GPU rendering -> which one?

[curly]

Hi,

I just upgraded to Octane Render 3 for Houdini, I still need to buy a GTX 1070 for my GPU expansion board and I'm up and running with GPU rendering in Houdini.

My question. I really like Octane Render for it's image quality and simplicity. Why aren't their so much character animations done with Octane Render and why seem the Redshift3D guys pushing their software much more then Otoy is doing?

Can someone with experience in both render engines tell me the pros and cons of Redshift3D and Octane Render? My humble assessement is that Octane Render is much simpeler to setup and it gives better -> Maxwell Render style -> image quality -> while Redshift3D seems more like a VRAY on GPU type solution with a lot of tweaking required to get decent results. I haven't bought Redshift3D yet, but planning to perhaps in the future. They seem to push their marketing better. It would be nice to have some preset material of Octane in Houdini. -> Although from Rohan Dalvi's video's the shader system doesn't seem to be to difficult.

 

Comments please about the comparison between Redshift3D and Octane.

The do and don't about using high res textures in VRAM.

Why is Otoy not pushing their software more towards character animation?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Atom]

I am leaning towards Redshift because of it's out-of-core technology which allows you to complete a rendering of a frame even if you exceed vRam. It also has a feature where you can specify part of your vRam as an accelerated lookup table for rays. This really does accelerate rendering, I was quite surprised that I could get a 5 minute render down to 1:30 just by allocating some memory on the GPU for rays.

As far as character work, any render system can do that. Character work is driven by the animation package, not the render system.

I like the Redshift pricing model better as well. I get the plugins for all package as part of the original price. If I decide to add a new package to my machine I don't have to make a new purchase. With OTOY you have to purchase each plugin for each package. Although the overall package for OTOY and Redshift for a single package is about the same.

If you have not tried the Redshift demo, why not? You could get familiar with it before you buy.

Here are a couple of characters that I have been working on and rendering using the Redshift demo. This frame takes 7 seconds to render on a 1070 gtx.

Edited September 8, 2016 by Atom

[eetu]

13 hours ago, Atom said:

 

I am leaning towards Redshift because of it's out-of-core technology which allows you to complete a rendering of a frame even if you exceed vRam.

 

If you check the Octane 3 specs, they do have out-of-core textures, which should help quite a bit.

[curly]

I don't  care about the fact that you should pay for every plugin. It seems normal to me that programmer who develop the plugin also have to make a living. Octane render can load obj sequences and alembic. That should eliminate the VRAM problem.

 

I would love to see a side by side comparison rendering the same scenes with different engines.

 

 

[Atom]

I agree that programmers should be paid too. The prices are about the same for a single app. Meaning if I purchase OTOY and Houdini plugin it costs approximately $500.00 which is near the same price for Redshift with the plugins for free. So the programmers are still getting paid. With Redshift, if I get a new app I can just use the plugin and not have to go back to the store again. With OTOY you have to buy more.

There is no eliminating the "VRAM Problem". It is part of the technology.

Render engine comparisons of any type are always problematic because you have to be an expert in all features, for every render engine you compare, in order to conduct a fair and balanced test.

One thing Redshift is lacking is any example files at all for Houdini, AFAIK. You can comb through their forum and pull a few down but most of them are end users with problems and not working features demonstrated.

But Houdini help is also lacking an example file for each node as well.

Edited September 9, 2016 by Atom

[lukeiamyourfather]

45 minutes ago, curly said:

Octane render can load obj sequences and alembic. That should eliminate the VRAM problem.

What file format they can load has nothing to do with the video memory problem. Geometry is geometry is geometry and there's only so much video memory to handle the data. When you run out it stops working.

19 hours ago, curly said:

Comments please about the comparison between Redshift3D and Octane.

Octane is unbiased (like Maxwell) and Redshift is biased (like V-Ray) so your observations about how they behave are spot on. In my opinion neither are ready for day to day visual effects work. They're great for a lot of other things though like heavy ray tracing with relatively small data sets. Packaging, architecture, product shots, etc.

19 hours ago, curly said:

Why aren't their so much character animations done with Octane Render....

I'm guessing you mean like animated films? Compared to well established renderers it's finicky and comes with a lot strings attached (like the video memory limitations mentioned above). Another gotcha is the flexibility or lack of flexibility in building shaders. These things add up to become show stoppers. The render farm is a big part of it too, historically machines in data centers haven't had discrete graphics cards which makes it an all or nothing proposition if you want to setup a render farm and plan to use a GPU renderer. Overall it's just not a good deal as the complexity of a production rises and the stakes become enormous. I think in time GPU renderers will become more robust and more common but they're not a silver bullet for rendering.

[curly]

But with Octane Render you can use Layer ID's and object visibility to render only the shadows of the objects. You can render out in different layers your objects and they plan to include the Altus Innobright denoising system. On the forum they say you need a seperate dedicated gpu for the denoising with at least 6GB of VRAM. Their eventual goal is to get the Monte Carlo algorithm as noise free as possible without using a biased denoiser like Altus Innobright. And Octane supports the pixar Opensubdiv system -> see the youtube link below. That makes it possible to model low poly meshes with opensubdiv applied and you can add an extra displacement map if you want. You can even use a dirt map.

I see not a lot of limitations anymore. 

 

http://www.cgchannel.com/2016/04/otoy-reveals-the-future-of-octane/

In addition, Otoy showed a work-in-progress ORBX-native implementation of Altus, innoBright’s promising standalone tool for denoising Monte Carlo raytraced renders.

 

 

[curly]

 

 

More procedural stuff in Octane Render. And Octane support out of core textures. I don't see a lot of limitations for the Vram problem anymore. Their are ways to work around it as mentioned in my post above.

 

https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=73&t=38240

[carlo_c]

It's been super interesting to see Redshift's uptake in production, just glancing at their blog/gallery it's been used in more than I first thought! I thought the Overwatch videos were brilliant.

 

[Erik_JE]

On 9/10/2016 at 9:10 AM, curly said:

More procedural stuff in Octane Render. And Octane support out of core textures. I don't see a lot of limitations for the Vram problem anymore. Their are ways to work around it as mentioned in my post above.

https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=73&t=38240

If you don't see the limitations you frankly don't get the problem. You can't fit a shot with 20+ furry characters, fire simulations, fog, digi doubles and environments in what is available at the moment. (With the exception of redshift that don't try to keep it all in memory so it don't really apply)

[curly]

So, because Redshift3d uses proxies and Octane doesn't you can't render large character scenes with Octane Render not even if you are using Alembic or OBJ sequences etc... ? Thanks for the explanation.  

[angelous4x]

Redshift uses alot of the attributes and functions with-in Houdini. which makes it so much cooler. using per point attributes for rendering particles. and instancing shapes are super fast. my heart is pretty set on Redshift. 

[LukeLetellier]

I'm quite ready for the Vray to hit Houdini, at which point you'll have another biased GPU option. Plus a super robust CPU renderer...

[Slimesunday]

Im running octane is C4D w/ a nvidia gtx titan. Its absolutely insane how quickly you can dial in the render in realtime. On the other hand one GPU isnt going to save you all that much in your final render. Render times will still be similar to your native render engine (but youll get to a finalized render faster because you can work in realtime). If your super rich and want to buy 5 GPUs, your render times will be insanely quick.