Octane GPU Renderer 49€ until June 4th

[FrankB]

http://www.refractivesoftware.com/

[dandelO]

That looks like a very cool suite. I'm downloading the demo version to check it out, cheers, Frank.

[dandelO]

Weird, my card appears to be unsupported, according to this program, although, it's a Geforce 8400M GS: http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_8400M.html

I will try a driver update but it isn't that outdated...

EDIT: Never mind, 4th post here says it all: http://www.refractivesoftware.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=55&p=1273&hilit=Geforce+8400m+GS#p1273

It should still be recognized as a CUDA capable device, though. Odd.

[MGebhart]

This program certainly has great potential. However, since it's in Beta it's rather buggy.

It took three tries to get this model in without a crash. To be expected with Beta. I'll add basic materials in Blender 2.5 Alpha 2 and play with the values in Octane along with render settings.

Wish me luck.

nVidia GTS 250 1024mb

NOTE: $68.00 USD

[MGebhart]

Started to work with materials within Octane....KABOOM.

[MGebhart]

Here is a link for the Octane/Blender export script. Listed under links.

http://www.blendernation.com/octane-render-v1-0-beta2-released/

I found this to work well to convert a mesh that imports well into Octane

[pfrancke]

I bit, while the deal is on.  Have trust in developers who work hard I say!

Attached is my first decent attempt at it.  Walli's Noble one lit by an HDR image I made using FrankB Dutch skies.  A little bit of photoshop to make the colors pop and to fix a couple of wild pixels.  It looked pretty much like this after 5 minutes of rendering, I let it go 17 minutes.

[FrankB]

this looks great! And 5 minutes is quite impressive, too! 

[dandelO]

Doh!
I got this trial version working now. Didn't realize I had to install CUDA development kit for my NVIDIA card before.

It's very fast indeed. Need to work out how to use the thing now.

[dandelO]

A great renderer, when it works. Much faster for me than Luxrenderer, too.
But... An extremely unstable application

Shame, hopefully they can bring this up to scratch, it's very promising...

*** EDITED: Possibly I'm being a bit harsh with/on the program, being new to me and all. Whatever, I can still make it crash at the drop of a hat.
I've seen wonderful renderings from this by other people, though, so, clearly it does work, and well.
Just not for me on my first day's playing with it...

[rcallicotte]

There's a Modo script now for Octane.  It depends on what I do with the package...it does have some stability issues, but it's very good.  You need a Cuda 3.0 card, though.

[rcallicotte]

Link if you want to see or get the Modo plugin for Octane - http://forums.luxology.com/discussion/topic.aspx?id=48007

[glen5700]

It's defiantly worth looking into, here are some of my initial tests. There some mapping issues but I will work on that as newer beta's get released.

http://www.3ddigitalgraphics.com/gallery/octane.html

Glen