A bit surprised nobody is talking about this yet around here, but it's definitely intriguing. I use RedShift, but I'm curious as to how well Octane runs in Houdini. It sounds like the new features (and particularly the new free tier) will make for a good add-on to both Mantra and Redshift for me.
Anyone else excited….or is Octane in Houdini not particularly good?
Otoy has a history of suing small developers, over-hyping and under-delivering. No-one wants to be associated with them tbh. Just use Redshift, 3Delight or other great developers.
Links? Always curuous about why commercial renderers are many orders of magnitude slower than what I've seen programmers make for themselves, even with cpu-only rendering and off-the-shelf libraries. The cynic in me thinks patents, but haven't seen any evidence.
I'm assuming by “commercial renderers” you mean big, production proven render-engines, such as Arnold, Mantra, Mentalray and Vray, because “commercial” defines anything on the market that sells for a penny. Starting from that assumption, my guess would be that these big renderers have a lot of development behind them - shader writing SDKs, a commitment to its userbase to keep updating and supporting (comes with a team) and whatever else that doesn't come to mind right now. Regarding boutique renderers, you might find their doors closed tomorrow, because who knows why and you might never find out.
efit: oh, I forgot to mention one important thing: bureaucracy. It's good because a system relying on it is less likely to crumble on the short term (destined to do so on the long term), but pretty much bad from other PoV. The bigger the company, the bigger its bureaucracy - I'm hoping this is common knowledge.
Edited by anon_user_89151269 - March 20, 2018 12:43:00
The cool thing is that it'll possibly be for free. We'll have to see, they mention Blender and Unity as free plugins, but others may need the subscription ($20 per month). No specific mention on Houdini, but they say the plugins are soon upcoming.
The AI de-noising is impressive - might really speed up things especially if you need quick results vs. super high quality.
@Midphase: Not sure I get it. The link you post shows proof that the guy they sued has stolen their source code and resold it.
Seems pretty clear that Otoy is aiming at real time raytracing also. The inclusion into Unity seems primarily for that goal - and all the other features are further steps toward it. Add in improvements (especially in denoising and load speed) and the more powerful GPUs - and this could work in a couple years.
