OTOY® once again advances the state of the art of GPU rendering with the release of OctaneRender 4™ – available now – with groundbreaking machine learning techniques, out of core geometry support and massive 10-100x speed gains in the scene graph.
Los Angeles, CA. – November 21st, 2018 – OTOY, Inc. is proud to announce the official release of OctaneRender™ 4, building on a decade of advancements that have revolutionized commercial GPU rendering across film, television, motion graphics, architecture and design.
Octane 4 integrates dozens of industry-first breakthroughs into the world’s fastest unbiased GPU renderer – including state of the art Spectral AI Denoising, AI lighting, high performance out-of-core geometry and 10-100x speed ups in the scene graph and viewport.
OctaneRender 4 is available for purchase today, and is a free upgrade for all Octane 3 users.
What’s New in OctaneRender 4™
- Introducing Octane All-Access
New Octane 4 annual ‘all-access’ subscription plans, starting at $19.95 month (1 year minimum), unlock ‘all you can eat’ access to the industry’s largest ecosystem of integrated DCC plugins – including Maya, Cinema 4D, AutoCad, Revit, Houdini, Blender, 3ds Max, After Effects, Nuke, Unity, and soon, Unreal Engine.
- Brigade Engine Integration
OTOY’s real-time path-tracing game engine ‘Brigade’ has been integrated into Octane 4, making heavy scene loading and interactivity up to 10x-100x faster.
Brigade gives artists instant game engine-like feedback in the Octane viewport when moving or deforming heavy meshes or scenes with millions of triangles.
- Out-of-Core Geometry Support – powered by Octane Scene AI
Octane 4 can render fast out-of-core geometry from CPU memory, with minimal speed loss, even across multiple GPUs – a first for an unbiased GPU renderer.
All meshes and textures can, if desired, be stored in CPU memory while Octane is rendering at fully interactive speeds with no viewport latency. Scene AI models visibility of surfaces in real time to dynamically move geometry in and out of core for maximum performance.
- Spectral AI Denoiser
Octane 4 introduces groundbreaking machine learning technology to interactively denoise beauty and AOV passes on-the-fly, both in the viewport and for final frame production rendering.
Octane’s state of the art Spectral AI Denoiser operates on internal perceptual models of material, spectral irradiance and scene data deep in the engine. Domain specific AI denoisers help with glass, refractions, SSS, depth of field and motion blur, reducing render times by 50-100x in noisy scenes.
- Volumetric AI Denoiser
Octane’s Volumetric AI Denoiser removes noise in volumes (and volume passes) that previously required tens of thousands of samples to achieve noise free results.
[Image Credit: Impact https://www.behance.net/Mindofimpact ]
- AI Light
AI Light further complements the AI Denoiser; it is fully unbiased, and tracks emissive points live, in real-time with up to 6-10x speed improvements for scenes with many small light sources such as multi-point or spot lights.
- Light Linking and Light Exclusion
Light linking and light exclusion in Octane 4 helps artists granularly manage scenes with complex lighting without creating multiple render passes. With light IDs set in emitter nodes, artists can now include and exclude lights by material in object layer nodes, and also globally in the kernel settings, allowing control over the direct influence of emitters on objects
- Planetary Environment System
The new planetary environment in Octane 4 is based on the Nishita sky model, and simulates the scattering of sunlight in the upper atmosphere and space. It expands physics and lighting conditions to support atmospheric shaders and planet shaders with unbiased path-traced accuracy.
- Universal Material
With Universal Materials in Octane 4, the process of combining different materials is dramatically simplified, enabling artists to use a single ‘uber’ material to achieve the complexity of what previously required multiple types of material mixes – such as diffuse, specular, glossy and metallic. Universal Material incorporates multiple BXDF lobes including: Specular Transmission, Diffuse BRDF, Specular Reflection, Coating, and Sheen.
- 25% speed gains in raw OctaneBench performance for shading and lighting
Even without AI and scene graph improvements, Octane 4 renders 25% faster
than Octane 3 on the same GPU, as measured by OctaneBench:
- Native Substance PBR Texture Integration
OctaneRender 4 now provides Substance PBR texture integration in DCC tools such as C4D and 3ds Max.
- UDIM Textures
For production texture workflows, OctaneRender 4 supports UDIM textures through a new image tile texture node enabling artists to set up custom tile grids.
- 8:1 GPU Texture Compression
Dynamically compressed textures in Octane 4 can use 1/3 – 1/8 the VRAM of normal RGBA, grayscale and float textures. Compressed textures incur zero speed loss, and are nearly identical in visual quality to uncompressed textures.
- IOR texture input for Materials
Material IOR in the base layer of Universal Materials can be controlled procedurally with Texture nodes and OSL shaders connected to a new 1/IOR texture input pin.
- Multi-layer OpenEXR Import / Export:
EXR layer ingest in texture nodes can be used to reload multi-layer OpenEXR output files into an OSL post-processing and compositing nodegraph. OpenEXR importing and exporting allows artists to perform granular per-render-layer beauty and lighting pass compositing, denoising, blending, filtering, relighting, and color correction – with the full power and flexibility of OSL shader nodes.
- New FBX Scene Exporter Node
Artists can use OctaneRender’s internal ORBX scene translation system to flatten and export scene geometry, allowing you multiple geometry graphs to be exported in one FBX or Alembic file for 3rd party toolchains.
OctaneRender™ All-Access Annual Plans
With new annual ‘all-access’ subscription plans, starting at $19.95 month (1 year minimum), artists can get ‘all you can eat’ access to the industry’s largest ecosystem of integrated DCC plug-ins, with cloud rendering (ORC), a secondary render slave licence and continuous future updates beyond Octane 4 for enterprise customers.
- All-Access to the Industry’s largest DCC plug-in ecosystem
Octane annual ‘all-access’ subscription plans, beginning in Q1, will enable artists to access multiple DCC plugins from OctanRender Studio – including Maya, Cinema 4D, AutoCad, Revit, Houdini, Blender, 3ds Max, After Effects, Nuke, Unity, and soon, Unreal Engine.
- All-Access Enterprise Features: Extra Rendering powerin 2019 and Beyond
For perpetual licence/enterprise customers, All-Access plans further grant a secondary render slave node plus continuous access to all future updates and features beyond OctaneRender 4, including NVLink (starting with Octane 2018.1 – XB1) and full RTX hardware acceleration on Turing GPUs coming with Octane 2019.
With Vulkan-RT Core acceleration in initial WIP Octane 2019 RTX builds,
OctaneBench 6 already exceeds 400+ OB on a single GPU.
About OTOY Inc.
OTOY Inc. is the definitive cloud graphics company, pioneering technology that is redefining content creation and delivery for media and entertainment organizations around the world. OTOY’s Academy Award®-winning technology is used by leading visual effects studios, artists, animators, designers, architects, and engineers, providing unprecedented creative freedom, new levels of realism, and new economics in content creation and distribution powered by the cloud. For more information, visit www.otoy.com.
Additional Resources: