production environment, and is actively bringing innovation to it's products, and trying to support new tech ASAP. For example, Octane has had support for 10xx/pascal cards for what, 2-3 months (??), Iray still doesn't support them (yet both are Nvidia products). Octane also supports out of core textures so large scenes can still be rendered via the GPU, with Iray large scenes dump to the CPU.
I'm not slamming Iray, it's a great addition to DS and I use it a lot. But having access to both, Octane just seems more feature rich, polished, and "professional". I got Octane before Iray was integrated into DS. Would I buy it now that DS has Iray? Yes, mainly because of the Carrara plugin, if I only used DS, possibly not. Do I find it a valuable addition to my 3D "toolkit"? Definitely!
The image below was done with the Octane for Carrara plugin. I had to do the usual work on the materials when brining DS content into Carrara (bump/normal maps are almost always lost, and a few other areas always need adjusting), but once the Carrara materials are setup properly, the Octane plugin translates them extremely well. I easily had less than 30 min. doing Octane specific adjustments (probably lees than 10 min.) except for the outfit on the figure on the left, which I created a lot of my own material/shaders for. and edited the default setting on the others a lot (I've used this particular set in DS/Reality/LUX, DS/Iray, DS/Octane, and Carrara/Octane, and it always needs extensive materials/shader work to get the most out of it as it uses a lot of Firefly/3Delight "cheats"). But, it would have easily taken just as long or longer using DS/Iray to make the material/shader adjustments (I seldom use the default materials/shaders regardless of render engine used).
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Fantastic image; one aspect added believability, your figures were posed to interact with the blocks; a surprising number of promo renders they are hovering, or not properly reacting to where they are.
So yeh, Octane may have done its part, but your work beforehand added more imo.
Tools are great, but as ever, its down to the user to (well) use them to the best of their ability.
I see lots of professional level IRAY renders; sadly not all of them are promos for products. But the standard of promos is continueing to improve. IRAY has been with us over a year, how long has Octane been with us?
Good point. I should check to see how much memory Daz Studio and Iray use. My computer only has 8 GB of memory. After Windows 8 boots, only 6.5 GB is free. I don't what is using the other 1.5 GB.
Edit: At least the Iray render engine comes with Daz Studiio.
If I could I would be all over Octane like a fly on a sandwich, as I just see that Otoy have put more thought into their product.. In that with Octane when it comes to GPU rendering you are not limited to the video cards ram like Iray is.. What would have been nice to see is Daz work out a deal with Otoy and have Octane built into Studio but one can only dream..
Windows is notorious for reserving memory and locking it away...so Windows is using that 1.5 GB (which is typical...it uses between 1 and 2 GB just sitting there).
I tried Octane and Octane DS out for about six hours.
I was so disgusted with the developer of the plug in, that I had to go back to the main Octane people. My experience with their support was only marginally better and required me to catch them on a technicality in their own contract in order to get my money back.
The developer I had an issue with is now gone, I believe, so +1 on that.
However, the Octane support people were also problematic, so -1.
All I can say is that it is an extremely high investment for something that, at least back then, had no demo to experiment with first. And I believe they closed the return loophole that I caught them in. So if it turns out to be not your thing, you may be out your investment.
Dude, you do absolutely sweet work.
But as another commenter said, I believe the primary reason your work looks as good as it does is you have mastered your craft, and not that the tools you use are doing the heavy lifting. It's like all those guys who bought RED 4K cameras because they could afford one and David Fincher uses the RED, but nothing they do looks like David Fincher's work. They've got the same tools, but they don't have Fincher's DP behind the camera.
At best your work is a great motivator for what one can achieve when they have the tools and the SKILLS, but between the two, skill and experience counts the most. You have to put in the work to learn this stuff, and a lot of it is learned without even sitting in front of a monitor.