is the Octane Daz plug in avaliable here?
Toobis
Posts: 941
Or anywhere? I cant see it on the main Octane site. Is it still avaliable? also is it still like 500 dollars?
Post edited by Toobis on
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It doesn't seem to have a specific page on their site anymore but it's still available in Otoy's store among the "fully integrated plugins". And yes, it's still a few hundreds of dollars.
The authors of Octane recommend you try the demo first
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Demo is here - https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/demo/
Here is where you purchase - https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/purchase/
Select the fully integrated plugin option and click on Daz Studio to see the different options
Beta 3 of the plugin is here - https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=51808
I used Octane for over a year and although its good its no better than Iray. I can't see why anybody new would bother with it. I have not used it since the emergence of Iray.
It does have some advantages over iRay. like out-of-core textures (effectively negating the scene VRAM limitations), node graph editor for more complex shaders and customisation, region render and render layers. I also miss the post processing ability from Octane that i cant get in iRay, at least not as easily.
The iray integration with daz studio will make it far easier for anyone who is starting out to learn, and also makes many things much simpler for more experienced users as well. I was always hoping future updates to iray and DS would give us some of those things i am missing from Octane, but even if iray has/gets those capabilties, whether or not daz will incorporate into DS is another story. Id imagine they would not want to make it too hard to learn and use
Which is why I will always probably stick with octane
DAZ does not make Iray, Nvidia does. So the features would depend on Nvida.
Thanks guys thats plenty of info.
i know who makes iRay. But just because iRay has certain features, doesnt mean it is automatically integrated into daz studio. Daz integrate it in such a way that it works well and easily inside das studio itself, so if new features become available in iRay itself, Daz still have to develop an update into daz studio so that people can access said feature, and ensure it works well with other daz studio functionality.
Maybe, but since DAZ has been fairly good about incorporating Iray update, particularly the major SSS change in 4.9 I wouldn't discount their updating ability that much.
I'm not so sure about that, I own it and I think it has a slight edge over Iray. Some renders from people that know the engine really well make some fantastic stuff. Iray is pretty new though, so not as many experienced people with it. Iray may have an edge when it comes to skin, I think it was built with skin shaders in mind.
But the difference isn't that great, and the workflow with it integrated in Daz was well worth switching for me. (I was using it with the Poser plug-in). Every new scene & item I bought required shader & material work. I LOVE buying an Iray product here at Daz, and have it render nice out of the box.
Octane is significantly faster, so there's that at least. Its developers, OTOY, are also claiming to be able to work with AMD hardware in the near future.
its difficult to really get a proper inbiased comparison. It requires someone who knows both engines well, so that all shaders, lighting etc are setup correctly and equally, using the same scene, textures etc.
ive used both, but by no means an expert in either engine, and in general i think Octane is faster
I was an Octane user but then switched to Iray pretty exclusively for a year or so when DAZ adopted it. I liked how Iray was integrated into DAZ so much more smoothly than the Octane DS plugin. Then some months ago I had reason to fire up Octane again, and holy smokes it is a lot faster than Iray for quick immediate results while tweaking.
A few other pluses for Octane are the flexibility of the shaders - you can be experimental and creative there by building as many layers as you like and combining things in a way that isn't possible in Iray, and there are some shader features that still aren't available with Iray like AO dirt and fresnel falloff effects. Also, the alpha version of Octane 3 has interesting new volumetric effects.
If you don't want to fuss with shaders too much and like the price of free, then Iray for DS can't be beat. Octane does give you some tangible added benefits, but I wouldn't spend the money for it until you hit a roadblock in Iray that is worth paying a few hundred bucks to get over by jumping to Octane. At this point, when using Octane I prefer exporting to Octane standalone rather than using a plugin. The standalone Octane renderer is awesome and much less of a headache than the plugins. (and right now, I'm not actually using either Iray or Octane - I've been getting into Mental Ray in Maya and finding that with it I can render human skin better than anything else I've used. I miss the speed of GPU rendering, but the end results are worth it to me.)
Iray is a brilliant rendering solution. If I wasnt an avid Octane user, I'd be very content with Iray.
Octane is probably number 1. While there are several unbiased engines out there, Octane is unmatched. There are some definite advangates to Octane, that for me make it worth every penny Otoy asks for.
1. Shaders / Hands down, Octane's shader building system is miles easier to learn and make headway with than Iray. One important example is with SSS. In Octane, setting up SSS is super easy incorporating one primary channel. But to do the same thing in Iray, requires around 4 different settings aka channels, including the convoluted "weight" stuff. Octane isnt laboured with concepts like weightedness. In fact, I find myself quite unhappy with the complexity of Iray as presented within DS. It just doesnt make any sense to me, doesnt feel natural. Even Top Coat, is essentially pointless and can on it's own require tons of testing to realize how uneecessary it is. Octane shaders are designed to mimic more closely the lingo we've grown accustomed to in other packages, so you're off and running much faster. Node based shading, allowing the user to stack as many level as desired, is brilliant. Iray cannot compete with that flexibiliity.
2. Render Target- Octane provides a level of control over the render that Iray cannot compete with. There simply are no Iray equivalents for many of the render target considerations. Everything from white balance to dynamic range, its all tweakable in an easy to read manner. As mentioned above, the Post processing effects alone will save you so much drama in photoshop later on.
3. Speed- Octane is probably faster than Iray, but this is not easy to test because as stated, setting up materials and lights in Iray is completely different than setting up the same scene in Octane. I know of quite a few people who could claim to have a real grasp over the Octane shaders and lighting options, but that isnt the case for Iray. Show me an Iray guru, even self proclaimed, and I'll feel better about the overall learning curve. Perhaps Iray is more in keeping with physics, but Octane retains the accuracy while being user friendly. Because Octane is so much easier to set up, Octane can seem easier to get set up so it can seem faster. Takes a lot more test renders in Iray due to unpredictable effects from all those darned weight sliders.
4. Lighting---Along with super speed at unbiased rendering, Octane offers some of the best looking and fastest rendering biased solutions as well. Octane provides 5 render kernels and each of those has sub-menu options. And again, with absolute control over the way rays are distributed and utilized, Octane can be made to move VERY quickly.
I can't decide if it's Iray I dislike, or if it is the way its been implemented in DS. Either way, Octane wins hands down in my book.
**So far, there is not one thing Iray can do that Octane cannot also do. On the other hand, I can name several things Octane can do that Iray cannot. There's a reason Octane has a cost factor, and why people gladly pay it.
I just got around to sampling the Octane demo and I must say that I definitely like working with it. It wasn't really that hard to comprehend, perhaps a bit overwhelming for first time users, and if I had the money right now to purchase it, I would. I was putting up a scene together and rendered both in iray and octane demo, was really impressed with the octane one. I use iray a lot, but I still prefer Reality over it, just a bit of a hassle setting up the materials as it was with the Octane demo,
Octane does perform well. At one point in time the DS plug-in was not doing what people expected, and people had a hard time separating Octane issues from the DS plug-in issues. Generally speaking, Octane had no issues, it was the plug-in. But since then all of that is fixed and it seems the plug-in is doing exactly what it should. That said, I'd definitely get the DS plug-in so that all of the HD bells and whistles and all function as expected. Exporting works fine enough. But I must admit, I kinda hate working in Octane standalone, I definitely prefer working with Octane via the Carrara plug-in.
To my mind, with the plug-in Octane is as integrated into DS as Iray for anything that really matters. I think Sorel is a good one to get opinions about this on, since he primarily uses DS and chooses Octane instead of Iray. His reasoning I'm not certain about but I know he uses the DS plug-in.
Even if I had the funds available (which I don't) I'd have to consider whether I'd be better buying Octane or buying another GPU (a GTX 1070 would be a similar cost). I've quickly realised with IRay and the GTX 970 I already have that GPU VRAM is so often the limiting factor. I've read somewhere (but can't find confirmation on the Otoy site) that Octane uses system RAM as well as GPU VRAM so that might be a consideration. But with the new GTX 1070 coming with 8GB, even if Octane can make use of system RAM, it seems unlikely that I would struggle to fit a typical scene into 8GB.
As for image quality, it is often in the eye of the beholder. I've seen images posted by people who are undoubtedly technical wizards - here and elsewhere (e.g. Deviant Art) - which even I, as a lowly hobbyist, wouldn't be happy with. Yet I've also seen images done with just IRay Uber material and the default HDRI dome for lighting which look superb. Composition, posing and facial expressions are often as important as lighting and materials.
I'd recommend downloading the demo and seeing how you like it. For people who want to render just DAZ products with no-fuss plug and play, they'll probably be happy sticking with Iray. If you like tweaking and customizing shaders though, Octane is a lot of fun and seems more logically set up for creative use than Iray.
Rashad, about Octane standalone vs plugin, I think I started preferring the standalone when I started working with more scenes that were mixtures of assets from different pieces of software rather than just Poser and DAZ. HD export from DAZ works fine, just gotta have the main subdivision level turned up past the default limits (to 3 or 4) when exporting. I really like the nodes in Standalone, and the ease with which I can set up different cameras and render targets to switch between. And it feels rock-solid and reliable. If they would just put a gizmo in there to let us grab geometry and move it around in Standalone... (My cynical side thinks they haven't added that basic seeming element because it would make Standalone so easy to use it would lower demand for the line of Octane plugins. Over the years, I've bought Octane plugins for Poser, DAZ, and Maya but probably would have saved some of that money if Octane Standalone had a simple manipulator gizmo.)
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If you are still struggling if you should get a new GPU or OctaneRender then obviously you should get the new GPU first.
But if you tried every last feature of Iray, allready invested in a system with multiple fast GPU and find that you would like to have more control over your workflow and the end result then it is time to give OctaneRender a try.
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The difference between Nvidia and Otoy:
Nvidia has a tendency to only share facts very shortly before products are ready.
Otoy management on the other hand shared their plans how to keep improving OctaneRender:
https://home.otoy.com/octanerender-3-and-roadmap-update/
Examples:
Native support for bone and skin animation
OctaneImager, a powerful post-processing and compositing application
Native plugin ecosystem:
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So should you use OctaneRender or Iray?
My answer: Use both depending on the project.
- If you just want to do a quick render it seems reasonable to just place the objects in the scene and use the Iray materials as they are.
- But if you are looking to do more like
animating material parameters, light emission, sun and sky position,
manage how much space textures use in VRAM,
composite computer graphic images with photographs,
render out light passes for each light in the scene so you can adjust lighting strenght in postproduction
render out reflection, subsurface scattering, transmission passes so you actually can check how each parameter affects a layer of the image
bake textures for animations
then you will notice that OctaneRender has so many more options for advanced workflows.
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In addtion there are even 3rd party tools that actively support OctaneRender standalone:
http://www.phantomtechnology.nl/
Phantom Scatter is a procedural instancing technology for OctaneRender that lets you create amazing scenes with instances in a very conveniant way.
Phantom Photo Match is an amazing tool to help you figure out the proper camera settings to match computer graphic elements with photographs.
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I have been using Iray for an animation movie and the rendering is way too slow even on 3 980tis. Especially on indoor scenes where you have deep shadows. Octane 3.1 which should come out in a few months will have a denoiser plugin which is reason enough to upgrade to Octane. I have a 5 second scene that took me hours to render only to be unhappy with the grainy noise. Being able to use a denoiser would save my bacon. I am looking at Neatvideo to fix the noise and am not sure if it will help. But I would gladly pay for a builtin plugin I believe the name of the denoiser that Octane will be using is called ALtus.
Octane 3.1 will have adaptive sampling which will speed up the rendering process even further. Octane 4 which is supposed to come out in 2017, will feature Brigade, Otoys real-time path tracer will be available with all the Octane plugins. Once I finish my movie I will be looking hard at real-time PBR such as Iclone which should come this year and Film-engine based on the cryengine renderer.
I would rather stick with DAZ and Iray since these are the only programs I know. But for my next project if I can't get my renders down to 30 seconds a frame either with Octane or Iray then I will have to make the switch to another software. Ideally IRAY will upgrade their renderer to become faster but I suspect IRAY will always be a few steps behind Octane when it comes to speed. Which is why if I stay with DAZ buying Octane is a must.
I deal only with still renders, but it would be nice to have renders be a lot faster so I can have larger/higher quality images without tying up my machine FOREVER.
A lot of the advantages of Octane seem to be for stuff I don't do much, so... still debating.
Two different render engines by two different companies with two different goals. I think its great that OTOY is expanding but I believe the number one deciding factor for most people will be the integration of Iray into Daz Studio for free PLUS that fact that a lot of products come out with Iray ready material settings.
If they offered an indie/hobbyist license and price they might get more interest from the DAZ user base.
Having to buy the full and plugin makes it expensive; I am interested, but that is the cost of an extra nice gfx card too.
Absolutely. I can put up with Iray being a bit slower and generally less capable than Octane, as the benefit of native D|S integration far outweighs any slight technical drawbacks. Plus, the market is producing a lot of innovation in Iray related stuff. This leads to fewer layers of arsing about, which is something you get a lot with third party solutions, and is something I don't need with limited time for hobbying.
And as a Brycer, I have to laugh at the idea of people complaining about "slow" thirty second render times!
The official OctaneRender 3 pricing was posted on May 16.
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=54021
-> If you allready own OctaneRender standalone and the OctaneRender for DAZ Studio plugin the upgrade is only $75.
Considering all the added features since v2 and all the upcoming features that are planned for the v3 release cycle this seems very fair.
For new users that want a combo of both OctaneRender standalone and the DAZ Studio plugin the price is now at $579.
The official OctaneRender 3 release is now scheduled to be on Monday the 23rd of May 2016.
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Even at $75, I'm doubting I would get it. The DS plugin left a bad taste in my mouth and with most items being iray-ready now, I'm not much into messing with another set of materials and I definitely wouldn't support it in any of my products. I rather put the $75 towards updating my Marvelous designer license.
There will also be an indie price for 9.99 a month subscription. You will be limited to 2 gpus for rendering. Otherwise you get all the same features as the standalone.