Octane vs IRAY
DarkRepast
Posts: 221
in The Commons
Hello!
I've been doing some research about Octane and even gave a try to the demo. I'm finding it fiddly but pretty powerful.
My question is simple: is it better than IRAY or is it simply easier to make something look amazing with Octane?
Is it worth spending nearly 600 dollars for Octane? I don't think the demo is a good judge of quality since you can't seem to save files to mess with them (even with the watermark).
Any thoughts would be awesome :).
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You need to take a look at this thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/240111/octane-4-with-ai-features/p1
Thank you. I was on the site but I didn't even see the subscription option, just the purchase--and the purchase on the Octane site seems to still be for V3.
I appreciate the link!
While Octane is a great renderer, one of the things that keeps me with Iray if the Iray preview built into DS. I spent years with luxrender and the reality plugin, but not having to open a new window everytime I want to check something was a godsend and I can't imagine going back to not having the preview option.
...personally I like the ability to render outside the Daz programme.
Rendering separate from the Daz programme would eliminate the risk of the process dumping to much slower swap mode on my system because with Daz Iray, a good deal of system resources (memory and processor) needs to be devoted to keeping Daz and the scene open during the process on top of the load for rendering (most jobs end up dumping to the CPU).
The other main attraction for me is Octane's out of core rendering which means I don't have to spend 1,000 or more for a 1080 Ti and can get along just fine with my little 4 GB 750 Ti.
Hmm very good point. So there's no easily accessible Octane preview window or something?
Octane has a very powerfull preview window, I always keep it open. It updates faster, has click focus, and does not jam your machine when you're adjusting morphs. (you can see them update live)
Thanks for the comments.
I've looked at some amazing tutorials regarding Octane. It really produces some gorgeous results. I'm confused by the V4 pricing model. There's a subscription link on the site but I didn't see how you would access the free tier.
On the other hand, I do have the 1080 Ti (got in before the Cryptocurrency nonsense killed prices). However, I have to admit that with the demo of Octane, I produced better looking results barely knowing how to use it than I do with IRAY after a year of learning it.
This!!
Octanes viewport is nothing like what we have (don't have) with Reality/Lux or Luxus/Lux, it is an additional window that you open while working in DS, and you see the changes typically as fast as you do with Iray. The screen can get a little cramped when you have a single display (I use a laptop), but like iray, you get almost immediate feedback in the Octane Render (OR) viewport.
The attached image shows on of the Octane Render Main panel on the left, the DS viewport in the center, and the Octane render viewport on the right. The biggest downside compared to Iray is that you make any changes to the scene/figure in the DS viewport, then they are shown in the OR viewport. But, on the flip side, a big advantage to the OR viewport is that you can pan and zoom the rendering image in the OR viewport while it is rendering (just zooms and pans the image, doesn't change any render settings. Another huge plus is all the very accurate memory usage, and other information, shown in both the OR viewport and the System Tab of the Octane Render Main window, no guessing like with Iray.
Octane 4 isn't available for purchase yet, it's still in beta (the DS plugin isn't update to use the beta yet either), so that's why there aren't any links for V4 on the Otoy website. It's not clear yet if the DS plugin will be free either, it was created by an independent developer, not paid by Otoy, so it may not be (but hoping it will be). The Octane 4 beta (standalone) is available to people with current version 3 licenses. It looks like with V4 they are introducing a whole new license structure, so it may be advantageous to wait and see if the free version will work for you (even if you would need to purchase the DS plugin, you would save a lot). But if you can wait (or don't want to wait) for the full release of V4, they have said that all V3 users will get a free upgrade to V4.
Octane does have a lot of features Iray doesn't, and is a bit faster than Iray, especially with the new AI enhancements. So far I'm getting finished renders about 40% to 60-70% faster using the AI features than with V3, which is pretty impressive for a GTX 970M
. But it has a lot of other nice features too. If you plan to do animations, it's a lot faster than Iray, and will be even better with V4.
This is great info. I wondered about the availability.
I might have inferred the answer to the question I'm about to ask but I'll just put it straight: do you feel it's superior to IRAY for just doing stills and such? I do a lot of rendering for book covers, comic type stuff, etc. The Octane demo, while pretty good at letting me try stuff, was pretty darn limiting.
Thanks!
That's a tough one, and a lot of it depends on personal preference and needs. I've used Iray more than Octane over the past few months, mostly just due to wanting to play with Iray, and partly due to being lazy. But, I think this will begin to change now. The enhancements coming with V4 are really good (but the most recent V3 enhancements are pretty sweet too). For anyone needing fast turn around, I think Brigade (Otoy's real time engine) will be a huge plus (game changer??) with V4. When we get the DS plugin for V3.8, that could be huge for many people. It will include a toon shader (may be important to your work??) and it also has support for OSL shaders, which makes a whole new world of shader resources available (there are a lot of OSL shaders available for free on the web).
Is it superior to Iray? Again, that depends on the user. They both make outstanding images, but if your willing to get "your hands dirty", I think Octane will give you more extendability (if that's even a word). While both are professional products, IMHO Iray seems to be more of a tech demo product for Nvidia (a really good one). Their main focus is making GPU's for gaming, with extending the GPU use for processing intensive applications (Cuda) as a second focus. Iray is one of their successful tech demos for Cuda that may, or may not, get more priority since it was spun off into another "company". Otoy's business is 3D rendering, and they are 100% focused on making it profitable, and competing with other similar products. If everything they are planning from their road map comes to fruition, Octane could be in a completely different class than Iray (it sort of already is, but many of the features aren't a must have for most DS users). Of course, Nvidia may have similar plans for Iray, but we don't have that information available.
So, If I were making a choice now, I would probably wait to see what the new pricing scheme is for V4, and what could really be done with the free version, versus the subscription, versus the permanent (pro) license. However, if I found Octane to really fit my needs now, and easier to use than Iray, I might just be tempted to jump all in early (knowing that I would be upgraded to V4 for free - and probably at least one plugin for free as well). One other thing to think about is with the subscription version you will need to have internet access for license authentication (probably the free version too?), the permanent license will only need web access for initial installation. For most people this isn't an issue, but I thought I should mention it.
I got Octane before DS had Iray, and was on the beta team for the Octane plugin for Carrara, so I'm already invested in it. But, Octane 3 came out after Iray was included in DS, so I had to make a choice to upgrade my DS plugin to V3, or stay with what I had (I got the Carrara plugin upgrade free with my V3 upgrade, but had to pay for the DS plugin). I chose to upgrade because I felt that Iray was a superior product. I don't regret the upgrade, or my investment in Iray one bit. I have 6Gb of RAM on my laptop GPU, but never have to worry about needing more GPU RAM with Octane thanks to out of core textures (and only 4Gb on my desktop, so Iray is pretty constrained there, but Octane isn't). I can't say how you would feel about it if you purchase Octane, but thought it might help to know how I feel. Bottom line, I'm happy with Octane, extremely excited about it's future (especially after test driving the V4 beta), and I feel like it is a more polished and professional product than Iray (but I still like and enjoy Iray as well).
I should also add that I have seen post from people who were unhappy with their purchase of Octane, so once again, it depends on the individual.
I would say Octane is the more powerful renderer, its feature set was far beyond iray even before the most recent updates and V4. As some above have said though, it really depends on user preference. If you are more interested in say, a 'plug n play' renderer, then you would be better off with iRay, given its integration with DS, the shaders you can get on the store, and the fact that all DS content these days comes with iRay shaders.
If you prefer to show a more personal touch to your own images and make them look different to every other daz+iray image out there, then Octane would be better. It will cost you in time, as there will be far more fiddling with settings and tweaking of materials/shaders to get the look you want, especially for something like skin using daz character maps (although there is a good octane skin shader you can buy that is made for daz characters - called RedspecSSS).
You can achieve things with Octane that you cant with iRay, at least not with the Daz version/integration. A good example of this is render passes, being able to render multiple different lights, depth, AO, SSS etc all as seperate passes gives a great deal of control to fine tune those effects by combining them as seperate layers in postwork, or to create interesting and exagerated effects that would not be possible otherwise.
I'm currently testing Octane demo for Daz, it indeed looks very interesting.
I was trying to recreate spotlight behavior in Octane. For example, I want to have light shine on specific spot only, like blue spot in this Iray render (IRAY.png). As you see the light falls only on front showman.
In Octane I made a very small emissive sphere and put it near the spot I want, but I can't figure how to prevent the light to shine in all directions(octane.png). The blue light is on side snowman as well, which I want to prevent.
Does anyone have tips about this kind of set up in Octane?
What you are after is IES lights. If you look on the Octane forum, there are plenty of threads about it. It is not an octane-only concept either.
Basically you plug an IES file (downloaded from many sources online) into the distribution node of the light in question, and it behaves essentially like a map that instructs the renderer how to project the light from the emitter. Many different IES files for different light behaviors
Edit - many people also create custom light/softboxes, simulating light techniques used in photography. Basically placing the emitter inside some open geometry, causing the light to only shine out through the open part of the object. For your purposes, you would use an open cone type object with the flat/bottom part of the cone removed
Are you saying there are no spotlights in Octane? A sphere will emit in all directions of course.
Most, if not all, of this can be done in Iray with Canvasses and Light Path Expressions (in the Advanced tab of Render Settings).
This is great info. I wondered about the availability.
I might have inferred the answer to the question I'm about to ask but I'll just put it straight: do you feel it's superior to IRAY for just doing stills and such? I do a lot of rendering for book covers, comic type stuff, etc. The Octane demo, while pretty good at letting me try stuff, was pretty darn limiting.
Thanks!
This was awesome and I appreciate your time and thoughtful answer!
Thank you for the IES tip. I could get some light directionality with it, but lack of light cone visualization makes it hard to fine tune.
I tried cone-like prop as well. I' still figuring things out, but it seems that to get sharp spotlight you need to put cone really close to the object you illuminating. Thus cone renders too. But if I don't want it to render and make it transparent, it also stops blocking light.
There are no dedicated spotlights in Octane. Local lights(non-HDRI and non-sunlight) are made through emissive textures.
I like to use IRAY, because it just works like a charme in DS. There is a lot of fiddeling with octanerender. No doubt though, that OR is the better renderer. Render done with the new octaneRender V4 in 58 sec. Using V3for DS, then exporting scene to V4.
EDIT: Oh yes, I've tried the denoiser, of course. ;-)
Odd. So maybe make a flat round mesh like a spotlight instead of a sphere?
Create a plane primitive in DS, convert to SubD,, set SubD to 8, apply the proper emission surface (or use the one you have in your sample - make sure it is single sided), move very close to the snowman (with the emission side toward your snowman), set scale to appropriate size, and you should have the effect you are looking for.
...for myself it comes down to either waiting for rendering in Iray to complete in CPU (and sometimes swap) mode or creating more unique as you mention "personalised" works. With either there is still time involved in fine tuning materials lighting and such however if I can reduce render times by 50 - 60% (compared to Iray CPU only mode) with out of core rendering then I feel I am ahead of the game. I would imagine one could save frequently used materials as presets in Octane as well.
Below are all the available options for render passes in the DS plugin for Octane, so everyone can compare for themselves. Octane also has Deep Image rendering, which I don't think Iray has.
I use both, generally I find Iray preferable in terms of workflow and speed. I have my Octane licenses from when I was mostly using Poser. If you were for some reason using Poser... Octane is the only way to fly.
..well once V4 is released I will give it a good try. Again already dealt with converting materials for Lux so not a total stranger to that process. The fact that for Carrara it uses the Carrara shader room is a big plus.
Attached is a screen grab of the emitter settings, I think there are a few very useful features at the bottom that we don't have in Iray.
Do you own V3 and its DAZ module? Then you can download it allready now.
..unfortunately, no. Never really had the financial resources to afford both. With a V4 subscription at 20$ a month, that changes the game (also now have a GPU with 4 GB of VRAM instead of just 1 GB).
In my opnion the main features anyone should be looking for in a PBR engine are:
- Integrated Denoiser: needed for fast rendering of animations. Without a denoiser PBR rendering takes forever. Period.
- Micro Displacement: needed to render sculpted models (daz hd) without taking a huge amount of geometry.
- Motion Blur: absolutely a must for production-ready animation.
IRAY - Now Iray has none of the above. It seems the next release of DAZ Studio will have the denoiser. Not sure what the gpu requirements will be.
OCTANE - The next release of Octane will have the denoiser. Not sure what the gpu requirements will be. I didn't find anything on micro displacement support. Also it seems motion blur is limited to objects that don't change the vertex count. So it's not good for FX.
CYCLES - Has everything of the above. Plus it works on any gpu.