Last night I played with the Octane Render for the first time. I bought into the beta program some time ago but never did anything with it sofar. For people not in the know, Octane is a render engine which uses the computers video card to render images and because of that it is insanely fast. It renders so fast that you can interactively change your materials and directly see the results, this makes it really fun to use it and setting up materials becomes a breeze.


Shaders

Octane has three shaders, a diffuse (think Lambert), a glossy (metals, plastic etc) and a specular (glass), a SSS shader is not supported but I read that they plan that for Octane 2. The shader options are standard but they have settings for a thin film. Setting up a shader is easy and fast, the layout is good and there are large sliders to fine tune your surface. The range of surfaces you can simulate with these three shaders is big as the companies website gallery shows and even though the shaders themselves give you plenty of options, you can go even further and build your own node trees. Normally all the different surfaces of your mesh are displayed as one long list in the Node Inspector which you can scroll through to get to the one you need, but Octane has a really handy feature to bypass that, click with the material eyedropper on the material you want to edit in the Render Viewport and that shader is loaded into the Node Inspector.  There are more of those little workflow enhancers in Octane, like the instant shader ball in the Render Viewport when you click a shader node in the Graph Editor or the setting of the focus point by clicking where you want it inside the Render View. Things like these make Octane not only fast ro work with but also a pleasure.


Drawbacks

There are some drawbacks though and they are big. The biggest one is memory. Octane can so far only use the memory on your video card and it fills up pretty fast. As a test I used the models from my ‘The Contract’ image.  The mesh itself (1.6 mil quads) loaded without a problem, but I had to strip away a lot of the models to free up some space for textures. As you can see in the image above, the 877 Mb of my GTX 260 was maxed by this little scene and I couldn’t even use all the textures I wanted.
Another point is that the scene you want to render has to be one single obj file. You can load multiple meshes into Octane, but you can’t render them together in one scene or move them about relative to each other. This means that you have to do the layout of your scene in another application. Octane also can’t render subD meshes so you have to freeze your subD meshes before loading them into Octane, and although Octane can render animations, it does it in a brute force kind of way. I haven’t tested this myself yet but I read that the plug-in for your 3D-program (all major ones are supported) freezes all your meshes and send them over to Octane for every frame of your animation. So Octane has to reload the scene for each frame, with my little test scene loading took about one minute so for a 60 frames animation that will add another hour.


Conclusion

So what do I think of Octane Render? I think it is still early days. In a couple of years many of the limitations will probably be gone as the Cuda* technology matures, video cards get bigger memory and the PCI-E bottleneck gets resolved. Octane is really fun to work with, with lots of handy little features and its renders have an instant beauty over them which I find hard to achieve with other render engines. Octane is certainly production ready, be it on a limited scale but even on this limited scale it makes beautiful images is it a pleasure to work with.

* So far Octane is only for Cuda enabled cards (Nvidia), I don’t know if they will switch to Open CL later.