octane render plugin for FZ?

[jonmoore]

never could test redshift because on mac only. btw octane will support also AMD cards and opencl as of version 3 (at least they announced it), so it will be truly platform independent.

-----

about redshifts image quality, i must say that i have not seen yet architectural images looking as good as rendered in octane. at least the company gallery page images don't show anything too thrilling to me.

 

To be clear I'm not really a fan of GPU rendering for high quality stills full stop. But for animations Redshift really comes into it's own (or for working on things like exhibition stands, kitchen design modelling and such like in near real time). Being able to go from 30-40 minutes a frame to 2-3 minutes a frame is worth the visual compromises.

 

V-Ray and Modo's native renderer in 901 are now so fast (especially with the new ALSA capabilities in 901) they compete with GPU solutions in speed tests so there's no need to compromise on photoreal stills work. The 'Adaptive Light Sample Allocation' in Modo 901 has a new direct illumination method that adaptively allocates samples from a global count to each light based on its estimated contribution. This means that interior Archviz scenes that would usually bring a CPU renderer to it's knees because of the multitude of direct lights are now anywhere between 5-20 times faster and all from a single global samples setting which gets dynamically allocated to each light by need. Killer new feature.

 

I put the test shot below (no work of art but a good example) together with a studio lighting rig (which is always a CPU hog) yesterday in around two hours - that includes building the materials from scratch, look development etc. The combination of the speedy workflow of utilising Modo's preview renderer whilst developing the shot and the speed enhancements of ALSA made for a great experience.

 

The only reason I bring this up is that GPU rendering isn't the only game in town when it comes to speed. But I am in agreement that having an integrated render engine (if it's well integrated) is always better than having to export geometry to an external engine. However with the improvements in FormZ 8.5's OBJ export engine a world of possibilities have just been opened if you have access to a DCC package to host the GPU solution (Octane, Thea, Redshift, iRay etc). In fact I noticed yesterday that Thea have launched a new version with a 40% discount till August 10th, which makes the studio product €195 (the one most apt for OBJ exports from FormZ). Thea is available for both Mac & PC - CPU, GPU and Hybrid (my favourite of the bunch in Thea) - at the very least, it would seem worthwhile downloading the demo whilst it's priced so low. And as I mentioned a few messages back Modo Indie is available for €295 with very few limitations over the full studio product (a €1795 product). Most importantly it allows you to render at up to 4k resolutions which should be more than enough for most use cases.

 

And both Thea and Modo area available to use on your projects now. Whilst it's great that Maxwell are exploring the benefits of GPU and it's good to let Autodessys know that it would be beneficial to have a third party GPU plugin integrated within Formz, these things take time and there are low cost options available now that will pay for themselves in a single job.