Otoy launched Octane Render 2021 (OC renderer), which is a major update to the GPU renderer. It can overhaul the AOV system, improve the performance of the new Nvidia Ampere GPU, and add support for Hydra rendering representatives. This version is currently in closed beta and will not be released until OctaneRender 2020.2. The company also announced RNDR+, a new subscription package that bundles Octane Render with 10 render node licenses and a full copy of the gaseous fluid simulator EmberGen and Terrain Generator World Builder.

OctaneRender 2021 has a fully reconstructed rendering AOV system, custom global textures and Shader AOVs, powerful artist-friendly GPU boolean geometry cropping tools, new light sampling and 2 mesh objects emit less noise, and 1.5 times faster ampere GPU utilization in the scene RTX hardware Motion Blur, rendering improvements for overlapping volumes and light links, new OCIO functions, rebuilt in core memory management and Multi-Render support for other Hydra Render clients-including Autodesk Arnold, Cycles and OTOY Real-time Brigade and Anime Renderers.

Overview of features in OctaneRender 2021

• • 2x improved lighting sampling:  Octane 2021’s new AI lighting algorithm can reduce the lighting and shadow changes of the mesh emitter, reduce the overall noise in the beauty channel, and increase the final frame rendering speed by 2 times or more.

• • The new Boolean geometry shader trim : Allows artists to easily create procedurally trimmed intersecting geometries by applying trim materials to volumes, meshes, or vectron formulas. Compared with ordinary clipping operations, Octane 2021’s clipping material allows you to use the UV settings of the clipping material geometry to fill the surface of the clipping geometry with the original material, texture and shading parameters.

• • RTX hardware motion blur (1.5 times faster on Ampere):  Octane 2021 supports hardware acceleration on the NVIDIA Ampere GPU of the animated mesh instance, and supports geometric deformation to produce motion blur effects
    
  • Brand new Render AOV system: Using Render AOV group nodes, artists can add any number of inputs, and then connect specific Render AOV nodes to them. Rendering AOV groups can be nested, and single rendering AOVs or entire groups can be enabled/disabled.

• Global OSL texture AOV allows you to apply textures or OSL shaders to the entire scene, with or without the environment. They are presented as info AOV, which means that info AOV settings will also be applied to them. You can use your own texture to overwrite the Alpha channel, or use the default behavior of the Alpha channel equal to other information AOVs. To render the global texture AOV in screen space, projecting the sample position to UV can be used to create a mask for dynamic compositing.
  
• The custom AOV provides an easy-to-use container and an option in the object layer node to write the mask into the custom AOV. Custom AOVs have an additional option that allows you to specify whether to write the AOV only after the first reflection (for camera light) or after (specular) reflection and/or refraction. In this way, you can also capture these properties through reflection and/or through transparent materials.
  

Other main functions include:

• Improved color management with ACEScg and Open Color IO color space
• Improved shading with energy-saving GGX , improved micro-face BRDF controls, and new texture nodes
• Volumetric light links allow artists to specify light exclusions for media and volumes in Octane 2021
• Use volume-polygon intersection and higher intersection limits to increase the opacity sampling of volume rendering -allows more than 4 overlapping volumes (without affecting speed)
• The ” curvature texture” node used to create a shader , which takes into account the exposure or occlusion of a given surface point, introducing new artistic possibilities, such as worn out surfaces, filling gaps, etc.
• Improved X-Particle support -integration with the latest X-Particles SDK
• Significant 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
• VRAM using OctaneRender supports billions of unique primitives , and each grid supports an unlimited amount of geometry and can accommodate available memory
• Multi-rendering/Hydra : Multi-rendering allows Octane to swap to any other rendering engine (including standard Hydra rendering delegates) in a few seconds. This introduces a new renderer into the Octane core, including OTOY Brigade (real-time path tracking engine), OTOY AnimeRender, Autodesk Arnold and Cycles

Functional roadmap for 2021:

• EmberGenFX, World Creator and Sculptron  DCC RNDR module
• Native USD support : USD scene import and USD as the default format in Octane and ORBX to realize scene interchangeability between DCC plug-in and standalone version
• Headless network rendering
• Cross-DCC IPR and node graph UX
• Smooth tangent and interpolate vertex tangent to eliminate discontinuities in anisotropic reflections related to tangent space
• Improvements in direct light environment sampling .
• Normally distributed variable tail BRDF , allowing artists to better control the highlight tail of microfaceted BRDF
• Additional material : Allows the artist to specify multiple light-emitting layers to be added together.
• PPM kernel (progressive photon mapping) for fast caustics rendering
• Arnold standard surface /volume as octane core material/volume node
• Reduced shadow terminator for low poly count meshes : shadow terminator artifacts are automatically reduced during rendering without any additional user controls
• Volume user data attributes
• Rest position shader input

 

For more details, please visit: https://home.otoy.com/octanerender-2021-rndr/