I come from offline rendering and don’t really see much use in that at the moment to be honest.
It’s a neat addition when the Maxwell cards will be out in a week, because people who happen to work with UE4 will end up having 970s, or 980s soon so there will be a huge jump in case you feel like using Octane inside UE4 for whatever reason.
As we already know Kepler cards perform awfully in GPU PT. In fact I still often see people who render basic studio light setups without the need for much VRAM still rocking 5xx cards until the present day.
GPU rendering became even bigger this year with Vray RT, Arnold GPU and Octane around, but I’d rather render this stuff out from a full fledged 3D app.
For now Alembic support looks a lot more interesting for realtime rendering bringing in a complete scene with animations to UE4 as they are. I’d rather bake a giant Alembic scene for 5 hours in the background than manually have to fiddle with import and the gazillion of possible problems that come with compability.
It’s an unbiased renderer for the editor. Not terribly useful actually, most 3D applications have a similar type of renderer built in already, like Blender or 3ds Max, so if you’re already doing stuff in 3D there you can just do your GPU rendering there instead of exporting to UE4. It’s also not a real-time solution, it just gives you a very quick idea of what something will look like, to get a clean image it needs some extra time to render so it’s not for games really.
There’s no point in having iRay or Vray in UE4–they would both be very slow to render, at best you could use it as an alternative to using lightmass but it would be significantly slower to render. One of the cool things about UE4 is the ability to get really close to that quality with much less time and you end up with a result that you can show in real-time.
The way I understand it, we’ll be able to do everything offline in Octane, (very powerful engine, I’ve tried the 2.0 version) bake the lighting, then export to ue4 to make a realtime scene. It will replace lightmass for that.
We’ll have much more control for G.I and lighting in Octane and still have the benefits of realtime in ue4. Can’t wait.
If they pull it off this will be MASSIVE for Octane + UE4. On the offline side I can’t get past Nvidia Iray, there’s a certan jene-se-quoi (or however you spell that) about it.
This could be used for games with fixed cameras like old resident evil games.
You can show a fading screen between static scenes to hide Octane redering progress.
Octane is not a realtime solution, but if it has the ability to bake lightmaps it could give a better result than Lightmass, though I would expect it to be slower. At least part of the tool that would be most useful is getting a quick preview of the lighting without rebuilding it all, even if it’s noisy it would be useful.
Octane render can give you a preview of a scene in 1 second (or maybe a couple pass) vs unreal that you have to wait until the whole lighting build is finished (because preview shadows aren’t representative of the baked result at all). So let’s say 1 min vs a couple hours. huge difference. Can’t wait!
Also, Octane runs strictly on gpu and can benefit from using multiple gpus, not just sli… You can have 12 gpus working on a scene if you want!!!
I’m waiting for Nvidia to allow non-Nvidia-Grid ie. Geforce cards to be used with Nvidia vGPU virtualised GPU clusters. In otherwords, build your own Nvidia VCA appliance with several boxes each having say 3 980 Ti.
YES! Very naughty of Nvidia to force you to use their VCA appliance or GRID cards if you want powerful GPU and vGPU clusters! But I understand Nvidia has to start out that way, at least to ensure stability in production environments where Quadros and Teslas are the norm.
Lord willing they will open it up to Geforce cards as time goes by. Their IRay Server beta allows for local network cloud rendering (queued and streaming) using their beta plugins and IRay Server beta etc. Currently 3DSMax and Maya appear to have the best support for that. And it works with Geforce cards… but it’s not meant for WAN cloud or vGPU yet.
Now Nvidia Iray for Blender. That would be sweet and people would pay for that, I imagine it would be less expensive than Octane for Blender!
Advanced live texture baking: A feature that’s most beneficial for use in real-time game engines, OctaneRender 3 supports unbiased GPU texture baking (UV or volumetric) of global illumination, spherical harmonics and 8D light fields in Unreal Engine 4 and Unity plugins.
Anyone here is familiar with volumetric G.I baking?
Not to mention it’s pretty fast.