Thanks a lot for such a nice review and insights about Octane, shaneseymourstudio.
I think, I will wait for v4 of Octane, then. The base version of Octane for Unity is free, so I will try it first to see, if I like it over iray renders.
I am excited for the v4 release for the plugin. The monthly sub allowed me to download the standalone Octane engine v4. I tried to export the scene for use in the standalone via the plugin function that facilitates this, however I am unable to get it to work or show anything in the standalone. I have not spent alot of time on this though so maybe I will focus some on this in the near future as I would really like to use the AI features and other new functions. I will report back if I get anything to work. I will also do a safe for Daz render to post from the plugin in a few.
As it looks now rtx 2080ti is pretty good, I ran a test render, would say demanding, with same settings on gtx 1080ti and rtx 2080ti, both were the same scene, ending condition was 100% convergence ratio
gtx 1080ti 100% 3560 samples / 6200s
rtx 2080ti 100% 3530 samples / 3600s
I assume that the performance will get only better with further updates of iray.
Nvidia's business strategy has been shifting away from supporting their own renderers so they can invest more in the compute and AI space. This has been shown by their dropping support for Mental Ray and handing a lot of the support for iRay to third parties. And let's face it, iRay is not among the top or popular renderers in the market, not even close. Mental Ray was far more successful. There are iRay plugins for only about 3 or 4 content creation applications, then there's Daz Studio, iClone, and Substance Painter. That's about it. Not a great loss from Nvidia's standpoint. But there is always Octane for DS users. They decided to drop Optix and use the Vulkan API for RTX access, putting them in position to offer services for both Nvidia and AMD gpu's. Octane has more than 25 plugins with more planned to come, A big update in the near future, and I doubt users would have reason to worry about them dropping support any time soon. I'm not a big fan of Octane, but if I were a Daz Studio user, I would be knocking down their door right now.
Great marketing pitch.
Does anyone of you uses monthly subscription of Octane for Daz Studio?
How well does it perform?
I see, they have updated version for Unity to Octane 4.00 RC 5, so I may give it a try there, first.
I started a monthly sub for the Octane plugin for daz. The plugin doesn't use the latest v4 of Octane yet and not sure when that will be available.
I played around with the plugin for 20ish hours over the last week and half. I have used the 4.11.0.196 beta with the plugin. There are many little quirks, like alot. I have managed to navigate through most things and can say I truly like Octane results, however, it takes quite some time to learn and get used to things. If you have never used a node editor for materials then you will have to learn to with the plugin. Most materials work well in the conversion process. Lighting is interesting and tricky until you learn the differences and how to utilize it with your scene. Also, I have tested the different anatomical elements available for daz models and only the daz ones convert well with the others showing lines and odd behaviour with the material on them. I am sure there is a way to fix them but I have not focused on it.
Crashes. There will be crashes sometimes. I find that if I make alot of changes and keep rebuilding the scene daz will eventually crash. That is to say that I will make some material changes or displacement map changes etc and then in the separate Octane render window pane I will have to "Rebuild Scene" if it doesn't update correctly, will happen often, and then Daz will crash if I have done that a few times. Not sure if memory consumption is just getting too high or what.
There is just way too much that I have learned in the last week and half to put conscisely in this response so my simplified recap is to be ready to tinker....alot. Great results though when you get things figured out and you will see alot of detail that just doesn't show up in iRay renders, at least from Daz iRay renders.
Interesting post! I am assuming that you had experience with Iray before trying out Octane. I say this because my experience is the opposite of yours. Octane's materials and lights make much more sense to me than Irays weighted system. However what I do find interesting is that no one has written a simple conversion script, for either lights or materials, so that mastery of these two different engines wouldnt be so necessary. Octane to Iray, Iray to Octane conversionms should not be so difficult. Let's hope some really good converter between iray and Octane gets developed one day soon. Seems like such a tool could be a lifeline for Iray if fears of it being left behind by Nvidia turn out to be true, and many people adopt the free Octane 4. Curious where this will all go.
As it looks now rtx 2080ti is pretty good, I ran a test render, would say demanding, with same settings on gtx 1080ti and rtx 2080ti, both were the same scene, ending condition was 100% convergence ratio
gtx 1080ti 100% 3560 samples / 6200s
rtx 2080ti 100% 3530 samples / 3600s
I assume that the performance will get only better with further updates of iray.
So 2080ti IS considerably faster than a 1080ti! Very very very good news!
As it looks now rtx 2080ti is pretty good, I ran a test render, would say demanding, with same settings on gtx 1080ti and rtx 2080ti, both were the same scene, ending condition was 100% convergence ratio
gtx 1080ti 100% 3560 samples / 6200s
rtx 2080ti 100% 3530 samples / 3600s
I assume that the performance will get only better with further updates of iray.
So 2080ti IS considerably faster than a 1080ti! Very very very good news!
Well, it is very, very much more expensive, so it damn well should be.
Nvidia's business strategy has been shifting away from supporting their own renderers so they can invest more in the compute and AI space. This has been shown by their dropping support for Mental Ray and handing a lot of the support for iRay to third parties. And let's face it, iRay is not among the top or popular renderers in the market, not even close. Mental Ray was far more successful. There are iRay plugins for only about 3 or 4 content creation applications, then there's Daz Studio, iClone, and Substance Painter. That's about it. Not a great loss from Nvidia's standpoint. But there is always Octane for DS users. They decided to drop Optix and use the Vulkan API for RTX access, putting them in position to offer services for both Nvidia and AMD gpu's. Octane has more than 25 plugins with more planned to come, A big update in the near future, and I doubt users would have reason to worry about them dropping support any time soon. I'm not a big fan of Octane, but if I were a Daz Studio user, I would be knocking down their door right now.
Great marketing pitch.
Does anyone of you uses monthly subscription of Octane for Daz Studio?
How well does it perform?
I see, they have updated version for Unity to Octane 4.00 RC 5, so I may give it a try there, first.
I started a monthly sub for the Octane plugin for daz. The plugin doesn't use the latest v4 of Octane yet and not sure when that will be available.
I played around with the plugin for 20ish hours over the last week and half. I have used the 4.11.0.196 beta with the plugin. There are many little quirks, like alot. I have managed to navigate through most things and can say I truly like Octane results, however, it takes quite some time to learn and get used to things. If you have never used a node editor for materials then you will have to learn to with the plugin. Most materials work well in the conversion process. Lighting is interesting and tricky until you learn the differences and how to utilize it with your scene. Also, I have tested the different anatomical elements available for daz models and only the daz ones convert well with the others showing lines and odd behaviour with the material on them. I am sure there is a way to fix them but I have not focused on it.
Crashes. There will be crashes sometimes. I find that if I make alot of changes and keep rebuilding the scene daz will eventually crash. That is to say that I will make some material changes or displacement map changes etc and then in the separate Octane render window pane I will have to "Rebuild Scene" if it doesn't update correctly, will happen often, and then Daz will crash if I have done that a few times. Not sure if memory consumption is just getting too high or what.
There is just way too much that I have learned in the last week and half to put conscisely in this response so my simplified recap is to be ready to tinker....alot. Great results though when you get things figured out and you will see alot of detail that just doesn't show up in iRay renders, at least from Daz iRay renders.
Interesting post! I am assuming that you had experience with Iray before trying out Octane. I say this because my experience is the opposite of yours. Octane's materials and lights make much more sense to me than Irays weighted system. However what I do find interesting is that no one has written a simple conversion script, for either lights or materials, so that mastery of these two different engines wouldnt be so necessary. Octane to Iray, Iray to Octane conversionms should not be so difficult. Let's hope some really good converter between iray and Octane gets developed one day soon. Seems like such a tool could be a lifeline for Iray if fears of it being left behind by Nvidia turn out to be true, and many people adopt the free Octane 4. Curious where this will all go.
Nvidia's business strategy has been shifting away from supporting their own renderers so they can invest more in the compute and AI space. This has been shown by their dropping support for Mental Ray and handing a lot of the support for iRay to third parties. And let's face it, iRay is not among the top or popular renderers in the market, not even close. Mental Ray was far more successful. There are iRay plugins for only about 3 or 4 content creation applications, then there's Daz Studio, iClone, and Substance Painter. That's about it. Not a great loss from Nvidia's standpoint. But there is always Octane for DS users. They decided to drop Optix and use the Vulkan API for RTX access, putting them in position to offer services for both Nvidia and AMD gpu's. Octane has more than 25 plugins with more planned to come, A big update in the near future, and I doubt users would have reason to worry about them dropping support any time soon. I'm not a big fan of Octane, but if I were a Daz Studio user, I would be knocking down their door right now.
Great marketing pitch.
Does anyone of you uses monthly subscription of Octane for Daz Studio?
How well does it perform?
I see, they have updated version for Unity to Octane 4.00 RC 5, so I may give it a try there, first.
I started a monthly sub for the Octane plugin for daz. The plugin doesn't use the latest v4 of Octane yet and not sure when that will be available.
I played around with the plugin for 20ish hours over the last week and half. I have used the 4.11.0.196 beta with the plugin. There are many little quirks, like alot. I have managed to navigate through most things and can say I truly like Octane results, however, it takes quite some time to learn and get used to things. If you have never used a node editor for materials then you will have to learn to with the plugin. Most materials work well in the conversion process. Lighting is interesting and tricky until you learn the differences and how to utilize it with your scene. Also, I have tested the different anatomical elements available for daz models and only the daz ones convert well with the others showing lines and odd behaviour with the material on them. I am sure there is a way to fix them but I have not focused on it.
Crashes. There will be crashes sometimes. I find that if I make alot of changes and keep rebuilding the scene daz will eventually crash. That is to say that I will make some material changes or displacement map changes etc and then in the separate Octane render window pane I will have to "Rebuild Scene" if it doesn't update correctly, will happen often, and then Daz will crash if I have done that a few times. Not sure if memory consumption is just getting too high or what.
There is just way too much that I have learned in the last week and half to put conscisely in this response so my simplified recap is to be ready to tinker....alot. Great results though when you get things figured out and you will see alot of detail that just doesn't show up in iRay renders, at least from Daz iRay renders.
Interesting post! I am assuming that you had experience with Iray before trying out Octane. I say this because my experience is the opposite of yours. Octane's materials and lights make much more sense to me than Irays weighted system. However what I do find interesting is that no one has written a simple conversion script, for either lights or materials, so that mastery of these two different engines wouldnt be so necessary. Octane to Iray, Iray to Octane conversionms should not be so difficult. Let's hope some really good converter between iray and Octane gets developed one day soon. Seems like such a tool could be a lifeline for Iray if fears of it being left behind by Nvidia turn out to be true, and many people adopt the free Octane 4. Curious where this will all go.
I had only used iRay before trying Octane for the first time a couple of weeks ago now. The plugin I am using is for DAZ and converts the materials automatically with some having to be tweaked after such as mirrors I have found. The reason I mentioned the lights is because the way the plugin operates it was not apparent to me how to deal with lighting. In the plugin all that I could do at first was use the sun node for Octane or an hdr image. I finally figured out that I could select a light from my scene, won't work with DAZ spotlights, but a mesh light or other surface can be made into a light source using materials for it which I found from the live DB, a feature I love, and applied to light surfaces. From what I can find there is no way within the plugin to add an Octane light. In the standalone Octane software I am sure it is very simple to add light sources but the plugin does not offer it that I can find aside from the aforementioned hdr or sun light. It also took me awhile to figure out how displacement works with the plugin but once I did I was very happy to find it works much better than what I have figured out in DAZ to do. If I can figure out how to get the plugin's ability to export a scene that can be opened in Octane standalone to work then I will certainly try to work within it. Can't wait to try Octane with a 2080ti...or 2!
As it looks now rtx 2080ti is pretty good, I ran a test render, would say demanding, with same settings on gtx 1080ti and rtx 2080ti, both were the same scene, ending condition was 100% convergence ratio
gtx 1080ti 100% 3560 samples / 6200s
rtx 2080ti 100% 3530 samples / 3600s
I assume that the performance will get only better with further updates of iray.
So 2080ti IS considerably faster than a 1080ti! Very very very good news!
It varies, it is between 65-70+% depending on the scene, recently ran another different scene with same conditions and rtx card was 66% faster, but it's only 25-35% in games as the reviews says, I don't know why tho.
Nvidia's business strategy has been shifting away from supporting their own renderers so they can invest more in the compute and AI space. This has been shown by their dropping support for Mental Ray and handing a lot of the support for iRay to third parties. And let's face it, iRay is not among the top or popular renderers in the market, not even close. Mental Ray was far more successful. There are iRay plugins for only about 3 or 4 content creation applications, then there's Daz Studio, iClone, and Substance Painter. That's about it. Not a great loss from Nvidia's standpoint. But there is always Octane for DS users. They decided to drop Optix and use the Vulkan API for RTX access, putting them in position to offer services for both Nvidia and AMD gpu's. Octane has more than 25 plugins with more planned to come, A big update in the near future, and I doubt users would have reason to worry about them dropping support any time soon. I'm not a big fan of Octane, but if I were a Daz Studio user, I would be knocking down their door right now.
Great marketing pitch.
Does anyone of you uses monthly subscription of Octane for Daz Studio?
How well does it perform?
I see, they have updated version for Unity to Octane 4.00 RC 5, so I may give it a try there, first.
I started a monthly sub for the Octane plugin for daz. The plugin doesn't use the latest v4 of Octane yet and not sure when that will be available.
I played around with the plugin for 20ish hours over the last week and half. I have used the 4.11.0.196 beta with the plugin. There are many little quirks, like alot. I have managed to navigate through most things and can say I truly like Octane results, however, it takes quite some time to learn and get used to things. If you have never used a node editor for materials then you will have to learn to with the plugin. Most materials work well in the conversion process. Lighting is interesting and tricky until you learn the differences and how to utilize it with your scene. Also, I have tested the different anatomical elements available for daz models and only the daz ones convert well with the others showing lines and odd behaviour with the material on them. I am sure there is a way to fix them but I have not focused on it.
Crashes. There will be crashes sometimes. I find that if I make alot of changes and keep rebuilding the scene daz will eventually crash. That is to say that I will make some material changes or displacement map changes etc and then in the separate Octane render window pane I will have to "Rebuild Scene" if it doesn't update correctly, will happen often, and then Daz will crash if I have done that a few times. Not sure if memory consumption is just getting too high or what.
There is just way too much that I have learned in the last week and half to put conscisely in this response so my simplified recap is to be ready to tinker....alot. Great results though when you get things figured out and you will see alot of detail that just doesn't show up in iRay renders, at least from Daz iRay renders.
Interesting post! I am assuming that you had experience with Iray before trying out Octane. I say this because my experience is the opposite of yours. Octane's materials and lights make much more sense to me than Irays weighted system. However what I do find interesting is that no one has written a simple conversion script, for either lights or materials, so that mastery of these two different engines wouldnt be so necessary. Octane to Iray, Iray to Octane conversionms should not be so difficult. Let's hope some really good converter between iray and Octane gets developed one day soon. Seems like such a tool could be a lifeline for Iray if fears of it being left behind by Nvidia turn out to be true, and many people adopt the free Octane 4. Curious where this will all go.
I had only used iRay before trying Octane for the first time a couple of weeks ago now. The plugin I am using is for DAZ and converts the materials automatically with some having to be tweaked after such as mirrors I have found. The reason I mentioned the lights is because the way the plugin operates it was not apparent to me how to deal with lighting. In the plugin all that I could do at first was use the sun node for Octane or an hdr image. I finally figured out that I could select a light from my scene, won't work with DAZ spotlights, but a mesh light or other surface can be made into a light source using materials for it which I found from the live DB, a feature I love, and applied to light surfaces. From what I can find there is no way within the plugin to add an Octane light. In the standalone Octane software I am sure it is very simple to add light sources but the plugin does not offer it that I can find aside from the aforementioned hdr or sun light. It also took me awhile to figure out how displacement works with the plugin but once I did I was very happy to find it works much better than what I have figured out in DAZ to do. If I can figure out how to get the plugin's ability to export a scene that can be opened in Octane standalone to work then I will certainly try to work within it. Can't wait to try Octane with a 2080ti...or 2!
Oh yes, we are speaking the same language of yummy! I realize that a 2080ti is a bit wasted on my current system so I'll need to start over from scratch to take any real advantage of what Octane 4 will be able to do with these RTX cards fully enabled. Octane truly makes me want to spend time rendering. It really is an elegant software, but I am recently finding that Iray's approach is in some ways more honest, and the way the tools are displayed in Iray actually makes sense to me now. One thing Iray had the jump on was the adoption of the Universal and Metallic materials, as elegant Octane has only recently developed its own versions of these. Add to these mterial classes is Octane 4's adoption of the main and most relevant multiple BRDF profiles. Huge steps! Major steps I'd say for Octane. A sort of normalization. Octane is in my opinion much better positioned to probe into the feature film arena.
After running the benchmark scene I was confused why the RTX 2080 Ti did not seem to use OptiX Prime Acceleration..
That post indeed explains that all:
Another thing to note is that OptiX Prime will not be accelerated on RTX; only OptiX will. This is significant because Iray uses OptiX Prime, not OptiX. Thus, Iray does not get RTX ray tracing acceleration on my RTX 2080, and something big will have to change before it does get accelerated. I don't know whether Nvidia will port Iray to OptiX, which would be a big effort, or whether that will be done by MI Genius or Lightwork Design, or it will just not happen. Another possibility is for some party to implement OptiX Prime on top of OptiX to get access to RTX hardware acceleration.
If I were DAZ I would be privately freaking out about my renderer being left in the dust because it's not hardware accelerated, even though the same company made the renderer and the hardware acceleration.
As it looks now rtx 2080ti is pretty good, I ran a test render, would say demanding, with same settings on gtx 1080ti and rtx 2080ti, both were the same scene, ending condition was 100% convergence ratio
gtx 1080ti 100% 3560 samples / 6200s
rtx 2080ti 100% 3530 samples / 3600s
I assume that the performance will get only better with further updates of iray.
So 2080ti IS considerably faster than a 1080ti! Very very very good news!
It varies, it is between 65-70+% depending on the scene, recently ran another different scene with same conditions and rtx card was 66% faster, but it's only 25-35% in games as the reviews says, I don't know why tho.
Can you try out the scene a few pages back? Specifically on page 17 of this thread where DAZ_Rawb posted his scene. It rendered on my 1080 Ti in 5m 40s.
Otoy still has MDL on the list of shader languages that may be supported in the future in Octane.
- - -
DAZ Studilo Iray would need to be adjusted to output MDL information in a way that can be read by the Octane for DAZ Studio plugin.
Phrased differently:
Every Iray material node could include some MDL tags that could be read by Octane.
It's the other way. MDL is on top of the render engine. Octane has to support it. Once it can read and write mdl files, there is nothing to do but to read the mdl file. No conversion needed for the shaders
When you want to go from one engine to the other, you just have to transfer maps and values for the shader. That would be the plugin job
Nvidia's business strategy has been shifting away from supporting their own renderers so they can invest more in the compute and AI space. This has been shown by their dropping support for Mental Ray and handing a lot of the support for iRay to third parties. And let's face it, iRay is not among the top or popular renderers in the market, not even close. Mental Ray was far more successful. There are iRay plugins for only about 3 or 4 content creation applications, then there's Daz Studio, iClone, and Substance Painter. That's about it. Not a great loss from Nvidia's standpoint. But there is always Octane for DS users. They decided to drop Optix and use the Vulkan API for RTX access, putting them in position to offer services for both Nvidia and AMD gpu's. Octane has more than 25 plugins with more planned to come, A big update in the near future, and I doubt users would have reason to worry about them dropping support any time soon. I'm not a big fan of Octane, but if I were a Daz Studio user, I would be knocking down their door right now.
Great marketing pitch.
Does anyone of you uses monthly subscription of Octane for Daz Studio?
How well does it perform?
I see, they have updated version for Unity to Octane 4.00 RC 5, so I may give it a try there, first.
I started a monthly sub for the Octane plugin for daz. The plugin doesn't use the latest v4 of Octane yet and not sure when that will be available.
I played around with the plugin for 20ish hours over the last week and half. I have used the 4.11.0.196 beta with the plugin. There are many little quirks, like alot. I have managed to navigate through most things and can say I truly like Octane results, however, it takes quite some time to learn and get used to things. If you have never used a node editor for materials then you will have to learn to with the plugin. Most materials work well in the conversion process. Lighting is interesting and tricky until you learn the differences and how to utilize it with your scene. Also, I have tested the different anatomical elements available for daz models and only the daz ones convert well with the others showing lines and odd behaviour with the material on them. I am sure there is a way to fix them but I have not focused on it.
Crashes. There will be crashes sometimes. I find that if I make alot of changes and keep rebuilding the scene daz will eventually crash. That is to say that I will make some material changes or displacement map changes etc and then in the separate Octane render window pane I will have to "Rebuild Scene" if it doesn't update correctly, will happen often, and then Daz will crash if I have done that a few times. Not sure if memory consumption is just getting too high or what.
There is just way too much that I have learned in the last week and half to put conscisely in this response so my simplified recap is to be ready to tinker....alot. Great results though when you get things figured out and you will see alot of detail that just doesn't show up in iRay renders, at least from Daz iRay renders.
Interesting post! I am assuming that you had experience with Iray before trying out Octane. I say this because my experience is the opposite of yours. Octane's materials and lights make much more sense to me than Irays weighted system. However what I do find interesting is that no one has written a simple conversion script, for either lights or materials, so that mastery of these two different engines wouldnt be so necessary. Octane to Iray, Iray to Octane conversionms should not be so difficult. Let's hope some really good converter between iray and Octane gets developed one day soon. Seems like such a tool could be a lifeline for Iray if fears of it being left behind by Nvidia turn out to be true, and many people adopt the free Octane 4. Curious where this will all go.
I had only used iRay before trying Octane for the first time a couple of weeks ago now. The plugin I am using is for DAZ and converts the materials automatically with some having to be tweaked after such as mirrors I have found. The reason I mentioned the lights is because the way the plugin operates it was not apparent to me how to deal with lighting. In the plugin all that I could do at first was use the sun node for Octane or an hdr image. I finally figured out that I could select a light from my scene, won't work with DAZ spotlights, but a mesh light or other surface can be made into a light source using materials for it which I found from the live DB, a feature I love, and applied to light surfaces. From what I can find there is no way within the plugin to add an Octane light. In the standalone Octane software I am sure it is very simple to add light sources but the plugin does not offer it that I can find aside from the aforementioned hdr or sun light. It also took me awhile to figure out how displacement works with the plugin but once I did I was very happy to find it works much better than what I have figured out in DAZ to do. If I can figure out how to get the plugin's ability to export a scene that can be opened in Octane standalone to work then I will certainly try to work within it. Can't wait to try Octane with a 2080ti...or 2!
Oh yes, we are speaking the same language of yummy! I realize that a 2080ti is a bit wasted on my current system so I'll need to start over from scratch to take any real advantage of what Octane 4 will be able to do with these RTX cards fully enabled. Octane truly makes me want to spend time rendering. It really is an elegant software, but I am recently finding that Iray's approach is in some ways more honest, and the way the tools are displayed in Iray actually makes sense to me now. One thing Iray had the jump on was the adoption of the Universal and Metallic materials, as elegant Octane has only recently developed its own versions of these. Add to these mterial classes is Octane 4's adoption of the main and most relevant multiple BRDF profiles. Huge steps! Major steps I'd say for Octane. A sort of normalization. Octane is in my opinion much better positioned to probe into the feature film arena.
...where Octane catches my attention is it's Out Of Core Rendering mode. Pretty much with this there is little need for expensive Quadro GPUs (particularly the RX series) to get a high amount of VRAM so that the entire process doesn't dump to the CPU or crash if it exceeds the card's memory. As I have read it is still faster than Iray CPU rendering which is a big plus.
If Otoy is indeed embracing the Vulkan API in the 2019 release, that could mean it no longer is locked to just Nvidia. A Vega WX9100 is half the price of a Titan-V. and has 16 GB of VRAM along with almost as many stream processors (cores). Yeah it doesn't have Tensor cores, but I'll take the trade off for more VRAM and a lower price tag.
For their next series of cards, I understand AMD is developing a high speed bi directional link similar to Nvidia's NVLink. It remains to be seen whether this will only be available on the WX series or also find its way to the consumer Radeon line as well. AMD needs something to get a jump on Nvidia, and that would be huge if it happened. Keeping an eye on this.
We got an 2080RTX in the office today and gave it a try on the latest Daz Studio public beta and the latest drivers from Nvidia.
Good news is that it works right out of the box. Currently the performance is pretty good but we don't believe that the hardware raytracing functionality has been enabled in the currently shipping version of Iray.
In the attached test scene, with the 2080RTX in a older computer (compared to the machine with the 980Ti) here is what we found:
980Ti: 10 minutes and 30 seconds
2080RTX: 6 minutes and 3 seconds.
I wasn't able to test with a 1080 or 1080Ti machine today but hopefully the attached scene file (which can be rendered with only free assets you get when you sign up on our site) will let you all judge for yourself.
I have an Ryzen 5 2600 | RTX 2080Ti system checking in - RTX 2080Ti does this test in 4 minutes and 35 seconds. Very impressive!
I was really interested in using Unity for 3d artwork. Humble bundle had Gaia on sale a little while ago for $10 along with a ton of assets, but I contacted the unity helpdesk to ask them if you were allowed to use Unity for 3d artwork and this was their reply:
Hi there.
Thank you for reaching out to us!
Unfortunately, under the current EULA, we cannot allow users to create standalone images that do not relate directly to interactive media.
For example, currently, we only allow users to create images if they are being used to advertise their game/app.
However, we are currently expanding the Unity Editor to be used with other forms of media & art which you may find interesting. Please see the link below:
...if you are not yet convinced about dropping dropping a lot of zlotys on a 20xx card and need something better than what you currently have, this just popped up in my inbox:
I was really interested in using Unity for 3d artwork. Humble bundle had Gaia on sale a little while ago for $10 along with a ton of assets, but I contacted the unity helpdesk to ask them if you were allowed to use Unity for 3d artwork and this was their reply:
Hi there.
Thank you for reaching out to us!
Unfortunately, under the current EULA, we cannot allow users to create standalone images that do not relate directly to interactive media.
For example, currently, we only allow users to create images if they are being used to advertise their game/app.
However, we are currently expanding the Unity Editor to be used with other forms of media & art which you may find interesting. Please see the link below:
Thanks for checking this out. It will be interesting to see, how much they charge for the film making in Unity.
Great, that I have iClone 7 and the new Character Creator 3 with iray add on, so it will keep me busy for a while
and I can create both movies and still images with them under Reallusion EULA.
If they're moving in that direction I don't see any reason why they wouldn't let us use it in the future. There are people using it for art, and even uploading it to the Unity forums and no one seems to mind, so I don't think they really care if you're doing it for fun, but I wanted to use it for commercial purposes, so for me, that was a strict no-no.
Well Linus has done a review of sorts on the RTX 2070 and well yes, while okay if you want SLI/NVLink then don't bother as the RTX 2070's do not have SLI functionality.. If you want SLI/NVLink you will have to go to either the 2080 or 2080Ti..
...if you are not yet convinced about dropping dropping a lot of zlotys on a 20xx card and need something better than what you currently have, this just popped up in my inbox:
Thank you for the "heads up," kyoto kid. I ordered one before the sale ended to replace my 680. I had originally been looking for a 1060, but the sale made the step up afordable.
Well Linus has done a review of sorts on the RTX 2070 and well yes, while okay if you want SLI/NVLink then don't bother as the RTX 2070's do not have SLI functionality.. If you want SLI/NVLink you will have to go to either the 2080 or 2080Ti..
..I have to say "thumbs up" on the video. A 200$ increase over the 1070 and no linking provision for the gaming community is definitely hits against the 2070. I saw this weeks ago.
Again the fact that few if any games embrace ray tracing, and for us using Daz, we likely will not get the benefit either as Nvidia will not be enabling Optix Prime on consumer RTX cards makes, me want to quote an old advert:
Where's the Beef?
So if you are into any semi-serious large scale high quality graphics work without waiting an eternity for the render process, it is either dig deep for a Quadro or head over to Otoy and Octane.
...the previous statement was a personal comment that does not necessarily reflect the view of these forums.
Optix has nothing to do with any video game, so whether Optix Prime gets the ray tracing acceleration has no relation to how video games adopt ray tracing or not. The way video games will add ray tracing is through either Vulcan or DirectX12, and mostly DirectX12. The vast majority of games are going to be on DirectX. Iray does not use DirectX or Vulcan. DirectX12 just recently released its latest version which adds ray tracing support. So now it is only a matter of getting games to add support.
Gamers are not too thrilled with ray tracing simply because of the performance hit that the games listed so far have. Metro and Battlefield 5 are only targeting 1080p when ray tracing is enabled. Gamers do not spend $1200 to play at 1080p. If you are buying a 2080ti to game, you are playing at 4K resolution. Once the performance catches up and you can game in 4K with ray tracing, and lower tier cards like the x60 series get ray tracing, then the movement to ray tracing will catch fire. And then there is of course, the price. If Turing was less expensive, the reaction to it would be very different. I have never seen so much negativity towards a Nvidia GPU launch.
The only question at hand is how will Nvidia treat Iray. Gaming is a popular thing around the world, but Iray is an extremely niche thing. Will Nvidia even bother with something so niche? Or might they just go in another direction? These are valid questions. A bunch of people are looking at an alternative...like Octane, based on a single comment about Optix Prime. And I can understand why. Octane is getting improvements and looks to offer major advantages over Iray. Out of core rendering is MASSIVE and cannot be under stated. This is the single most idiotic problem with Iray, and now nobody can defend it with Octane adding out of core rendering. A quality denoiser, and support for ray tracing acceleration will make Octane vastly superior in every possible way. Even if Nvidia makes the changes to take advantage of RTX, Iray would STILL be way, way behind Octane with no out of core support. Whether you be a user who does not have the cash for a ridiculous GPU, or a pro who does, there would be no reason to choose Iray over Octane in 2019.
If Octane has these features, what render engine would you choose?
It varies, it is between 65-70+% depending on the scene, recently ran another different scene with same conditions and rtx card was 66% faster, but it's only 25-35% in games as the reviews says, I don't know why tho.
Tensor cores. No video game is using Tensor cores yet, but I believe the Volta driver that the Daz beta uses does.
...exactly. why I am looking at the Octane subscription plan. No need for a big expensive Quadro with OOC rendering. The only downside I need to open a PayPal account (I had issues with them years ago) but 20$ per month for the Daz version is far better for my budget than having to plunk down nearly 600$ up front. Yeah I'll have to get used to a node system but the work I've seen and form what I have read and heard, a small issue compared to Iray which in Daz does not offer all the features of the standalone (just like what occurred with 3DL). I've worked with Reality/Lux so having to process and convert textures is nothing new to me.
Comments
I am excited for the v4 release for the plugin. The monthly sub allowed me to download the standalone Octane engine v4. I tried to export the scene for use in the standalone via the plugin function that facilitates this, however I am unable to get it to work or show anything in the standalone. I have not spent alot of time on this though so maybe I will focus some on this in the near future as I would really like to use the AI features and other new functions. I will report back if I get anything to work. I will also do a safe for Daz render to post from the plugin in a few.
As it looks now rtx 2080ti is pretty good, I ran a test render, would say demanding, with same settings on gtx 1080ti and rtx 2080ti, both were the same scene, ending condition was 100% convergence ratio
gtx 1080ti 100% 3560 samples / 6200s
rtx 2080ti 100% 3530 samples / 3600s
I assume that the performance will get only better with further updates of iray.
Interesting post! I am assuming that you had experience with Iray before trying out Octane. I say this because my experience is the opposite of yours. Octane's materials and lights make much more sense to me than Irays weighted system. However what I do find interesting is that no one has written a simple conversion script, for either lights or materials, so that mastery of these two different engines wouldnt be so necessary. Octane to Iray, Iray to Octane conversionms should not be so difficult. Let's hope some really good converter between iray and Octane gets developed one day soon. Seems like such a tool could be a lifeline for Iray if fears of it being left behind by Nvidia turn out to be true, and many people adopt the free Octane 4. Curious where this will all go.
So 2080ti IS considerably faster than a 1080ti! Very very very good news!
Well, it is very, very much more expensive, so it damn well should be.
Now those are something I would buy.
I had only used iRay before trying Octane for the first time a couple of weeks ago now. The plugin I am using is for DAZ and converts the materials automatically with some having to be tweaked after such as mirrors I have found. The reason I mentioned the lights is because the way the plugin operates it was not apparent to me how to deal with lighting. In the plugin all that I could do at first was use the sun node for Octane or an hdr image. I finally figured out that I could select a light from my scene, won't work with DAZ spotlights, but a mesh light or other surface can be made into a light source using materials for it which I found from the live DB, a feature I love, and applied to light surfaces. From what I can find there is no way within the plugin to add an Octane light. In the standalone Octane software I am sure it is very simple to add light sources but the plugin does not offer it that I can find aside from the aforementioned hdr or sun light. It also took me awhile to figure out how displacement works with the plugin but once I did I was very happy to find it works much better than what I have figured out in DAZ to do. If I can figure out how to get the plugin's ability to export a scene that can be opened in Octane standalone to work then I will certainly try to work within it. Can't wait to try Octane with a 2080ti...or 2!
It varies, it is between 65-70+% depending on the scene, recently ran another different scene with same conditions and rtx card was 66% faster, but it's only 25-35% in games as the reviews says, I don't know why tho.
Oh yes, we are speaking the same language of yummy! I realize that a 2080ti is a bit wasted on my current system so I'll need to start over from scratch to take any real advantage of what Octane 4 will be able to do with these RTX cards fully enabled. Octane truly makes me want to spend time rendering. It really is an elegant software, but I am recently finding that Iray's approach is in some ways more honest, and the way the tools are displayed in Iray actually makes sense to me now. One thing Iray had the jump on was the adoption of the Universal and Metallic materials, as elegant Octane has only recently developed its own versions of these. Add to these mterial classes is Octane 4's adoption of the main and most relevant multiple BRDF profiles. Huge steps! Major steps I'd say for Octane. A sort of normalization. Octane is in my opinion much better positioned to probe into the feature film arena.
After running the benchmark scene I was confused why the RTX 2080 Ti did not seem to use OptiX Prime Acceleration..
That post indeed explains that all:
Source: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3993836/#Comment_3993836
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There could be an alternative solution that may work out for all parties involved:
On August 13 2018 Nvidia announced that the Material Definition Language MDL is now available open source:
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/08/13/open-source-mdl-sdk/
Iray is based on MDL.
Otoy still has MDL on the list of shader languages that may be supported in the future in Octane.
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DAZ Studio Iray would need to be adjusted to output MDL information in a way that can be read by the Octane for DAZ Studio plugin.
Phrased differently:
Every Iray material node could include some MDL tags that could be read by Octane.
Now: an autoconversion transforms MDL to Octane materials
Afterwards: MDL materials can be read and rendered in Octane
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This approach would mean that published artists could support Iray and Octane at the same time without much extra work.
Otoy is listed as a partner of Nvidia. DAZ3D is a partner of Nvidia.
Are the people in charge able to work this out sometime down the line?
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Can you try out the scene a few pages back? Specifically on page 17 of this thread where DAZ_Rawb posted his scene. It rendered on my 1080 Ti in 5m 40s.
It's the other way. MDL is on top of the render engine. Octane has to support it. Once it can read and write mdl files, there is nothing to do but to read the mdl file. No conversion needed for the shaders
When you want to go from one engine to the other, you just have to transfer maps and values for the shader. That would be the plugin job
...where Octane catches my attention is it's Out Of Core Rendering mode. Pretty much with this there is little need for expensive Quadro GPUs (particularly the RX series) to get a high amount of VRAM so that the entire process doesn't dump to the CPU or crash if it exceeds the card's memory. As I have read it is still faster than Iray CPU rendering which is a big plus.
If Otoy is indeed embracing the Vulkan API in the 2019 release, that could mean it no longer is locked to just Nvidia. A Vega WX9100 is half the price of a Titan-V. and has 16 GB of VRAM along with almost as many stream processors (cores). Yeah it doesn't have Tensor cores, but I'll take the trade off for more VRAM and a lower price tag.
For their next series of cards, I understand AMD is developing a high speed bi directional link similar to Nvidia's NVLink. It remains to be seen whether this will only be available on the WX series or also find its way to the consumer Radeon line as well. AMD needs something to get a jump on Nvidia, and that would be huge if it happened. Keeping an eye on this.
Finally get Octane to work in Unity 2017.4.12. One need to download also Cuda library:
There is a freebie Orbital scene for Unity. On my computer with GTX 1080 it has rendered in 6 minutes 45 seconds
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/?stay#!/content/105656
It will be awesome, if someone with RTX 2080 Ti could render it and provide the timings, to compare.
Ok, another freebie scene for Octane render in Unity - Docking Bay - https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/?stay#!/content/105657
After 38 minutes of rendering, the render is still noisy. It looks like my computer and GTX 1080 is not enough fast for such scenes.
Just another Octane render from Unity. I have added Electra (Victoria 4 based character) and 2 fantasy figures from Unity.
They looks pretty good together, so thanks to the free version of Octane, one can have great renders.
Rendering time: 1 hour 56 minutes
I have to figure out, how to pose characters in Unity for static scenes.
Don't know how many people on this forum are aware of this but Morph 3D seems to be some kind of spin-off from DAZ3D in the unity store:
https://assetstore.unity.com/publishers/13832
The MCS female and male may allready be rigged for unity:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/humanoids/mcs-female-45807
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/characters/humanoids/mcs-male-45805
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split off 2nd part of reply into 2nd post
I may look at unity after Octane 4 is officially launched and the new license terms are clear.
Maybe someone else who has both a RTX 2080 Ti and access to Unity can help out here?
Unity has a lot of potential not just for game, app development but also for those interested in animation.
- - -
However, the reason why I shop at the DAZ3D store is because I am interested in high resolution 3d models for creating images.
I still hope that DAZ3D can find a way to bring the RTX technology to DAZ Studio in one form or the other.
I have an Ryzen 5 2600 | RTX 2080Ti system checking in - RTX 2080Ti does this test in 4 minutes and 35 seconds. Very impressive!
I was really interested in using Unity for 3d artwork. Humble bundle had Gaia on sale a little while ago for $10 along with a ton of assets, but I contacted the unity helpdesk to ask them if you were allowed to use Unity for 3d artwork and this was their reply:
...if you are not yet convinced about dropping dropping a lot of zlotys on a 20xx card and need something better than what you currently have, this just popped up in my inbox:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=14-487-265&utm_medium=Email&utm_source=GD101518&cm_mmc=EMC-GD101518-_-landing-_-Item-_-14-487-265
2 day sale only.
Thanks for checking this out. It will be interesting to see, how much they charge for the film making in Unity.
Great, that I have iClone 7 and the new Character Creator 3 with iray add on, so it will keep me busy for a while
and I can create both movies and still images with them under Reallusion EULA.
If they're moving in that direction I don't see any reason why they wouldn't let us use it in the future. There are people using it for art, and even uploading it to the Unity forums and no one seems to mind, so I don't think they really care if you're doing it for fun, but I wanted to use it for commercial purposes, so for me, that was a strict no-no.
Great renders BTW.
Thanks, BradCarsten, and great, that you have asked them and clarify the topic of rendering still images with Unity.
Besides being addicted of buying assets at Daz, I have bought a lot at Unity store.
As a matter of making a game, especially only by myself, will take enormous amount of time, I cannot count on it.
I have seen a post in the forum of somebody, who bought a commercial game license at Daz and is still in the middle of game making.
These game licences has dissapeared from the store a long time ago and are replaced by interactive license of each product separately.
I am glad, I have bought an indy game license of DAZ products, when it was available.
This film, movie idea, is interesting, but I do not know, if they allow to make videos in Unity, free personal edition.
I have to examine more carefully their EULA.
Can someone link me to the benchmark thread? I can't seem to find it.
Well Linus has done a review of sorts on the RTX 2070 and well yes, while okay if you want SLI/NVLink then don't bother as the RTX 2070's do not have SLI functionality.. If you want SLI/NVLink you will have to go to either the 2080 or 2080Ti..
Thank you for the "heads up," kyoto kid. I ordered one before the sale ended to replace my 680. I had originally been looking for a 1060, but the sale made the step up afordable.
..I have to say "thumbs up" on the video. A 200$ increase over the 1070 and no linking provision for the gaming community is definitely hits against the 2070. I saw this weeks ago.
Again the fact that few if any games embrace ray tracing, and for us using Daz, we likely will not get the benefit either as Nvidia will not be enabling Optix Prime on consumer RTX cards makes, me want to quote an old advert:
Where's the Beef?
So if you are into any semi-serious large scale high quality graphics work without waiting an eternity for the render process, it is either dig deep for a Quadro or head over to Otoy and Octane.
...the previous statement was a personal comment that does not necessarily reflect the view of these forums.
Optix has nothing to do with any video game, so whether Optix Prime gets the ray tracing acceleration has no relation to how video games adopt ray tracing or not. The way video games will add ray tracing is through either Vulcan or DirectX12, and mostly DirectX12. The vast majority of games are going to be on DirectX. Iray does not use DirectX or Vulcan. DirectX12 just recently released its latest version which adds ray tracing support. So now it is only a matter of getting games to add support.
Gamers are not too thrilled with ray tracing simply because of the performance hit that the games listed so far have. Metro and Battlefield 5 are only targeting 1080p when ray tracing is enabled. Gamers do not spend $1200 to play at 1080p. If you are buying a 2080ti to game, you are playing at 4K resolution. Once the performance catches up and you can game in 4K with ray tracing, and lower tier cards like the x60 series get ray tracing, then the movement to ray tracing will catch fire. And then there is of course, the price. If Turing was less expensive, the reaction to it would be very different. I have never seen so much negativity towards a Nvidia GPU launch.
The only question at hand is how will Nvidia treat Iray. Gaming is a popular thing around the world, but Iray is an extremely niche thing. Will Nvidia even bother with something so niche? Or might they just go in another direction? These are valid questions. A bunch of people are looking at an alternative...like Octane, based on a single comment about Optix Prime. And I can understand why. Octane is getting improvements and looks to offer major advantages over Iray. Out of core rendering is MASSIVE and cannot be under stated. This is the single most idiotic problem with Iray, and now nobody can defend it with Octane adding out of core rendering. A quality denoiser, and support for ray tracing acceleration will make Octane vastly superior in every possible way. Even if Nvidia makes the changes to take advantage of RTX, Iray would STILL be way, way behind Octane with no out of core support. Whether you be a user who does not have the cash for a ridiculous GPU, or a pro who does, there would be no reason to choose Iray over Octane in 2019.
If Octane has these features, what render engine would you choose?
Tensor cores. No video game is using Tensor cores yet, but I believe the Volta driver that the Daz beta uses does.
...exactly. why I am looking at the Octane subscription plan. No need for a big expensive Quadro with OOC rendering. The only downside I need to open a PayPal account (I had issues with them years ago) but 20$ per month for the Daz version is far better for my budget than having to plunk down nearly 600$ up front. Yeah I'll have to get used to a node system but the work I've seen and form what I have read and heard, a small issue compared to Iray which in Daz does not offer all the features of the standalone (just like what occurred with 3DL). I've worked with Reality/Lux so having to process and convert textures is nothing new to me.
Also W7 does not support DX12.