OT: 3D modeling GPU Renderer for all 3D software

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 5/12/2010, 12:29 PM

Hey guys,

I don't know how many of you do 3D modeling, but if you do, and you are tired of sitting around waiting for high quality renders, you should look into Octane from refractivesoftware. I use blender (because the price is right :P), and it doesn't have a lot of pathtracing, and even though it's not 'slow' 3D rendering with ambient occlusion and/or pathtracing, it takes a while, but with octane I can just export my scene as an OBJ file, and take that into octane, and octane GPU renders and does it fast. I just bought the software this week, and it's still in beta, but they are selling it cheap while it's in beta ( and I think it's going to be ready for release pretty soon ). So I thought I'd share it here for anyone who does their own 3D, regardless of the application.

It was only $130 ( actually it's 99 Euro's, and it converted to 130 ), but it's going to double in price when it's not a beta anymore.

www.refractivesoftware.com

It's also really great, because you can just move around, change lighting, materials, focal lengths, DOF, focal points, etc... in the renderer on the fly and it just starts re-rendering right away.

Anyway not a real vegas thing, but thought I'd share it, because I always appreciate a good tip.

Dave

Comments

ChrisMN wrote on 5/12/2010, 2:28 PM

Thanks for the info Dave. I've just started to experiment with Blender so I will look into this.
Chris

MTuggy wrote on 5/12/2010, 3:09 PM

Thanks for the tip. I'll take a look at it. I use Lightwave 9 so can export to OBJ. How does it do with textures, etc?

Mike

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 5/12/2010, 4:21 PM

works fine with textures (though in the current beta, you can have spaces in your material names), and it even lets you apply textures in the octane rendering tool.

Here's a video of it showing with dual nVidia 480's, the performance is crazy.

As you can see, it's pretty amazing, the only thing is that the renders are limited by the video memory, so you might be restricted in large size scenes or super gigantic renders?

Dave

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 5/12/2010, 7:06 PM

just bumping for those that might have missed it.

Dave

Rory Cooper wrote on 5/13/2010, 12:52 AM

So what I understand that this will only help with mapping and texturing for still shots within Octane
Or will it remap and texture existing obj’s in existing 3d scenes?

For eg, can I generate an obj in my 3d app flat color select mesh areas then do my animation. Then fire up Octane remap and tweak then fire up my original
3d app and render final scene with new textures, reflections etc.? Is that correct?

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 5/13/2010, 10:10 AM

you misunderstand, you animate your project, an assign some sort of material to your mesh(s), then you export your obj file ( with animation if you want - though the beta doesn't support animation yet, but it will ). You then import the obj file into octane, assign the materials and get the lighting the way you want it, and then you can render to whatever size you want (and for animation, I assume it will just do each frame based on the number of max samples you set which will then be sequentially saved).

So once it's in Octane, it goes from octane to final output. you can change and assign materials in octane, as well as focal point, DOF, lighting, and a host of other things.

It's all done via GPU (CUDA) and depending on your GPU, it's done VERY quickly or just quickly :)

Dave

FrigidNDEditing wrote on 5/13/2010, 7:39 PM

just and FYI the 2.2 Beta will be released soon in public demo ( Monday?), and it will have customized export scripts for several of the major softwares, to push over animations, etc... as well.

They talk like the promo price may end after that some time, but I know they have at least one more Beta planned, however I don't know if they'll have the special price still. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know, so if you downloaded the demo and tried it out, it will have more functionality soon, so you may want to take a look after the new demo beta goes public. MTL is still coming in 3, so you won't get superbright pixels in the final version obviously.

Dave