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Wow - you don't check in for a few days and you return to a lot great renders!!
@Jonstark - Great image! Fantastic idea for a quick and easy way to use Carrara volumetrics with Octane!
@PhilW - Very nice vehicle for just a zBrush doodle. I really like the shaders and setting!
@Ekic - More outstanding renders, I really like the senses of scale in them!
With the recent release of Octane 2.21.1 the need for an expensive video card with a lot of VRAM has diminished a great deal. Octane now supports out of core textures.
"Out-of-core textures allow you to use more textures than would fit in the graphic memory, by keeping them in the host memory. Of course, the data needs to be sent to the GPU while rendering therefore slowing the rendering down. If you don't use out-of-core textures rendering, speed is not affected."
Now the main limitation will be that you still need to be able to fit all of the geometry into your GPU RAM, but you can fit the geometry of some pretty complex scenes easily into 3-4Gb of VRAM. You can pick up a GTX 660 with 3Gb of RAM and 960 Cuda cores for less than $200.00 and have good performance with Octane (faster than the card I use).
Of course you still have the initial cost of Octane, and Octane isn't a good fit for everyone. But for many people this will expand their possibilities and use of Octane a great deal without needing to get a $1,000 video card.
With the recent release of Octane 2.21.1 the need for an expensive video card with a lot of VRAM has diminished a great deal. Octane now supports out of core textures.
"Out-of-core textures allow you to use more textures than would fit in the graphic memory, by keeping them in the host memory. Of course, the data needs to be sent to the GPU while rendering therefore slowing the rendering down. If you don't use out-of-core textures rendering, speed is not affected."
Now the main limitation will be that you still need to be able to fit all of the geometry into your GPU RAM, but you can fit the geometry of some pretty complex scenes easily into 3-4Gb of VRAM. You can pick up a GTX 660 with 3Gb of RAM and 960 Cuda cores for less than $200.00 and have good performance with Octane (faster than the card I use).
Of course you still have the initial cost of Octane, and Octane isn't a good fit for everyone. But for many people this will expand their possibilities and use of Octane a great deal without needing to get a $1,000 video card.
Wow, this is kind of a big deal, didn't know about this at all, thanks for the heads up! Will octane for carrara work with the new version?
With 3 to 4 GB of VRAM you shouldn't worry too much about geometry.
Here's a rather wild example: this scene has an ocean surface OBJ of almost 700 MB, and a fishing boat OBJ (converted from a CAD model) of 643 MB + 32 MB worth of 3D foam OBJ's + some seagulls and crew. Not too many texture maps, but still some 50 MB just for a high-rez HDR sky dome and a really big foam texture map. Renders just fine on my Geforce GTX 770 using the v1.2 Octane plugin for DAZ Studio.
Cheers!
Erik
...the initial cost of Octane plus the plugins for Daz and Carrara (which are still in beta status) is also why I am sticking to Lux.
I already have Reality4 and Luxus for Carrara is much more within my budget.
The "Out of Core" rendering sounds very much like Hybrid Rendering in Reality/Lux. As there have been stability issues the Hybrid mode and it really does not present significant enough speed advantage over pure CPU rendering Lux has ceased further development on it and will just focus on Pure CPU and Pure GPU rendering in future releases.
For my purposes, the whole attraction to working with GPU rendering is for the speed.and not "cooking" my CPU for hours to days at a time.
Here's a 3DL example of a typical scene I create
Thanks for alerting us to this, I hadn't noticed. I see that this release also features light passes which is another great feature. I have asked Sighman for an update on when this may be integrated into the Carrara plugin.
Hi Erik, I notice from your screen shot that you only use one GPU. I have been looking at Octane and read somewhere that there could be instability if you run Octane and your Monitor on the same GPU. Just wondering if you have ever had any problems with it.
Hi Erik, I notice from your screen shot that you only use one GPU. I have been looking at Octane and read somewhere that there could be instability if you run Octane and your Monitor on the same GPU. Just wondering if you have ever had any problems with it.
I run Octane on a laptop using only my Nvidia GPU with no instability problems at all. You do need to watch your memory usage a bit closer when using one GPU because you will use video RAM in other applications (i.e. DS will consume VRAM for viewport display, the more complex the scene, the more VRAM it will consume). Many people will use a less powerful and less expensive video card for their display, leaving their powerhouse GPU dedicated to rendering only.
I would guess that anyone who has experienced instability with a single card with the current version of Octane it would most likely be due to heavy use of the GPU for other operations while rendering that caused the use of too much VRAM, even if only for a fraction of a second.
...so Octane requires Daz Studio to be open while rendering?
I've been experimenting with the fog settings with Reality 4 / DS.
Very nicely done indeed!
What kind of render times were these (let's say in comparison to your normal non-fog times)?
If your rendering via the plugin DS must be open. If you export your scene via the plugin to a .ocs file, you can render in Octane Standalone without DS open (this would be similar to how Reality and Luxus work). Unlike LuxRender 1.x, Octane provides a full API so that developers can integrate Octane "into" the host application, rather than build a bridge/exporter to the application. This typically means the host application must be open to use the plugin to the external application.
This is very similar to how LuxCore works, which is a part of the development for LuxRender 2x. LuxCore will provide a full programming API to Luxrender, thus the ability to integrate LuxCore/LuxRender, and the LucCore/LuxRender IPR (Interactive Progressive Render) into the host application like what SphericLabs has done with the LuxusCore plugin preview for Carrara. The integration of Octane into the host application is one of the things that really helps Octane boost productivity. As long as you have the Octane Render ViewPort open (which is running the core Octane Render program/.dll - without the Standalone user interface), you see all changes to the scene in near real time, without any user intervention. Where the workflow with Reality and/or Luxus the process to see your changes is a lot more cumbersome and time consuming - you have to export the data to a file(s), LuxRender is started, it reads the files, then starts the render. This is a much slower process.
Awesome renders!!!
Can you export a DAZ studio scene to .osc?
I know you can Carrara and was impressed when I found out as both Carrara and DAZ can chew a lot of RAM with stuff loaded Octane does not use.
Otherwise obj only way I knew from DAZ or Alembic
Very nicely done indeed!
What kind of render times were these (let's say in comparison to your normal non-fog times)?
The first image (with the tiger) is actually two images. Took about 12 hours to render both. One render was with the fog box, the other was without. The without was layered over the fog image, with an opacity of 10%. No other post rendering was done.
The second image was an overnight render. Probably around ten hours.
To answer your specific question, the first image with fog took about 9 hours. The non-fog layer took about 3 hours. I probably could have killed the fog version earlier, as there didn't seem to be much additional improvement.
It's definitely supported with OCDS 2.1 Pre Release 5th. Here are some posts with a bit more about it:
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=44044&start=170
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=44692.
but nowhere do they say how to export it :lol:
I use 1.2 BTW and nowhere in it or DAZ studio is there an export option, I have gone over it with a fine tooth comb
if there were I could combine Carrara and DAZ scenes!
in particular HD morphs geometry animated,
alembic export sadly does not seem to like it, errors a lot, did get the dragon in HD in standalone via alembic and plonked him in Howies hidden lake.
other than that nothing I cannot just do in carrara :lol:
not interested in MIchael and Victoria 6 HD BTW was thinking more the monstrous stuff, the creature morphs.
I don't think it was available in 1.2, but it is available with 1.5x in the last pre release. See the attached image for where you can find it in 1.5x (maybe you'll be able to find it in 1.2). I just tested it and it works perfectly with .ocs.
Also Sighman just posted the 2.21 release of OC4C with out of core texture support (as well as a number of other great new features). Woohoo!!!
ah 1.5 will not do animation for me so I use 1.2
not upgrading to 2.0 whatever it is now as I consider the money was better spent on the Carrara plugin and maybe other software like Hitfilm3 etc as it really is unneeded for me having Carrara one and I love using Carrara for animation unlike DAZ studio which frequently makes me cry.
If your rendering via the plugin DS must be open. If you export your scene via the plugin to a .ocs file, you can render in Octane Standalone without DS open (this would be similar to how Reality and Luxus work). Unlike LuxRender 1.x, Octane provides a full API so that developers can integrate Octane "into" the host application, rather than build a bridge/exporter to the application. This typically means the host application must be open to use the plugin to the external application.
This is very similar to how LuxCore works, which is a part of the development for LuxRender 2x. LuxCore will provide a full programming API to Luxrender, thus the ability to integrate LuxCore/LuxRender, and the LucCore/LuxRender IPR (Interactive Progressive Render) into the host application like what SphericLabs has done with the LuxusCore plugin preview for Carrara. The integration of Octane into the host application is one of the things that really helps Octane boost productivity. As long as you have the Octane Render ViewPort open (which is running the core Octane Render program/.dll - without the Standalone user interface), you see all changes to the scene in near real time, without any user intervention. Where the workflow with Reality and/or Luxus the process to see your changes is a lot more cumbersome and time consuming - you have to export the data to a file(s), LuxRender is started, it reads the files, then starts the render. This is a much slower process.
...yeah but I cannot afford 400$ for Octane (or another 300$ for a GPU that has enough RM to handle rendering) and the Beta Daz Studio interface. Then,again, why do I have to pay nearly 100$ for a beta?
IMHO if you have a decent graphics card like I did already then Octane render is a nobrainer
I regretted spending much less on more stuff than that which includes several pro bundles of content I hardly touch
it all comes down to usage, cheap but never use is money thrown away
I use Octane nearly everytime I turn my computer on which makes it an utter bargain.
Why? ??
because if I want to look at ANYTHING it is instant! Faster than 3Delight spotrender and after seeing something in Octane everything else looks so terribly sad.
The top and bottom are quick renders of 100 pixel samples as I am doing a 1500 frame animation
lighting was a no bainer, whack a textured flame emitter shader on all the candle flames and fireplace fires!!!
...yeah but I cannot afford 400$ for Octane (or another 300$ for a GPU that has enough RM to handle rendering) and the Beta Daz Studio interface. Then,again, why do I have to pay nearly 100$ for a beta?
Actually you can pick up a 3Gb Card with 960 Cuda Cores for $160.00, and with out of core texture support you could spend even less on a 2Gb card and still render some pretty large scenes. As I've said, Octane isn't for everyone, but it's a fantastic option for those that it is a good fit for. For those that want to use an unbiased renderer but don't want (or can't afford) to use Octane, Reality and Luxus can easily be used with DS for unbiased rendering, with a very low cost of entry. For me, Octane was a great purchase, even though it meant that I wouldn't be buying much of anything else related to my 3D hobby for over a year. For others Octane may not be a viable option.
Regardless, Octane it is improving at a very rapid rate, and Otoy has addressed most of the major needs, including scene size being limited to the amount of RAM on the graphics card. Out of Core texture support now removes the need for expensive graphics cards to render larger scenes. There is a slight hit in performance, but it is still much faster than any other unbiased rendering option available for Carrara. Out of Core isn't available for DS yet, and there is no information on when it might actually be available, but there is a work around that some people have been using.
I just tested it with the Carrara plugin, and I was able to successfully load and render a scene with Faveral's Medieval Docks, 3 clothed V4's, 3 clothed M4's, and several additional props (it needs some work though, because Carrara dynamic hair doesn't work in Octane). The scene rendered using the Carrara internal renderer can be seen here: http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/29802 Even with my modest card (only 336 Fermi based Cuda Cores) I was getting 1.3 million samples per second with path tracing using out of core textures, so the performance hit isn't huge (users have noted about a 5% performance hit).
The policy to pay for beta software is a bit unusual, but that is how Otoy has conducted business from the beginning. I'm actually rather glad they have the policy, because for those who are a bit more "adventurous", you can get the plugins for half price while they in beta, and get the upgrade to the full version for free. This saved me a fair amount of $$$.
..yeah but I would not be able to render the scene I posted earlier in 3GB of VRAM. That scene would require at least 6GB with all the reflectivity and transparency maps and it is fairly representative of the type of work I do..
I think you are missing the point of Out Of Core - only the geometry needs to be held in VRAM. Textures will be loaded preferentially into VRAM too, but if that exceeds the available space, it will be held in normal memory. So if you have 2GB VRAM and 8GB normal RAM, you will be able to use the whole lot to render your scenes, with only a small performance hit - better than not being able to render it at all. And in general, it is the maps and not the geometry that takes up the greater part of a typical scene, so it opens up what you can do with Octane hugely.
just checked, I am on frame 255 now, why is there a candle sticking out of my floor?
(this should give an idea of speed)
I'm guessing you mean this scene: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/48860/P418 ??
Since I don't know what was used in the scene, or how complex the geometry is, it's hard to say for sure. But I would guess that with Out of Core texture support, you could render it in Octane on a 3Gb card. I'm just guessing here that when you say it would take at least a 6Gb to render the scene you are referring to how much RAM DS consumes with the scene loaded. In my experience with Octane, it requires much less RAM to render a scene than DS requires to load/use the scene (typically around 50-70%). For example, with the attached SciFi image DS uses an additional 3.2 Gb to open/use the scene, but Octane only uses 1.4Gb of VRAM to render it.
With the objects loaded in your example scene, I would guess that well over 50% of the memory used is for texture maps, probably more like 70-80% is texture maps (again - just guessing, based on experience, geometry typically takes a lot less memory than the textures). Therefor, using the new Out of Core texture memory feature, the geometry and some of the textures in the scene most likely could easily fit into 3Gb of VRAM, then the additional texture data that dind't fit in VRAM would be loaded into system RAM.
The Stanford Dragon (image below) can be used good example of how much VRAM geometry doesn't consume. The dragon's geometry has over 800,000 polygons, and when the dragon alone is loaded into Octane, it only uses 27Mb of VRAM. So, you could easily load 100 of these into 3Gb of VRAM (80 million polygons) and still have room to spare. So with V4 coming in at what, around 70,000 polygons (?), theoretically you could easily fit over 1,000 of them in 3Gb of VRAM using Octane. Now the only question is, would you have enough system RAM for all of their texture maps :bug:
I have been experimenting with out of core rendering. My primary render GPU is a 780ti with 3Gb and while this works out most of the time nicely with some careful texture management I do run occasionally into a case where I do need more memory. Thus I was happy to see the implementation of out-of-core rendering (i.e. using the main ram for extra textures) in 2.21.1 standalone. One can of course load things directly into Octane standalone via .obj import, but I find it easier to use OcDS for the scene setup. Hence I experimented a bit with .ocs export from OcDS and rendering in Octane 2.21. For .ocs export the scene needs to be first loaded in GPU memory as far as I can tell (I does not work if one does not do that) and thus we cannot directly set up a large scene and export. Instead I set the scene up in several parts (three in the example below, the two figures and the scenery), set up materials, and saved each part in the correct position relative to each other as .ocs. Then I fired up Octane Standalone 2.21.1 and loaded the scenery and imported the other .ocs files into this scene. One needs then to connect the geometry from the additional .ocs files to the first Render Target (via the Geometry Root node) so that everything appears in one image. To make this easier and allow for small adjustments in the placement, I exported the figures as .obj from DS and re-imported them to DS prior to setting up the Octane materials in OcDS and saving as .ocs. That way they appear as a single mesh in OcDS, making it easier to move them via the Placement node and to connect them to the render target (only one connection for each figure rather than one for each submesh). Might sound like a lot of work, but is actually quite quick. Then I enabled out of core rendering and allocated 8 Gb of ram to Octane. And boom it went with out issues. This scene used 2.5 Gb on my GPU and a bit over 1 Gb of main ram. It does render slower which is not surprising due to the need to move textures in and out of the GPU, but for this particular example it was only about 5% slower than the same scene with one character which fit into my GPU. I did not notice any differences in stability. Below is the finished render. It is still a work in progress, so materials are not fully tuned. But it worked! Hopefully this feature will at some point be available directly via OcDS. It is very useful if you need to squeeze just a bit more into a scene... :D
Ciao
TD
I run Octane on a laptop using only my Nvidia GPU with no instability problems at all. You do need to watch your memory usage a bit closer when using one GPU because you will use video RAM in other applications (i.e. DS will consume VRAM for viewport display, the more complex the scene, the more VRAM it will consume). Many people will use a less powerful and less expensive video card for their display, leaving their powerhouse GPU dedicated to rendering only.
I would guess that anyone who has experienced instability with a single card with the current version of Octane it would most likely be due to heavy use of the GPU for other operations while rendering that caused the use of too much VRAM, even if only for a fraction of a second.
Thank you very much for clearing this up for me, it is really helpfull
I think you are missing the point of Out Of Core - only the geometry needs to be held in VRAM. Textures will be loaded preferentially into VRAM too, but if that exceeds the available space, it will be held in normal memory. So if you have 2GB VRAM and 8GB normal RAM, you will be able to use the whole lot to render your scenes, with only a small performance hit - better than not being able to render it at all. And in general, it is the maps and not the geometry that takes up the greater part of a typical scene, so it opens up what you can do with Octane hugely.
...however as stated, it is a slower process than pure GPU rendering. This is part of the reason why Lux dumped further development on their Hybrid rendering as the small speed advantage over pure CPU rendering was outweighed by stability and complexity issues.
For myself, dumping 400 - 500$ into a render engine (for which the plugins for the software I am using are still in Beta status) makes little sense when I already have Reality4, (the upgrade for which cost me only 19$, already supports pure GPU rendering, and has excellent customer support) and for 30$ more I can purchase Luxus for Carrara.
For me 400 - 500$ is a huge amount of funds which (at least for my purpose) would be better put towards purchasing say, ZBrush or a perpetual personal licence for Photoshop.
I'm guessing you mean this scene: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/48860/P418 ??
...nope, this one:
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/765456/
This scene peaked at 10.9 GB in 3DL.
The one with the two girls tops out at about 9 GB in 3DL and kicks up a "high memory usage" warning when submitting to LuxRender for CPU rendering. It also includes several the textures that make use of the LIE (the freckles on one of the girls, the graffiti on the shelter, and the brick road surface) which Reality converts for LuxRender. Reality4/LuxRender 1.3.1 also support the Daz SSS shaders.