OctaneRender 2021™ Preview is here!

OTOY announces OctaneRender 2021^TM – available as a closed beta preview today – with a brand new Render AOV framework, Boolean Geometry Clipping, RTX Hardware Motion Blur, Volumetric Light Linking, Multi-Render and much more!

LOS ANGELES, CA – November 27th, 2020 – OTOY Inc, is proud to release the first public preview of OctaneRender^® 2021, advancing the state of the art of GPU rendering across film, television, motion graphics, architecture and design.

OctaneRender^® 2021 features a completely rebuilt Render AOV System, custom global texture and shader AOVs, powerful artist friendly GPU Boolean Geometry Clipping tools, new Light Sampling for mesh emitters with 2x less noise, 1.5x speed up on Ampere GPUs in scenes leveraging RTX Hardware Motion Blur, rendering improvements for overlapping volumes and volumetric Light Linking, new OCIO features, rebuilt out of core memory management, and Multi-Render support for additional Hydra Render delegates – including Autodesk Arnold, Cycles and OTOY’s real time Brigade and Anime Renderers.

RNDR+ subscriptions: The Ultimate Octane Bundle for one low price

New OctaneRender 2021^TM RNDR+ subscriptions offer access to the complete OctaneRender® ecosystem including full commercial licenses to World Creator, EmberGenFX, 10+ OctaneRender nodes, 20+ DCC integrations and more and more – starting at just 29.95€ a month*.

• EmberGenFX real time GPU simulation toolset for ultra-realistic fire, volumetrics, smoke and particles (full commercial license during subscription)

• World Creator the industry’s leading GPU powered terrain and landscape generator (full commercial license during subscription)

• Unlimited Network Rendering: includes 10+ OctaneRender node licenses**

• 100 RNDR Tokens*** allowing you to tap into the massive parallel processing power of RNDR’s network of decentralized GPUs

World Creator follows EmberGenFX as the second major 3D toolchain addition to the growing Octane subscription suite, and expands OTOY’s procedural rendering pipeline introduced in OctaneRender 2020 – featuring Octane Vectron^TM, Spectron^TM, and Sculptron^TM.

Both EmberGenFX and World Creator for OTOY subscribers are now available in the customer downloads section of OTOY.com.

Overview of Features in OctaneRender 2021

• 2x Improved Light Sampling: Octane 2021’s new AI Light algorithm reduces lighting and shading variances with mesh emitters, reducing overall noise in beauty passes, accelerating final frame renders by 2x or more.



• NEW Boolean Geometry Shader Clipping: makes it easy for artists to create procedurally trimmed intersecting geometry with a clipping material applied to a volume, mesh or vectron formula. In contrast to ordinary clipping operations, Octane 2021’s clipping material allows you to fill in the clipped geometry surfaces with the original material, textures, and shading parameters using the clipping material geometry’s UV set.



• RTX Hardware Motion Blur (1.5x faster on Ampere): Octane 2021 supports hardware acceleration on NVIDIA Ampere GPUs of animated mesh instances as well as geometry deformations to produce motion blur effects
  

• Completely NEW Render AOV System: With render AOV group nodes, artists can add an arbitrary amount of inputs and then connect specific render AOV nodes to them. Render AOV groups can be nested and either single render AOVs or whole groups can be enabled/disabled.



• Global OSL Texture AOVs allow you to apply a texture or OSL shader to the whole scene including or excluding the environment. They are rendered as info AOVs, which means that the info AOV settings are applied to them as well. You can overwrite the alpha channel with your own texture, or use the default behavior which is equal to the alpha channel of the other info AOVs. To render global texture AOVs in screen space, the projection Sample Position to UV can be useful for creating masks for compositing on-the-fly.
  

• Custom AOVs provide easy to use containers with an option in the object layer node to write masks into custom AOVs. Custom AOVs have an additional option to allow you to specify whether you can write to the AOV only on the first bounce (for camera rays) or also after (specular) reflections and/or refractions. This way you can capture those attributes also in reflections and/or through transparent materials.
  

Other Key Features include:

• Improved Color Management with ACEScg and Open Color IO color space support

• Improved Shading with energy preserving GGX, improved microfacet BRDF controls, and new texture nodes

• Volumetric Light-linking allows artists to specify light exclusion for mediums and volumes in Octane 2021

• Volume Rendering improvements to opacity sampling with volume-polygon intersection, and higher intersection limit – allowing more than 4 overlapping volumes (with no speed hit)

• Curvature Texture Node for creating shaders that take into account how exposed or occluded a given surface point is, introducing new artistic possibilities such as worn out surfaces, filling in crevices and more

• Improved X-Particles support – Integration with the latest X-Particles SDK

• Major Stability (OOP) and out of core Memory improvements introducing a new memory management system that will improve resource allocation between GPU memory, peer-to-peer memory, and out of core memory

• Billions of unique primitives supported in VRAM with OctaneRender supporting an unbound amount of geometry per mesh that fits in available memory

• Multi-Render / Hydra: Multi-render allows Octane to swap to any other rendering engine (including standard Hydra Render Delegates) in seconds. This brings completely new renderers into Octane core, including OTOY Brigade (real time path tracing engine), OTOY AnimeRender, Autodesk Arnold and Cycles

2021 Features Roadmap:

• EmberGenFX, World Creator and Sculptron DCC RNDR modules

• Native USD support:USD scene import and USD as default format in Octane and ORBX for scene interchange-ability between DCC plugins and standalone

• Headless network rendering

• Cross DCC IPR and Node Graph UX

• Smoothed Tangents, interpolated vertex tangents for removing discontinuity on tangent-space dependent anisotropic reflection

• Improvement in direct light environment sampling.

• Normal Distribution tail-varying BRDF, to give artists more control of the tail of highlights for microfacet BRDF

• Additive material: allows artists to specify multiple layers of emission added together.

• PPM kernel (progressive photon mapping) for fast caustics rendering

• Arnold Standard Surface/Volume as Octane Core material/volume nodes

• Reduced shadow terminator for low polycount meshes: Reduces shadow terminator artifacts automatically during rendering without any additional user controls

• Volumetric user data attributes

• Rest position shader input

More information on OctaneRender 2021 can be viewed here, and you can watch Founder and CEO Jules Urbach’s GTC talk outlining OTOY’s 2021 development roadmap for OctaneRender.

Subscribe, buy, or upgrade today to access the latest version of OctaneRender – with Fast-Spectral Random Walk SSS, C4D native GPU noises, OSL Volume Shaders, Vectron Mesh and Volume Operators, and 4X faster Spectron quad and point lights, and many more new features.

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*For Existing Annual Subscribers Purchasing RNDR+: For those that wish to purchase RNDR+ but recently purchased an annual subscription, OTOY will provide up to 100 tokens for each remaining month in your existing subscription – for up to 1000 tokens when you purchase RNDR+. This offer is valid during the Black Friday sale only. Please see here for more information.