Network Rendering with Octane? Is that a thing?

Jonstark

I splurged to get a new computer, first desktop in many years now (I used the excuse that I wanted a new toy in the Oculus Rift) and so I've got a new fairly powerful computer on the way, that will have a Nvidia 980 (4 Gigs of ram).

My current rendering laptop has an Nvidia 740m (2 Gigs of ram) so I'm at least doubling the amount of memory I can have when rendrering scenes with Octane.  But I wondered, does Octane have the ability to network?  Meaning can I use both my laptop together with the new tower to render Octane scenes?  And if so, would that mean I could now do scenes up to 6 gigs large?

argus1000

I think your maximum RAM would be that of your new GTX 980, that is 4 GB .

aspin

Network rendering seems to be broken with latest Octane release. For network rendering you have to buy additional octane licenses.

You can render out-of-core, so you can render scenes larger than 4GB. On fast computers out-of-core is maybe 10% slower.

TangoAlpha

With Iray, it'll only use as much memory as the smallest card (ie 2 gigs). Which is fine if the scene fits, but if it doesn't it'll revert to CPU even if the scene would have fitted on the bigger card. Don't know if Octane behaves the same way, but it's something to be aware of and look out for.

Jonstark

Thanks guys.  I didn't realize I'd have to buy a whole new standalone license, same price as a normal one, that's a bit too pricey, especially as I really wouldn't gain memory size by doing it (in fact if it works like Iray, I might lose memory size even if I'm gaining speed).  I did already know about out of core rendering, but I appreciate the heads up, the last time I tried out of of core the scene itself took a very long time to load up in Octane, but maybe that won't be as much of an issue with the newer/faster rig.

Dartanbeck

Either way... congrats on the new roommate, my friend! I bet you're excited!!! :)

I got a new laptop with a quad-core cpu a while ago - so I was all excited that I can run Carrara on the move again. It's not bad at all at facilitating my Carrara urges, and I kinda got stuck playing with this so much that my poor workstation got left by itself for a while.

Now I'm back to spending most of my Carrara time on my workstation that I built... OMG, what a dramatic difference! Those tiny little 16 px buckets, all eight of them, flying past the screen with such a blaze... I forgot how beastly that baby is at rendering!

I'm about to start delving deeper into LuxCore IPR (I have an ATI Radeon) when my current project is out of the way. But I'm just wondering:

With these other render engines, like Octane and the new LuxCore, do we lose the ability to use Carrara's atmosphere from the Realistic Sky? I suppose there's always volumetrics... if the support those... I guess I'll find out when I stat learning more. I'm excited about it either way, but after studying Phil's Realism Rendering and putting that (and more) to practice on Carrara's native engine, I'm rendering really fast right now... and happy about it... really nice renders going on in that office!

Cheers, Jon!

Jonstark

I believe that the Octane 3 supports volumetrics, so it's possible that some future plugin version will be able to transpose things like volumetric clouds in Carrara and turn them into volumetric objects rendering in Octane, but I don't have Octane 3.x yet and I'm not entirely sure.

Realistic sky as far as the clouds and so forth doesn't transport, but then again it sort of does, because it seems to turn it into a cloudless hdri environment, meaning you get the blue sky and light coming from the position of wherever the sunlight is in your Carrara scene.  I've been using this function to really tune my Carrara shaders for realism, ironically enough, as I'll set up a scene with sunlight and realistic sky (and uncheck the clouds from the editor) then render the same scene in Octane, at that point it makes getting realistic highlight/shininess settings a breeze as I have a default to tune to.  At this point, with the thanks from Philw's Realistic rendering settings, I can get Carrara shaders for metal, cloth, plastic, etc so realistically tuned that I can pretty much use the Native Renderer as needed and it looks nearly interchangable with Octane renders of the same scene, so if I was doing a comic book and one panel needed to be an interior shot that I could do in Octane, and the next panel was deep in the woods and I needed to use a Howie scene that wouldn't fit in Octane, so needed to be rendered natively in Carrara, it wouldn't really be a problem.

It may be that some future version of the plugin will allow rendering of Carrara's volumetric objects (like clouds, etc) but for now it doesn't.  However I'm not sure it would be worth the trouble to do so, since Carrara pro can simply render out an atmosphere or volumetric layer that can be transposed with the Octane render, quickly giving the same desired result.

I'm looking forward to seeing how the new machine renders with Carrara native too, but because apparently technology hasn't jumped that far forward when it comes to cpu's, I'm not really gaining any more cores.  My current laptop has an i7, which is 4 cores hyperthreaded to 8, and the new machine will also come with an improved and newer/faster i7, but again really only 8 rendering cores, so the change won't be that drastic,

Wait, check that... I just remembered I can also use my current laptop as a render node, which would make it render 16 cores total.  Oh, and my work laptop that I don't usually use for play is a dual core hyperthreaded, so if I could figure out how to set it up I could made that a render node too, for a total of 20 cores.  Wowsa, that would be an exciting change for sure!  :)

Now I'm even more excited  :)  The new rig doesnt arrive til next Tuesday, then there will be the inevitable pain of setting it up and transferring all my files over, but I'm a little giddy at the thought of seeing 20 cores rendering all at once  :)

PhilW

Sighman's OR4C plugin for Octane 3 converts Carrara's volumetric clouds into volumetric objects in Octane.  The settings are not transferred so you need to define a new volumetric material but it is a start.  It also comes with a kind of distance fog effect that can be used to generate haze, etc. 

While I don't think you can network render with Octane, you can add extra graphics cards to your desktop and it will use these, just ensure that they all have 4gb or you will limit your scenes, it goes by the card with the least ram. Mec4D has demonstrated something similar with iray rendering on 12000 cuda coes!

aspin

In the Octane Plugin settings you can configure Network rendering settings. With latest Octane version it seems to be broken, but I think with v2 it should work.