Octane 4...Worth it?
Swan
Posts: 134
I spent a lot of time learning how to learn Reality and Lux. They were terrific, but required a lot of tweaking. I reluctantly made the switch to iRay. It's easier, faster, and comes with tons of specific products of all types. Recently, I stumbled across Octane. Looks impressive.What I'm wondering is whether its features are superior to iRay and if any superiority is worth not just the extra cost but especially the time and effort of learning the ins and outs of Octane. Would also appreicate learning what the most troublesome aspects were. Lastly, is Octane faster than iRay?
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I have been using Octane in DS for a while and find it a lot faster than Iray. The main downside for me are that, by default the material conversion from Iray materials to Octane materials often adds a specular component, and worse it links the specular colour to the diffuse base colour ( usually white ) this makes things glossy which shouldn't be. It is fairly straightforward to add a separate input to the specular, and set this to black, so removing the gloss, but it is tiresome if there are a lot of materials. I haven't found any way of simulating Iray decal materials in Octane, but I have don't have many so not a big deal for me. Odd things like mesh eyebrows don't show up in Octane, nt sure if there is a fix for that.
On the plus side there is a huge material library built into Octane, so some materials you can get better results from the Octane material than trying to use the converted Iray one.
If you apply Octane materials to a scene, and save it from DS, you can restore the Octane materials automatically when you load the scene.
Overall, despite the few downsides I find Octane suits me much better than Iray, and I rarely render anything in Iray now ( when I do I find it frustratingly slow).
One major advantage that Octane has over iRay, is that octane has whats called 'out-of-core' rendering. What this means is that if your scene data cannot fit into your GPU's VRAM, its not the end of the world. It can dump textures (and soon to be geometry if they have not already implemented) into your system RAM and still render. Whereas in iRay, if your scene does not fit in your GPU's VRAM, it will dump to a CPU render and slow down horrifically. The out-of-core rendering in Octane does have a speed deficit too, but its not nearly as much as the difference between a GPU and CPU render in iRay.
Octane does also have other features that iRay doesnt, like post-effects. Being able to add effects like bloom/glare at render time, instead of using photoshop to add later, and also volume rendering - fog etc.
Overall, people that have used both iRay and Octane will probably agree that technically Octane is the better engine, however its not as easy to use as iRay. The iRay implementation in Daz Studio and the fact that the store is a near-endless source of shaders/textures etc essentially turns iRay into a plug-and-play type solution that can save daz users a huge amount of time.
It takes time and effort to learn Octane, and anything you buy in the daz store would require some time fiddling with Octane shaders to get your characters looking as good as an out-of-the-box iRay render will due to the PA who created that character having done all that work for you.
I agree with @background and @joseft. I used Octane only for quite awhile until I recently discovered a batch render script from Renderosity that trumps nearly any benefit I was getting from Octane in terms of productivity. There is no good way that I have found for batch rendering with Octane from Daz. I was also disappointed to find out from the current plugin overseer at Otoy that several benefits from the latest and greatest would not be implemented into the plugin for Daz. This coupled with the ability to batch render from iRay caused me to swap back to iRay recently for all my work. I will still follow the Daz plugin development as well as Octane's main release for features that I want to see.
You can export from the plugin to the Octane main application to render but that is an extra step and has failed or been corrupted/not useable in Octane standalone enough times to make it where I do not use the feature anymore as well. The good thing here is that for $20 you can try it out for a month with the latest and greatest development plugin for Daz and see what you think. One thing I loved was the built in denoiser which does a vastly superior job, imo, to the one in Daz. For iRay I use the AI denoiser in one of the threads on the forums here to denoise after my batch renders and then resharpen in PS if needed after.
One thing I find makes a lot of difference between rendering in Iray and rendering in Octane, is that the Octane initial render is so fast and detailed that I can adjust lighting and get pretty instant feedback, whereas with Iray I tended to let renders go with less than ideal lighting because it was a slow process to adjust a light and then see what effect it had.
If you want to get 'under the hood' I find Octane material node editor to be reasonably easy to use, for example I was able to create an Octane double-sided material in a few minutes.
I use it with the Carrara plugin
I only have 2 for DAZ studio but not gotten around to installing it yet on my new computer
if they don't fix iray animation in 4.12 for cards that don't support OptiX soon I definitely will
YES, YES ! Octane Beta V0 has been my best investment and I plan to upgrade to 2019 (permanent licence). I don't have any plug-in, I manually convert scene from DS to Octane. During the years I made some personal nodes (lights, genesis skin, ...) to be more efficient during the conversion. I also must say that I like to tweak materials even if I'm not an expert . Another advantage : I can work on a new scene while Octane is rendering another one.
Octane is quick (very quick!) so lighting changes, material tweaking, composition is a pleasure. My longer final rendering time doesn't exceed one night (5000x3000 approx)
Out of core works very well. My now old rendering graphic card have only 4gb of memory (GTX780) and I have another one very small for display (2gb). Yes: rendering is a little bit longer but you can split your scene in different groups while working before rendering the complete scene. My most complex scene had 38 characters including 20 genesis 8, with clothings , a forest with scattering of trees, grass, clouds (a 15gb scene on my 4 gb graphic card).
You can import OpenVBD, scattering, ....
So yes: Octane is my only renderer since a long time and I didn't try Iray so I can't compare the two. Maybe my road would have be different if Iray came early!
All renders in my Daz gallery are made with Octane. Most of them are now very old and I would like to "upgrade" some of them if I have time.
Try the demo !
... ⬆ this ⬆
I've been using octane since I found out about it and way before iray was a thing, and I dont plan on switching unless something better comes out.
I find myself wondering whether it is worth paying for Octane - which has admittedly great features - or rather figure out how to render in Blender. I believe that Cycles also has out-of-core capability and, some say, faster than IRay. However, there would be similar issues with material conversion, I'm assuming (not that I have used either Octane or Cycles to date). Or perhaps a combination of Blender and the Substance suite which would still be cheaper than Octane, from what I can see?
Having used both (still quite a novice with Cycles), I would say Octane is generally better/faster than Cycles. I find it easier to set up shaders and get what I want in Octane (this could just be me), and rendering with AI lights and AI denoiser is generally faster. However, if you have a machine with a lot of fast CPU cores/threads and a really good GPU (or two), Cycles can be very fast (the screen refresh is still faster with Octane though). If your going the Blender route, you can use either Cycles or Octane 2019 (free). I haven't used Octane 2019 for Blender (2.8) yet, so I can't really compare which is better in Blender - but is is another option for Blender users (as is AMD Pro Render).
I can echo pretty much everything that others have said about Octane for DS. The redisplay is lightning fast, and no need to worry about upgrading your GPU to get more GPU memory, as both texture and geometry data can use out of core memory in the most recent Octane (compare the price of a 2080Ti to Octane, and Octane may make a lot more sense). If you do animations, having motion blur may also make Octane more appealing, since the DAZ implementation of Iray doesn't have motion blur (unless that changed with DS 4.12 and I missed it). Octane will require more shader work than Iray, but there could be other benefits with Octane that make a bit of shader work worthwhile.
Bottom line, for some people Octane is a better fir than Iray, but your mileage may vary.
I initially was on the Octane hype-train, but they've basically ceased development of the Daz plug-in.
I also found that adjusting the materials was taking way, way too long to get something of comparable quality to Iray's out-of-the box solution.
The plugin is still worked on lol. I am currently on version 2019.1.1. Also most basic materials are pretty easy to set up. It only gets tricky when you need to start fiddling with sss settings.