Octane Render plugin for DAZ Studio by Otoy
linvanchene
Posts: 1,382
This is an old thread of 2013 that got reactivated.
Some of the information in this thread may be outdated.
2018 - 11 - 23 edited to remove outdated information
Please check the official thread on the Otoy forum for updated information about V4 licensing.
OctaneRender 4 / All Access -Update FAQ
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=69646
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https://render.otoy.com/forum/
OctaneRender for DAZ Studio plugin
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=44
OctaneRender standalone - Commercial Product News & Releases
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=24
OctaneRender standalone - Development Build Releases
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=33
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Updated on 2018 August 2nd:
Added some information about the differences between the OctaneRender 3 and OctaneRender 4 licensing system in this post:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3836921/#Comment_3836921
The subscription gets upgraded from being useable with 2 GPU to 20 GPU and you get access to all plugins for 20$ per month.
Enterprise tier licenses will be available for companies with up to 200 GPU.
The free tier for users with 2 GPU will be available for the first time.
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Original post from 2013:
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I subscribed to a Forum thread over at Otoy and was happy to find out this morning that:
OctaneRender™ for DAZ Studio v1.10 released
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=29824
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This seems to be the official promotion video:
OctaneRender for DAZ Studio Workflow demo
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2018 08 09 edited: removed outdated links and information.
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Where can one buy or test the plugin?
updated 2018 08 09:
Full licenses:
https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/purchase/
Subscriptions:
https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/subscriptions/
Demo versions:
https://home.otoy.com/render/octane-render/demo/
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Comments
WOW!! Very good news that finally the DAZ Studio plugin is already available and released
Now I will have to test it and see how it works
Although as this is a GPU based render engine, first I MUST buy a new graphics card, as the one I have now is a very old Nvidia 9600 GT 1GB and surely this is not at all good for Octane :cheese: ,
I am considering to buy perhaps a Nvidia GTX 660 Ti 2GB or 3GB RAM , and I am not still sure to buy a 2GB or 3GB RAM because I do not know if it worth to pay around $120 more for having 1 GB extra.
But perhaps for Octane Render that only uses the GPU RAM could be useful and worth, but I still do not know. :roll:
YES! This could be a good idea to have also in the DAZ 3D Store and so have more options to have external renders for DAZ Studio and for using DAZ Products
Just judging by the video, Thats a very nice bit of integration.
I noted some of the performance figures for that pool room scene:
the untextured scene starts at 40 MS/s (Million Samples per second)
zooming in to some detail and moving the camera around with the chrome and shiny textures applied it averaged 11-12 MS/s
when he zoomed out to show the whole box it temporarily shot up to 135 MS/s
Am I reading that correctly, the whole scene was only 128MB?
As far as I could gather from the Otoy forum and site it is recommended to use as much GPU RAM as you can.
Another thing to watch out for though is that you have enough power supply for the card.
I actually am using a Nvidia GTX 660 Ti 2GB.
I would have had to update the power supply of my workstation for a more powerfull card.
If you can you may want to upgrade to a system with more than one video card.
This also has the benefit that you can choose to let one render in the background while the other is used for interacting with other GPU based applicatons that run on your system.
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I could not wait and did a first few tests late in the night:
I absolutely love the "Default Daylight Environment".
Check out an official video here:
OctaneRender for DAZ Studio Sunlight (new model) & Google Maps
http://vimeo.com/55246483#at=0
It is so awesome and fun to select any location on the world and see the changes of the light in realtime on the screen.
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What amazed me most though is how even with the default settings characters and materials look truely amazing.
I did a stress test with a fiber hair character I used for an image earlier this year.
Total Vertices :
1120546
Total Triangles :
865
Total Quads :
624195
Total Faces :
625060
The scene rendered in about 19 minutes with a Nvidia GTX 660 Ti at a resolution of 1336x631.
Link to test render:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151576064703899&set=a.10151422686548899.539733.169292668898&type=3&theater;
To compare: The 3delight version of the original image took more than 24hours to render.
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At the moment I am very happy to finally have a rendering solution with a reasonable speed / quality realtionship.
Can´t wait to keep trying out more things.
I would love to buy this but the price is far too high for my pocket - especially as I've just blown my savings on a new iMac 27". I'm not even sure that the GPU in the new iMac would be strong enough for this product (NVidia GTX 680MX with 2GB). Seems to me that most people who can afford Octane have PC rigs that would match Pixar's. ;)
I found the whole thing mind blowin. Yeah nice price tag but I would so like to play with that..Otoy, Oboy. :)
I really like the plugin and the render speed even with my card is nice. But unfortunately I only have 1Gig of video ram which is very limiting for some content. I have to figure a better way of working. I was thinking about texture atlas but have not not really sure how to used it. So I will see.
Over all... Great plugin. Next year sometime, I will just have to upgrade to the 660 3gig or the 670 4gig. I hope the prices will come down by then.
At the moment the plugin works for pc only anyway.
On the forums I read that the plugin creators will probably contact DAZ and ask for the numbers how many DAZ users are working on mac.
They also say that a conversion will probably take more than just a few weeks.
If you are a mac user you may want to add your voice in this thread or read up there what the status of the mac version may be:
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=29824&start=10
Edited double post to pick up on another idea. ;-P
I do not know what kind of setup Pixar has. ;-)
But lets just say that probably all people who are also using their pc to play games may allready have a setup that is a good start.
It would be very interesting to hear from people that are using older video cards what their experiences are.
My personal guess is that even with the early nvidia cards that feature cuda cores you will have faster render times than with any CPU based technology.
What is very important to know is that you absolutely do not have to spend several thousand dollars for the advertised quadro cards.
The geforce series will do just fine for most occasions.
Yep, 9800gtx with .5g ram... + almost 400 for plugin/renderer, but so nice looking...
one day :)
slightly OT but if you can't wait for a Mac Octane development process Windows 7 in native mode would run insanely well on that mac but you need a licensed copy of Windows 7, you can't install or use XP or VISTA on OS 10.7 and up unless it's a legacy OS install from 10.5 or 10.6 and you can't downgrade a new mac to a lower OS, it's coded into the API to prevent this.
Octane is an amazing product but that price point is going to drive away a lot of potential users.
i wonder if its really intended as a hobbiest tool or a pro tool.
from my point of view it's intendend as a perfect companion for daz studio :)
at least i tried my best to integrate Octane like it was a natural part of DS.
in terms of render quality, features and speed, and probably also complexity (if you really dig into it), Octane is clearly a tool aiming for pro's, matching with engines like Arion, Maxwell, vray and others - some close already, others not so close, but it is steadily and lately also very fast improving. btw, if you compare Octane with these price tags, you'll find it pretty low priced. on the other hand, i doubt you will ever see integrated DS plugins from the named firms, so these hefty price tags will never be a problem ;)
bottom line: if you want to improve your renderings, and have some time to spend, Luxrender based studio extensions will be a nice way; if you you have a little extra money to spend, and like to have even more fun with renders that complete in minutes instead hours, the octane plugin might be your choice. the interactive workflow because of the render speed is imo another bonus worth to mention.
of course i'm a little biased :)
anyway. as soon as the early adopters have unleashed all the bugs (and they are fixed of course), there will be a demo version, free for everyone, to find out what he or she can get from the plugin. the demo will have all and every feature of the payed version, except it will render to a fixed size (with a decent watermark on the images), and won't save the data to the .duf
ps: i'm currently already maxed out keeping the pace in the otoy forum, after the release, so i just can't regularly visit the daz forums also (yet). but if anyone has a burning question to ask, just send me a pm from here and i will answer it as soon as possible...
Thanks T_3 if I have any questions then I will ask over on the Octane forums, makes life a little easier for both sides. From a hobbiest POV and with how certain software prices itself in the market these days I don't mind the price tag so much. No I can't afford it YET but I will eventually.
I am playing with Lux at the moment and yes it does a nice job...but I don't want nice I want complete control and from what I have seen this plug-in gives us complete and utter control and instant feedback. I have been waiting form something like this since seeing Fprime of Lightwave some years ago but this is so much better.
And there I was thinking ahead to Lux and buying a new rig to suit, time to change tack.
This would be very nice and would go a long way towards getting many to scrounge the money to get it eventually I would think. What are the limitations of the demo version of the engine itself?
Its now about two days that I was able to make my first experiences with the Octane Render plugin for DAZ Studio.
The help over at the Otoy forum was awesome.
All questions were answered quickly and I guess I figured out the basics of how to use the plugin by now.
The next step will be to dive into the specifics of the material settings in Octane Render.
From a first look it seems quite similar to any node based editors like the DAZ studio shader mixer or the E-on Vue material system.
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I worked some more on my first test image and did a second version at a higher resolution and made a first try with Octane Render Materials.
In the plugin is a live material database included.
If you want you can let it check for updates automatically and download new materials from the server.
I wanted to apply a metal like material and all I had to do was enter metal in the search field of the plugin and I quickly found some options I like.
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This is the second version of my Octane Render test image at a resolution of 1920x1080.
This version at a resolution of 1920x1080 rendered in about 50 minutes with a Nvidia GTX 660 Ti.
Link to image on facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151578601593899&set=a.10151422686548899.539733.169292668898&type=1&theater;
Again take into account that this is zbrush fiber hair.
Scenes with transmaped hair rendered sometimes in about 1-2 minutes at the default settings. 7-9 minutes at a resolution of 2000x3000.
In short its really very fast with a lot of different quality settings that you can customize to your needs.
I would love to see some images what people can do that allready have experience with the Octane Render standalone.
I am just starting to figure this all out.
A simple render that uses just enough subsurface scattering to take the edge off the texture.
Direct light with ambient occlusion to provide a gentle blue ambient and 1 main mesh light.
7 minute render using a gtx480
This looks so amazing. I absolutely love the light and skin tone.
When I see images like that I really get motivated to dig deeper and find out how subsurface scattering in Octane works.
V5 rendered with the Octane Render for Daz Studio plugin. Pathtracing with 2 meshlights, GTX 660 TI 2GB.
Yup, quite nice result @ Wiseavatar. Did you use the sss texture provided in the Bree set for the transmission/absorption slot? Or how did you build your shader?
Btw, when some of you actually find some good combinations for materials, make sure to upload them into the LiveDB, so it will be shared with the others.
hi, i'm interested to buy a license, but i'm scared about the texture size / vram problem.
How i can estimate the vram needed for render a scene?
I don't know of a real easy specific way to estimate it other than adding everything up, but there may be one. Geometry usually doesn't take up much memory, but the textures, their size and your final render size will help determine how much memory you will need. Stonemason scenes like Streets of Asia can take up to 400 MB when optimized. Some folks use DAZ Texture Atlas reducing the common texture size by half and combine textures. I don't have the plugin yet. I do know early adopters of the Octane beta had no problem getting V4 and M4 and a small scene into Octane on lesser Nvidia cards with around 500MB. But you should try to get a card (if you don't already have one) that will have at least 2GB of VRAM and those are plentiful now at much lower prices. You can do it with 1.2 or 1.5GB. The goal of many Octane users is to save for a Titan card (6GB). But most of the newer Nvidia cards out the past year (if it begins with a 6 in the number, except, I think for one of the lower CUDA Core cards) or so can handle a higher number of textures - more than the older cards, and there's still a limit but most wiill not reach it. For performance speed you will need more CUDA cores.
Here's a link to the forums that might have more info and an easier way to estimate it. I only had time to look over this page (I think it's accessible to the public):
http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=23663&start=10
The answer was:
note: the plugin/octane only uses a texture map once per type; if you use the same image in 10 slots while maintaining the same type (floatimage vs. image) it'll need vram only once. if you mix types, octane will need vram once per type. the way how octane finds out about multiple uses of the same texture map by the way is the path on disk; using the very same image map from different locations will also require more vram.
in addition the render film (aka output image) - as long as stored in vram...
- needs x pixels * y pixels * 20 in bytes
(this is because the render film holds not only 4 bytes of color data, but additional data need to calculate tonemapping, post processing, ...)
you can neglect node parameter data; this ranges in kilobytes.
the geometry itself would need to be counted; and the plain number of triangles don't exactly result in the vram size needed, since octane does something called voxelizing, where at least i don't know a formula to calculate the real need. hopefully we see some additional stats from the octane plugin version anytime soon, so it would be possible to at least show those numbers when voxelizing is done.
if you like to do some research yourself, you may use the standalone - there you will get all those numbers, including geometry data ram usage...
I can only add that the VRAM size of the actual render may push past the limits if you want to render out images at larger sizes like 4000x6000. That was one aspect I did originally not think about. If you set up scenes for testing and have the preview at 720x480 in most cases it was no issue to raise the render size to 1920x1080. But sometimes when I wanted to push past that to 6000x4000 I was out of VRAM again and had to make some more adjustments.
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The best thing to do atm seems to get the Octane Render stand alone demo and see how that works for you.
A demo for the DS plugin for Octane may be released when most bugs are dealt with.
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The images rendered with Octane look fantastic. As a point of reference would it be possible for people to post render times in DAZ render engine as well so we can compare time savings and quality?
I have a GT470 with 1.25GB RAM so it probably won't be worthwhile buying Octane until I upgrade the card. The trouble is that the GT6xx cards don't work very well with Sony Vegas so I'm in a bit of a dilemma about whether to upgrade the card.
The cost of Octane is pretty high compared to the price range of the rest of DAZ products. Especially factoring in the cost of upgrading the graphics card. I understand that for Lightwave/MAX/Maya users it's not expensive compared to the cost of their software but if I could afford 280 euro's for a render engine then I probably wouldn't be investing in DAZ.
But if it means at least 10 times faster renders with far better quality then I would be sorely tempted.
thanks for the answers! :-)
I don't own a nvidia card, so if i can't try the demo, if i decide to buy octane :(
do you think the memory occupation of the 3delight stand alone while rendering a rib files can be indicative of the cost in vram of the scene (without optimization)? Actually i don't use more than 4gb of ram rendering images, using the smallest squares.
Would also be interested to know if RAM can be used to estimate VRAM.
I do not know.
I assume though that there are some differences or lets say optimizations that could lower the required VRAM space in relation to RAM space.
Actually, you have a card that's well respected over on the Octane forum. It's fast and if you watch your textures you'll be happy until you can upgrade your card. Many folks never come close to filling up their VRAM.
Actually, you have a card that's well respected over on the Octane forum. It's fast and if you watch your textures you'll be happy until you can upgrade your card. Many folks never come close to filling up their VRAM.
It can be surprising - I did a test render of 12 Genesis figures and it all fitted in the 4GB of the graphics card. Anderson Hall, by itself, blows past the 4GB ... ;)
With a bit of material management one can really fit quite a lot in the VRAM.
Here a quick overview how you can go about it:
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- In the "Settings" Tab of the Octane Render Plugin for DS leave the option "Automatic Material Updates after content loads" unchecked
This causes that only the geometry is loaded in the scene. Everthing will have the octane default material in the Octane Render Plugin Viewport
Screenshot:
Automatic material updates unchecked The library
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- With the mouse you can point on any surface in the "Octane Render Plugin Viewport" to select and open it in the "Octane Material Tab"
You can then right click the material zone and select "Create as New". This will load the DS material into the Scene.
Screenshot:
Materials Create as new Platea
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- In the Octane Plugin System tab you can find a visual representation in the form of a Bar Graph how much space you have left in the VRAM.
It also tells you how many more of each type of map / texture type you can load.
Loading non colored bump or transparency maps will use less space then colored textures.
Loading only the geometry without any maps does not take up much space.
Example: Only the geometry of "Platea" from Jack Tomalin uses only 206 MB of theVRAM
This is represented by the orange part of the bar. The light grey part is the space left and the black is the part of the VRAM used by other applications that may be running as well. In the example image it is photoshop that is running.
Screenshot
VRAM geometry only Platea
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- Instead of loading textures you can choose from a huge library of Octane Materials that other users created and then put online.
Any materials other users created can be automatically downloaded onto your system.
You can choose if that database is autoupdated each day or only then when you want.
In the Octane live DB you can choose "octane shaders" that will create a surface without stressing the VRAM or you can also load some material presets with tiling textures optimized for Octane.
Screenshot:
live db Bamboo Floor example
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- And last but not least you can create your own materials in the Octane Node Graph Editor - NGE.
In theory you can build a whole scene with octane shaders that will only use a very small part of the VRAM.
Screenshot:
lycan subsurface scattering experiments v1001
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Actually starting out with a card that has only 1.5 or 2 GB of VRAM may even be a good thing.
This way you learn from the start how to manage your scenes and come up with creative ways to use the limits of your VRAM.
I add this here because it would seem silly to make a new topic because of it and maybe other Octane users will run into the same question sooner or later when they want to upgrade to addtional video cards:
Is it true that Octane is limited to the lowest amount of VRAM your cards have?
Example:
If you buy a GTX Titan with 6 GB of VRAM and use it in combination with a GTX 780 that has 3 GB of VRAM you will be limited to only 3 GB.
If that is true it would be most recommended to only combine cards that feature the same amount of VRAM.
Can anyone confirm or deny?
If you are running multiple cards to render they each must have the same amount of VRAM. If you are using two cards, one for display only and one for render only, it doesn't matter as only one card will be involved in the rendering. If you have two cards rendering, both cards are doing the same calculations so they must have the same amount of VRAM to each hold the same data.