So I have received word directly from OTOY which I am quoting directly from the top:

“RC1 just went live yesterday in closed beta. If testing goes well (so far it is) through the weekend, we should be able to announce a date for our first official public preview next week. Thank you all for your patience!”

They've been in a closed beta since April 20th, which those of us whom have been in it are signed to EXTREMELY HEAVY NDA's which is why everyone's been so tightlipped about it…and as much as I love Redshift…looks like Octane X will be getting the first big wave.

As for software solutions, this was said 8 days ago directly to us:

“all macOS CUDA plug-ins now have Octane X DCC plug-ins ready, and are being tested right now by the closed beta group: C4D, Maya, Houdini, Lightwave, Blender, Sketchup, Poser, Modo and Nuke.”

They've been very open “as open as they can” while keeping their mouths mostly shut over the past few months of beta but the bottom line, and I quote:

“We are very proud to roll out our first release of Octane X for AMD/Intel GPUS to a select group of beta testers.

Octane X on Metal is 100% now feature complete. We reached full pixel parity with Octane 2020 CUDA about two months ago, and have spent the time since then working on getting more and more speed on AMD GPUs (Mac Pro users with Vega II Pro Duo - you might have the highest OB score of any single slot card). We have also added preliminary XDR display support in standalone.”

This cannot be any more clear. ANYONE in the chat who has been saying for the past few months that this would NEVER happen…it will, it did, and it's not years away. It actually might just be next week

Paint me a bit conservative about being enthusiastic about this…but between Redshift and Octane I don't know who's been the worse at overpromising and underdelivering. I do think that Octane will beat Redshift to the punch since Redshift appears to be having some substantial AMD driver issues at the moment which are out of their hands. Having said that, I'm not holding my breath for an actual release anytime soon from either company. In the meantime I'm quite happy with the performance that I've been getting out of 3Delight for Houdini.

When Octane X does materialize, I'll definitely check it out. I've been a fan of the Octane look for quite a long time, but I am dubious about its speed advantage now that CPU's have been making some massive advancements.

What Kays says … some companies are great at big words, but aside from selected “closed beta users' lab experimental show-offs”, their products are having hard times standing up to their claims.

I'll keep my mouth shut about Redshift, but Octane has been on my watch-list for some time now to replace the former. User experience I have read has not been THAT great and I am getting tired of companies promising or “mysteriously hinting at” the next-big-sliced-bread-invention. Actually delivering and actually making people OUTSIDE the “closed beta” laboratories make proper use of their tools would convince me. THAT I have to see.
For both render engines mentioned.

Marc

Who cares… Also more interested in 3delight thanks to Kays And I am using PCs for rendering anyways.

SreckoM
Who cares… Also more interested in 3delight thanks to Kays And I am using PCs for rendering anyways.

How's 3Delight going? Early thoughts? I'm lazily trying to sort out whether to take it for a spin.

I'm going to make a YouTube video soon about it and discuss the pros and cons of working in 3Delight. It's 99% there, very stable overall and the renders are fast and look good. I wish it had a bit more of those “lazy” utility nodes right out of the gate, such as Curvature for instance…but for anyone using an outside paint/texturing app such as Substance Painter it's not that big of a deal.

They're working out a couple of small technical kinks, but the team moves quickly, and typically fixes come in within a week of someone posting about a bug.

They recently introduced the 3Delight equivalent of working directly with binary proxies such as .ass for Arnold and .rs for Redshift which should speed up working with large scenes even further.

Here's a still from a project that I've been working on lately…using MOPs to instance the buildings, then adding VDB's for fog/atmosphere and displacement to add more interest to the geometry. Render time in HD was around 3 minutes, but I'd probably push the quality settings higher for a final render:

Midphase
Here's a still from a project that I've been working on lately…using MOPs to instance the buildings, then adding VDB's for fog/atmosphere and displacement to add more interest to the geometry. Render time in HD was around 3 minutes, but I'd probably push the quality settings higher for a final render:

So you think that 3Delight handles volumes well? I've yet to join the beta! I'm planning on it, I've just been studying like crazy lately.

Your renders look fantastic!!! Are you comping it in Nuke or…? Such a gorgeous scene!

Nice renders! Let us know when your video hits YouTube, love to check it out.

Midphase
I'm going to make a YouTube video soon about it …

Here's a still from a project that I've been working on lately…using MOPs to instance the buildings, then adding VDB's for fog/atmosphere and displacement to add more interest to the geometry. Render time in HD was around 3 minutes, but I'd probably push the quality settings higher for a final render:

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Thank you guys.

VDB's look quite gorgeous in 3Delight, but like in most render engines they tend to task the process quite a bit (although less than other engines). I'm hoping that the developers will create a semi-accurate but faster way to achieve atmospheric effects such as fog and distant haze. To me that's key in establishing distance in larger scale scenes. I'm hoping for something similar to the recent OpenGL Houdini viewport implementation of fog, except with the flexibility and integration into a proper render engine like 3Delight.

Nice! What is your CPU that you get three minutes per frame with?

An i9 9900K, 8-cores 16-threads. I am seriously considering upgrading to a high-end Threadripper if I commit 100% to CPU rendering, but I am waiting on a couple of developments before making the jump including:

1. The state of GPU renderers for OSX and…

2. The rumored AMD NAVI 2 GPU's which supposedly will be a real contender to Nvidia RTX GPU's.

Nice, that's about what I have… also, it's cool that 16-cores seem to be coming down in price (Ryzen 3950X is only $700).

A 64-core proc would be a dream machine for both CPU rendering as well as Pyro/FLIP. I believe the latest Renderman demo was done on a 64-core Threadripper:



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYOVudLnBbs [www.youtube.com]

Regarding Apple/AMD, personally, I wouldn't hold my breath for either of those two things. Long-term, sure anything can happen! But short-term, ehhhh…

Thanks for the reply!

callie_btw
“RC1 just went live yesterday in closed beta. If testing goes well (so far it is) through the weekend, we should be able to announce a date for our first official public preview next week. Thank you all for your patience!”

Speaking of over-promising and under-delivering, a week has passed and no launch date was announced, and users are getting tired of being strung along (https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=71814&start=310). Classic example of how not to manage a product launch I guess.

17 july has been announced in a very confusing way now. worst way to manage a community i ever saw. But still, the perf of octane on current macs will be the deciding factor for me in a similar way to midphase above.

Midphase
Paint me a bit conservative about being enthusiastic about this…but between Redshift and Octane I don't know who's been the worse at overpromising and underdelivering. I do think that Octane will beat Redshift to the punch since Redshift appears to be having some substantial AMD driver issues at the moment which are out of their hands. Having said that, I'm not holding my breath for an actual release anytime soon from either company. In the meantime I'm quite happy with the performance that I've been getting out of 3Delight for Houdini.

When Octane X does materialize, I'll definitely check it out. I've been a fan of the Octane look for quite a long time, but I am dubious about its speed advantage now that CPU's have been making some massive advancements.

I love the rouch of octane's render and with EmberGen itùs even more tenting.
Now im more concern about have a product waterproof for production and about speed compared to Redshift. The latest one has definvely some advantages here and it's the main reason why it is more adopted in the industry today

________________________________________________________________

Vincent Thomas   (VFX and Art since 1998)
Senior Env artist & Lighting & MattePainter & Creative Concepts
 http://fr.linkedin.com/in/vincentthomas [fr.linkedin.com]

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm085962 [www.imdb.com]

Color me shocked but it looks like Octane X for macOS might actually launch this Friday.

https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=71814&start=390#p386702 [render.otoy.com]

Would it kill them for once…just once….to actually deliver on what they promise?!? I swear if OTOY was a person, they'd be late to their own wedding!


P.S.

Well….wouldn't you know it? It's out:

https://home.otoy.com/octane-x-pr1/ [home.otoy.com]

Midphase
Would it kill them for once...just once....to actually deliver on what they promise?!? I swear if OTOY was a person, they'd be late to their own wedding!


P.S.

Well....wouldn't you know it? It's out:

https://home.otoy.com/octane-x-pr1/ [home.otoy.com]

It's out and it's awesome! Been using it for over a year now on my Mac Pro with 2 w6800x Duo's and it's been fantastic for clients...however...they have killed off the Intel version in Lieu of the M1 version...I use it on my M1 Max as well, but I've also simply stopped upgrading from C4D R25...I will indefinitely be using R25 until OctaneX on my M1 Max chip is as fast if not faster than what I am able to do on the Mac Pro.