It has a new geometry pipeline, improved hardware ray-tracing, a new Denoiser system, and more.
Image credit: OTOY
OTOY has released OctaneRender 2024.1 Alpha 1, the latest version of its GPU production renderer. It brings a new geometry pipeline, better ray tracing, and much more.
The updated geometry pipeline guarantees better performance but uses less memory. It unifies geometry data across CUDA and Metal GPUs so you can finally mix Windows, Linux, and macOS computers in a render network.
OTOY decided to "commit fully to hardware ray-tracing" and improved its performance. Ray tracing hardware is now used for all mesh primitives and geometry including hair, spheres, and displacement triangles. The company's tests show that rendering is about 20% – and in some extreme cases up to 80% – faster.
In addition, new denoise AOV nodes are now supported on both GPU and CPU and can be used to denoise any render AOV and create denoising filters in any composition AOV output graph. You can use them via a new Denoiser mode selection in the denoiser settings of the Imager node or via the compositor.
Image credit: OTOY
But this is not all OTOY has in mind for Octane. It is also working on native MaterialX support, localized language support, and OctaneGPT – an AI service that can "create nodes, scripts, shaders and generate scene and assets interactively form text, voice and even screen sharing: inside Octane.
Soon, the software will get Unreal Engine style decal support, Rest Position nodes, next-generation ML and spatial rendering toolsets, including Meshlet Streaming, Neural Rendering, Light Field baking and playback for XR and Virtual Production, Brigade temporal denoising, Material X looks, OpenPBR, Multi-stream headless rendering, and AI rendering and operator node graphs.
What’s on the 2024.x roadmap this year:
- Headless rendering with multi-render and multi-engine live linking (Blender, UE, C4D and standalone)
- Neural Rendering: NeRF, Splats and generative AI scene nodes
- Meshlet Geometry Streaming
- New Render Network manager for live and offline GPU workloads
- Volumetric Live Compositor for Virtual Production and Mixed Reality and Light Field displays
- Improved BRDF and shader support for faster single sample quality output
Improved LensFX system building on 2023 framework and 2024 shader graph system for post processing
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