What is Spectron?

Spectron™ is a new procedural lighting system built into OctaneRender. Spectron Procedural Volumetric Lights allow you to create procedurally driven volumetric lighting – like spot lights – with blockers, barn doors, gels and more. It provides ultra realistic procedural rendering tools needed to ‘finish’ the rendering equation – with new granular controls simulating all electromagnetic spectral phenomenon in Octane including: polarization, fluorescence and phosphorescence, complex layered substrates and porosity, diffractive optics, and relative doppler effect.

There are currently two default light primitives (including geometry) in the Spectron™ software module in Octane 2020.1: Spectron area primitive and Spectron sphere primitive. These light primitives can be added to the scene using the node graph editor’s context menu.

Spectron provides basic primitive scaling for both light types at the geometric level, and allows for the usage of position nodes in conjunction with geometric transformations. It also improves the light sampling algorithm for these two light primitives, taking into account the subtended solid angle of the receiving mesh surface. This will allow for improvement in noise reduction for direct light sampling, and will generally improve convergence of the image at a faster rate versus the usage of traditional mesh light sampling.