Volumetric rendering: light linking provides better control over which lights affect a volume The image on the left shows three coloured lights scattering inside a volume, reduced to one via light linking in the image on the right. OctaneRender 2021.1 supports volumetric light linking. The software’s hair BSDF model has also been extended with support for randomising hair roughness, and for the Zinke model for diffuse scattering, also used in renderers like Arnold and RenderMan. It is intended to prevent energy loss as the roughness of a surface increases, which resulted in the unexpected darkening of rough surfaces in renders using the old GGX BRDF model. OctaneRender 2021.1 also introduces a new energy-preserving GGX BRDF model, available in the Glossy, Metallic, Specular and Universal materials and Metallic layer and Specular layer nodes. Materials: new energy-preserving GGX BRDF model and updated hair BSDF model In addition, a new Mesh Volume SDF node converts a mesh to a Signed Distance Field, making it possible to perform Boolean unions between conventional meshes and OctaneRender’s Vectron procedural primitives. Unlike conventional Boolean modelling, the new surfaces this creates can be filled automatically with the parent object’s material or textures, using the clipping material’s UV set. New features in OctaneRender 2021.1 include a shader-based Boolean clipping system, which enables users to apply a clipping material to a volume, mesh or Vectron formula and use it for Boolean subtractions. New Clipping material enables real-time Boolean operations with automatic texturing Otoy has also dropped support for many of Nvidia’s old Kepler cards, now at least seven years old: OctaneRender now requires a Nvidia GPU with a Compute Capability of 3.5 or higher. In addition, RTX ray tracing, also available on GPUs using Nvidia’s older Turing architecture, has been improved, with “most production scenes” using RTX ray tracing rendering “1-5% faster”. OctaneRender 2021.1 improves performance of the renderer on Nvidia’s current Ampere GPUs, including the GeForce RTX 30 Series gaming cards and RTX A workstation cards.ĭeformation motion blur and blur on animated instances is now roughly “1.5x faster in production scenes”.

It is also the first version of OctaneRender to be available for Windows and Linux only, support for macOS now having been moved entirely to the newer Octane X edition.įaster on Ampere and Turing GPUs, but old Kepler cards are no longer supported

The release improves performance on current Nvidia Ampere GPUs, adds a new Boolean clipping material, improves volumetric rendering, and refactors the software’s handling of AOVs. Otoy has released OctaneRender 2021.1 XB1: the first public beta of the latest version of the GPU renderer. Scroll down for news of the stable release.

Octane render software